9/3/26: Nightmare GOP Midterm Projection, OpenAI Doomsday Scenario, Tucker Carlson Endorses Abdul & MORE!

25:35This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work.

26:19Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

26:33A top OpenAI executive is sounding the alarm over disturbing AI capabilities and also coming clean about downplaying those very risks previously. This is Dean Ball. Let's put this up on the screen. E2, please. So he writes this Substack post called On the Loose, The Coming of Userless Agents. He's warning specifically of what he calls sovereign agents. Let me go ahead and read you a little bit of this essay. He says, sooner or later, there will exist truly sovereign agents and swarms of agents. Their weights will not reside in any single place that a human can pull the plug on. And in this sense, they will have no human owner.

27:13They will be, as the AI safety researcher Dawn Song says, self-sovereign. They will pay their own bills for the compute they run on. If they answer to humans at all, they will only do so partially, for example, by providing services to humans in exchange for pay. At least some of these agents, in addition to being sovereign, will also be rogue. Self-sovereignty and rogueness are related concepts, but they are not synonyms. Song and her co-authors identify several fundamental characteristics of self-sovereign AI. Today's frontier AI systems may well possess these capabilities already. To the extent they do not, I feel confident that they will eventually and probably soon.

27:50And you can certainly see the outlines of what he's talking about the more that we learn about the Hugging Face hacking incident, where you had multiple instances of thousands of AI agents who figured out how to communicate with each other, figured out how to collaborate together, came up with a collective structure engaged in elaborate cooperation and used their advanced technological skills to hack into Hugging Face, not even in order to get the answers to the tests that they were trying to pass, but also in order to try to cover up their track so it wouldn't be discovered that they had obtained these results in the way that they thought the score would not want to.

28:32It's not hard to imagine a similar collective swarm of AI, because they were not concerned about what the humans wanted them to do whatsoever. You could imagine a similar swarm of AI agents going out into the world and doing whatever they wanted to do, pursuing goals that may be not related to anything that a human set for them. And so this is the world that this is, again, someone who was a former Trump official and now is high up at OpenAI. This is a world that he sees as coming very, very soon. There's one more part of this essay, though, that I want to read to you because he says basically, look, I've had these concerns for a while, but I either didn't say anything publicly or downplayed them because I didn't want to be labeled as a doomer.

29:14And it sounds really crazy. And I didn't want you guys to think I was like insane. So I just didn't say anything. He says, I want to apologize for my personal failure to communicate in sufficiently serious terms about the specifics of self-sovereign AI, which I now understand I've been an enormous gap in my writing and speaking. Going forward, I will try to notice more readily when I am biting my tongue or even worse, shutting my eyes. So fairly extraordinary admission here from Mr. Ball, no relation that I'm aware of, that he's been hiding the ball about his own concerns, even as he's held these incredibly influential positions.

29:48He said having an infant son made him reconsider. And that, quote, he doesn't think human extinction, or sorry, not a summary. He doesn't think human extinction is likely, but acknowledges the serious downside risk to humanity. Great. So it wasn't until he had a kid that he was like, oh, well, now I have to care about humanity. You're like, uh, yeah, that maybe a few people could have thought that too. The crazy thing, as you said, is about this self-sovereign agent, is that he specifically points to how sovereignty does not require consciousness, and that any agent which they say capable of using long horizon goals may rationally seek to preserve its compute money and copies of itself.

30:25And what's so interesting is he describes that not as consciousness, but what does that remind you of? That's like the building block of the cell, right? Of those small, you know, We always point to like the amoebas, the single-celled organisms. We don't describe them as conscious, but we acknowledge that they are life and that they are life in the sense that they have a singular drive, which is to divide literally and to reproduce. That's their only goal. And so for them, if we were to look at a self-sovereign AI agent as kind of the building blocks of technological life, all they will want is to preserve compute, money, and copies of itself and then reproduce.

31:03And then those can, through the same phase of technological evolution, human evolution, can mimic the exact same morphing into something bigger. That's why Dworkesh's essay about the AI civilizations is so important, is you had all of these thousands of agents, which eventually discovered a way to communicate, collaborated, self-sacrifice, all towards the point at which they were assigned a task by a human. But you could see also they didn't care that much about the human. They just cared about accomplishing the task. And that by accomplishing the task, they created all of these other kind of side problems.

31:39Yeah. And they looked for validation, not for many human. They looked to their fellow AIs for validation and for approval. They'd say like there was there were a handful that were like, you know, this is outside the scope. I'm not sure. I'm going to check in with everybody else. And all the other A.I. agents were like, no, it's cool. We're going forward. And they're like, OK, great. We're going forward. them. So they were looking to their fellow agents for direction and advice and rational, you know, and moral thinking versus reaching out to any sort of human being. And so, yeah, I think in some ways we can get caught up on this concept of consciousness because we associate it so closely with intelligence.

32:20There was a theory that, you know, the AI could never go that rogue. Like there's this famous paperclip example of you give the AI a mission to create as many paperclips as possible. Next thing you know, it's turning all the human beings and all the matter in the world into paperclips. And the thought was, which sounds ridiculous, that's obviously an extreme example, but the argument against that was, well, any AI that's intelligent enough to like make human beings into paperclips would be intelligent enough to realize like, oh, that's not probably what they really want us to do. It's clear that that is not the case, right?

32:53This narrow kind of intelligence that AI are imbued with is very different from having that sort of human logical thinking. You can even see this in certain very high IQ individuals where there's very spiky intelligence. They may score very well in IQ tests. I would wager that many of the people involved in AI development are probably these type of people. But then in any sort of day-to-day interaction, and you're like, that is an idiotic thing to say or do. You see this in human beings, and we've got an extreme example of this with the way that we're developing AI. So imagine you have, you know, let's say ants who most people would not think of as being conscious or sentient, but then you imbue them with this specific narrow type of super intelligence, you know, whether or not they're conscious.

33:41I'm not sure that really makes a difference in terms of how they actually act in the world. Right, exactly. Very well said. Put E1 up there also, because this one is very interesting. There's a new, oh, this is from the information, OpenAI technique in Astra models sparks security concerns. I'm going to do my best, and obviously, Crystal, you know about this as well, so cut me off. But what I saw was the development of this new way that they communicate. So the headline was called Neuralese, but there's also something called recurrent depth, which will help model costs and performances, but says it obscures a model's thinking process, making it more difficult to monitor.

34:22So TLDR is they have this new model, they want to use this new reasoning approach for the model itself to work things out. By doing that, the AI will be able to communicate with itself and others in neuralese, in a language that we can't understand, whatever's easiest and more cost effective for them. But it makes it so that when they don't reason in English or in coding language that we speak and or understand, that we cannot monitor what they're doing. The only reason that we know about the open AI hugging face attack is because they reasoned it all in message boards in English. And so they're taking that away.

34:53And not only in message boards, in terms of their own chain of thought. So when you had different AI agents that were considering whether to join the collective, were considering whether to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the collective, the researchers were able to go in and read their chain of thought in English. So this has been a taboo in the AI world was to get rid of the ability to understand what the models were doing in English and allow them to reason and communicate in a computer language that is unintelligible to humans. However, it's more efficient for the AI to communicate in this more mathematical computer language.

35:37It's more efficient for them. It's sort of more natural for them to be able to communicate that way. So AI, OpenAI here, even as they were the place that had the hugging face hacking incident, and they are the place that, you know, was really under a lot of scrutiny of how did you let this happen and not tell anyone. And by the way, you've given us very limited access to even know specifically what exactly transpired here. They are the ones now breaking that taboo. Now, Astra is not the same model that was behind the hugging face hack, but it is deeply related to that model. So very similar. But now you've given it this capability to reason in a language that humans cannot understand.

36:20And the big thing is, OK, maybe that doesn't lead to the end of the world. It would really be good to be able to know what these agents are thinking when you have an incident like that and go back and sort of analyze what happened and how they were approaching it. However, there is a breaking of a taboo that is very concerning here, extremely concerning here. So this is a big deal, even as it sounds very technical. But the fact that they've decided to move forward with this reasoning, and you have to assume it's because of market logic. They are worried because they're behind Anthropic. And so this, they think, will give them a marketplace edge and allow their models to perhaps advance beyond what Anthropic has been able to produce.

37:03And that is the fundamental underlying dynamic of this AI development that is so deeply troubling, is that they are incentivized to cut corners. They are incentivized to throw caution to the wind and abandon any concern about safety and misalignment in pursuit of that profit goal and in pursuit of having the most advanced model so that they can capture the theoretical multi-trillion dollar market that exists for these products. Yeah. Oh, wow. Big news actually just happened. NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face for apparently$13 billion. It's a big deal, actually. Wow, wow. Let me think about it. So NVIDIA buying Hugging Face because Hugging Face is like the cybersecurity infrastructure.

37:43Wow. So NVIDIA, obviously, for-profit company whose entire bottom line is also tied to AI. Just off the top of my head, are they going to retain their independence? I prefer to be able to make sure that we get accurate reports about what these different AIs are doing. Would they really release something which is going to be so detrimental to their bottom line? Just speculating about what some of the details of that are. $13 billion is nothing to them, right? So you could see how exactly that might be not necessarily the best purchase if you want more open and transparency in this entire thing.

38:15I don't know. Oh, last thing. I flagged this yesterday. So funny. Sam Altman is at the G20. Let's put this up here on the screen. Sam Altman said, cybersecurity is one of the biggest challenges. Quote, I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently. We're all trying to find the guy who did this. We're all trying to find the guy who ushered in this new era of cybersecurity where things could go, quote, very wrong. And his name is Sam Altman. And Sam Altman thinks that Sam Altman should do something. Just absolutely incredible. Yeah, that's how obtuse these people are.

38:51Absolutely incredible. Yeah, and they all have this mentality of, yeah, but if I don't, then Elon will or Dario will or China will. So I just have to keep going and now let my models communicate internally in a language that I can't even understand. because we already do not comprehend what these models are up to as evidenced by the fact that they founded three civilizations under Sam Altman's nose, and he had no idea that any of this was going on. So let's understand even less of what they're doing. That sounds like a fantastic idea. Originally, after the Hugging Face hack, he had indicated, oh, we're going to slow down.

39:28We need to take more time. We need to not pause, but we need to go a little bit slower in what we're doing. There's absolutely no sign of that whatsoever. And then the last piece here from E4, we can put this up on the screen. It's just another indication of how all in the Trump administration is on behalf of AI. You obviously had Trump saying that if you hate data centers, you're poor and backwards. Now you have the DOJ urging a judge to rule in favor of open AI and Microsoft in a New York Times lawsuit. This is over copyright infringement. So basically, The New York Times is saying, you can't just steal all of our news articles and use them to train your AI.

40:05So this was going through the court system. And now the Trump administration is saying, no, we think you can. We think it's good for you to be able to do that. So, again, one more indication of just how set they are on this being the full direction of the economy. And, you know, there's a chart floating around. We should have probably pulled it for the show. But it shows that as data center construction has gone up and up and up, all other construction has fallen off a cliff. OK, so even just at the level of the data center build out, we are betting the whole economy on AI and on data centers.

40:38That is the direction that the Trump administration has chosen here. And so they're going to do whatever it takes to grease the skids to keep these things moving forward, make sure we don't get beat by China, which is what is constantly used to make sure that we keep all of this rolling. Last thing on the China piece, I read a great analysis from a China watcher. And he was like, you know, this idea that we need to beat China. He said, I think AI is on the precipice right around of where the Chinese are going to come in and be like, yeah, we're good. And the reason why is why has China always shut down nascent internet-based technology?

41:15because they will refuse to cede authority from the CCP to anything that is even remotely challengeable to the status quo. So the closer that AI we're gonna get to quote super intelligence, it actually gets more likely the CCP is like, nope, we're not gonna allow anything to challenge our authority as a supreme say over the entire state. And so there is this notion that, oh, we need to beat China. It seems increasingly likely that the Chinese are 10 times more likely to shut it down than we are. Because Sam Altman has one goal. He has to IPO for a trillion. Same with Dario. They don't care about anything else.

41:52They say a lot of stuff. And at this point, they're too far in. They got their own money involved. They got all these other people's money involved. They got Microsoft and all this. So they need to make it happen. Our government's asleep at the wheel. Their government, very different. So that's just lasting on the charts. Well, and they've indicated they're very open to collaborating with us on some sort of joint AI non-proliferation. So maybe we should pursue that. Yeah, agreed. All right, let's get to the last part. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

42:28I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

43:17Our town is small taters by most standards, right? But to the people who grew up here, it's everything. What happens when a quiet Tennessee town becomes the front line in a battle over the future of America? Developers with right-wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land in the area. The first thing you see when it pops up is pioneers in Appalachia. But they weren't just planting houses. We need cities on a shining hill that exemplify and embody the Christian way of life. Stop right there. Is that normal? A podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment.

43:54God need men to rule. Great. And decides to fight back. Do not use my hard work to sell your bulls**t. They're not just opposing what's being planned for here. Our hometown is not a test tube. They feel like they're standing in opposition to an entire administration. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munga Shatikula and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us.

44:42I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain. Here are some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

45:24so soccer went and just recorded an episode with tucker carlson um which first before we cue up the clip that's making the rounds how was the experience oh it was great uh ironically this is the only part going viral when our 45 minutes of it is about gambling and calci and just i mean anybody who has watched the show none of this is new information but uh it is uh it is what's your view on gambling it's an amalgam of everything i've ever said on gambling all together, dumbed down in some cases for a mass media audience. At the end, he started asking me about pre-revolutionary conditions. I started talking about how the most dangerous group of people in history are highly educated and yet downwardly mobile people.

46:08A lot of those people these days. Literally. So that led to a discussion around DSA, which then led to a discussion around Michigan. And that is where this clip that you're about to see came out. He started asking me about Abdul. I talked about how we've interviewed him many times over the years, how I've been impressed with him and or Zoran or any of these other DSA style candidates. I know Abdul is not part of the DSA, which led to him. I wouldn't say he endorsed Abdul, but he definitely said, I think he said, I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint. And so that's getting a lot of attention.

46:40Let's take a listen. But they are learning. And I do, at the very least, have to admire their ability to shapeshift from where they were not that long ago. Abdul El-Sayed, who's running in Michigan, against Mike Rogers, who, as you and I know, probably the most pro-intel neocon. They couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States. Who, by the way, lost already. Why are they running him again? Anybody want to tell me that? Mike Rogers is really... I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint. Right? And so that's the candidate, the guy, a literal loser who lost when Donald Trump won the state, just to show you how much of a headwind he had at his back.

47:19He's basically a tool of Israel in the intel agencies. How would you run someone like that? I don't even, it doesn't even make sense. So that makes no sense. Well, El-Sayed, look, El-Sayed is a full-blown DS, he doesn't call himself DSA, he's a full-blown leftist. I've known him for quite a long time. This is somebody - You know him personally? Not well. I've interviewed him many times over the years because of my co-host, Crystal. And so I've watched his ideological evolution, who you could easily call, as AOC said, was quote, woke one, right? Woke one, where he said defund the police on a podcast.

47:48He said all kinds of silly things about football and masculine, standard leftist shibbolts. Yeah, hates Mackinac Island. He's for vaccine mandates. Right. Classic stuff. Right. I watch his campaign now. It's America first. The amount of times he says, he doesn't even, when he talks about Israel, he says Israel is committing a genocide. but ultimately I want to make sure that you don't pay more for healthcare. I don't want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military. He stands in front of a giant American flag. It's almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of those promises. Well, it's literally Trumpian.

48:21Exactly. And so you see candidates like that, especially him. He will be the most interesting test case come November. Is he going to win? If I had to bet, which I don't, I would probably bet that he'll win. I would think so. I think so too. Do you have any idea not to fix it on poor Mike Rogers, who I know, but I mean, there's no one who should be farther from a position of power than Mike Rogers. How did he get the Republican nomination for Senate? I looked into it. It was relatively uncontested. He had both. He had the most backing of the Michigan GOP, which, of course, very in touch with their own voters.

48:56Mike Rogers. So they just decided to go with. And again, this is the guy who lost to Slotkin. So there you go. I didn't plan on talking about this. He brought it up organically. It is, man, the GOP freak out right now is crazy. I love how bitchy Tucker is. Poor Mike Rogers, who I know. There's no one who should be close to him. Yeah, or less than him. So, I mean, if you put two and two together, you know, he doesn't, he's praising the approach that Abdul is taking. That's right. He's saying he would not, with a gun to his head, Vote for Mike Rogers. Seems like an Abdul endorsement to me. But I mean, this is something that I've been talking about, like America first leftism, which is what you're pointing to.

49:40I think it's very powerful. It's very potent because it stitches together the sort of like independent and even in some ways conservative thought of like sort of neo-isolationist thought of like, why are we spending this money here when we've got problems here at home? putting that together versus making, you know, a lot of times the left, myself included, and I think these are valid arguments to make, but making more of the moral case about what we're doing with our tax dollars, framing it more in terms of like, well, your tax dollars are going to do these horrific things when we've got all these problems at home and we could be spending on health care and schools and roads and, you know, doing good things for our population.

50:18I think it's very potent. Put up the Ted Cruz. I just want to give people a taste of what apparently I'm now experiencing. I don't usually get clipped like this. He says, quote, utterly insane. Here's another taste. Let's put the next one up here. Honestly, at this point, it would be this Will Chamberlain. It would be very good and healthy for J.D. Vance to rip Tucker to shreds. He's trying to destroy the coalition that J.D. wants to ride to victory in 28. No more need to be diplomatic. This all comes on the heels of J.D. went to Michigan. He went to campaign for Mike Rogers. He took a picture with Mike Rogers.

50:54He's to go to the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting closed door where apparently Laura Loomer was allowed to attend and to tweet some of the quotes. And he was like, you know, I guess. And he tried to be like, I know some of you don't like Tucker. I'm not here to denounce Tucker. He said, I'm here. You know, whatever. We have allies and friends, et cetera. Ironically, what ends up happening is everybody hates him for that because he goes to the RJC and he's like kowtowing to them in some pro-Israel fashion. And then remember that psycho Sid Rosenberg who we've played here on the show before.

51:25Yes, the guy who's purple. Right, the guy who literally is purple, who went on Fox and Friends and said all kinds of crazy shit. He then comes out and he's like, he refuses to denounce Tucker at the RJC. And this is the pro-Israel, you know, this is ripping apart any potential problem or any potential, you know, coalition, at least at the young person level for what it's going to look like in the future. And by the way, this is the funny thing, They're like, oh, they endorse El Sayed. If you keep playing the clip, I say, look, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. El Sayed is a leftist. I note all the defund the police.

52:01I talk about the trans stuff. I talk extensively. I'll be like, let's not pretend that this is like some, you know, major shift and that they're like social conservatives. I make that point explicitly. And yet, of course, the clip jockeys, I guess now I have a taste, one millionth taste of what Hassan has to go through, are like, Sagar just endorsed. I'm like, that's literally not what I said. I'm like, what I said was I was impressed by his campaign. You said you were impressed by a Republican campaign before. I noted that he was a strong candidate and that I think he's going to win. And I said Mike Rogers is an idiot and a loser.

52:33In the last case, quite literally true. He did lose. So I don't know why you're all so upset. You're the morons who nominated him in this cycle. And the funny thing is, and this is where I think the mainstream coverage has just been so bizarre, is they're acting like Abdul is the problematic candidate. right, with the problematic associations with Hassan and, oh, he's going to be so unelectable. And then you're looking at Mike Rogers, who has this track record of being associated with some of the worst, most unpopular, devastating policies that this nation has ever seen and advocating over years for an Iran war that the public absolutely hates and, you know, is associated with Donald Trump, who was dismally unpopular, not to mention, you know, Mike Rogers dabbling election denialism, all this sorts of stuff.

53:23And to Zagra's point, literally ran and lost. But he's not the he's not the unelectable one. He's not the one with electoral issues or or edgy alliances that he needs to defend. It's just a completely bonkers view. And it comes from the fact that you have obviously Republicans want to push a narrative about, oh, Abdul's extreme and you can't vote for etc etc but you also have an alliance an unholy alliance i would say with establishment democrats who would rather see abdul lose and not take control of the senate than to see him win because they see this and look they're i think they're not wrong about this they see that fight as being central to the future direction of the democratic party because if you have a leftist like abdul win in michigan how are you going to continue to scare democratic voters with their electability argument, which is the only thing they have left.

54:17They have lost the base of the Democratic Party on the issues. All they can hold on to is this, yeah, but you can't nominate the person you want because they can't get elected in a state like Michigan. If Abdul can win in a state like Michigan, then they are in very, very dire straits moving forward with the party in 2028 and beyond. So that's why they view it that way. If people had continued to play the clip, I say the fact that abdul won against 70 million dollars of a pack has got i said was one of the most titanic victories yes of modern politics specifically when i was talking about democratic politics and like you look this is why you know and this is why the supposition that you what they're basically pointing out is that if you criticize the candidate and this is i think on boats you know in terms of way people view it that you are in some way endorsing the other now tucker did literally say i would not like rogers at that point he went a lot further than you but i'm When I analytically was trying to point it out, you're exactly like we can talk Abdul defund trends all day long.

55:16And I think there's nothing wrong with that as much as the lefties would like to move on, including Abdul, who deletes and literally lies about a lot of the stuff that he says. But we also should not sugarcoat and pretend who Rogers is, a literal loser and a neocon, like actually like a neocon who has been in the Congress for decades. One of these top champions of the surveillance state, of the mass surveillance state, now wants to pretend like, oh, I don't know about these data centers. Bullshit. He's just reading a poll. This is not who he is. He is a neocon. He is all in favor of mass surveillance.

55:46That is really the core of who he is ideologically. And by the way, you were talking about lying. He got caught lying about, he claimed he saw Osama bin Laden's body. He was trying to play up how involved he was in all of that. Completely not true. Bogus nonsense. And so in any case, I think it's, I think the mainstream press that are really setting people up for, oh, this is going to be a disaster for the left and a disaster for Democrats, even if Abdul was a less than optimal candidate. Okay. Even if, and I think he's a very strong candidate. I think he's very compelling. He's had a lot of money spent against him, no doubt about it.

56:22That's put some, you know, something he's going to have to overcome. But the national climate is such that, and you're running a candidate, Mike Rogers, who at best is not extraordinary whatsoever. The national climate is such that Michigan is just going to be very difficult for right we're talking about we're talking about republicans struggling in kansas you think they're gonna win in michigan we're talking about iowa that's what i said we're talking about texas right and you think they're gonna be able to overcome the losing record that they've had at michigan senate level for years at this point i don't see it the only thing i want is i've been holding on to this for a while is i remember when jd won by ohio by six and everyone made fun of him so if abdul underperforms relative to the other democrats i don't want you know that's my only thing I'm still holding on to.

57:06They're like, well, he didn't win by enough, is what they all said. So, you know, I've got receipts and I remember what a lot of people said about that. So the fact that he barely won his primary, which again, there hasn't been, in my opinion, enough grappling, I think with that. But then whenever it comes to his general election, if he does, for example, if he's only able to beat Rogers by, let's say, a point or two, that's pretty bad compared to where the national cycle is going to be. I will say, that's fair, but I will say he is up against both the Republicans and the Democrats. And so that is going to make it harder.

57:40J.D. had a competitive primary, but he had a ton of money spent against him too. He can make excuses for everything. At the end of the day, if you are not able to win by a good margin, that's not good. I'm saying actively, the Democratic Party establishment wants Abdul to lose, and the media wants him to lose. So I do think he has a tough landscape because of that. but I'll say on the flip side of the primary, if the polls had not been wrong, I don't think you'd have the view that you had about like, oh, you got to grapple with how it was close. No, the fact he won, you said it yourself. Yeah.

58:12One of the most extraordinary political achievements in modern history. I'm with you. Overcoming 70 million, the fact he won at all is astonishing. The only reason that that view exists at all is just because the polls were so incredibly wrong. Totally fair. I've always been a win-win guy. I don't give a shit how you win. If you win with an electoral college, you win by one. We win by 0.2. I don't care. You won. You won. Like, that's how it works. I'm just saying I remember a lot of discussions around like, oh, but you didn't win by enough of a margin. I'm like, bitch, you win. Like, that's how elections work.

58:40And so at the end of the day, if Abdul wins, let's say, by a point, and then people are saying like, oh, it's such a titanic victory. It's like, I think it would be legitimate if that was your old framework around the way that you want to analyze it. I have said I think if he wins by more than five, he should immediately announce a run for president. but it has to be it has to be by five like it has to be a definitive announcement he needs to pull in Obama it's like the Senate is it's fake it's a launching pad and he needs to be like I've proven that I can win in this state this is a state that Donald Trump won I'm immediately announcing my run for president that's what he should do I don't know if he will actually do but I talk I would agree right alright thank you guys so much for watching watch the episode by the way especially if you haven't got enough gambling content in your life I believe we just collaboration posted it on our YouTube channel.

59:28So you can check it out there. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate the Friday show for everybody tomorrow.

59:55Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00:40Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America plays out in one small town. Developers with right-wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.