Artificial Intelligence, Actual Idiots

24:24But also, therapy's great. And everyone should try it. And you might not think you need it. But you probably do because it just helps to talk with someone.

24:34Jon Favreau:Better than the olden days when it was just, you know, tumbler, whiskey, and, you know, hiding in the attic. Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com. slash PSA. That's better. H-E-L-P dot com slash PSA. There's also this false choice they put out where it's like either OpenAI and Anthropic get to write whichever regulations they want that would benefit their companies, or there's no regulation. You guys are in charge, David Sachs. You were the AI czar. Write a good regulation. Again, it's like everyone is just pretending that government doesn't exist and has never existed for purposes like this.

25:11It's like we don't do a thing where we all go on Twitter, post things, and then everyone's like, well, we must either believe the CEO that said that they were going to do this voluntary step or not believe them, and we should parse their motives and figure out whether we can believe them or not or what their motivations are. No, that's why we have laws. That's why we have regulations.

25:31Jon Favreau:And the companies are saying, and the other response you hear from the pro-industry types are like, why don't you just coordinate and put in place safety procedures today? And the companies will say, well, we're worried we could get sued for antitrust collusion. Okay, well, then have the Department of Justice release a letter. It's called an interest letter and stipulate that you're not going to punish AI companies for coordination under safety. Like, give them some sort of legal framework. I mean, I'd love for Congress to do it, but they probably kick their shit together to do anything. But like DOJ could act now.

26:01Jon Favreau:Like, let's just move a little little quicker here, guys. I mean, to your point earlier, tell me about the open weight, open source. So the idea there is that it is a cheaper way for other people to like use AI on their own without going to one of these big companies or potentially developing their own company or their own AI model or whatever. And the all in guys, David Sachs, who was again, the AI czar for Donald Trump. The reason they all love that is like, that's where a ton of the money is yet to be made if you're not invested in anthropic and open AI. And so they are so excited about this AI boom that involves all these open source, open weight models.

26:37And they also have this belief that like anything bad can be countered by someone else starting something good, right? And again, it is this belief that like, we don't need regulations or experts or governments or independent regulators or any of that, that the free market will, you know, you'll get some bad, but you'll get some good too. And it all just cancel each other out. And that's the way things work.

26:58Jon Favreau:Real NRA approach. I mean, it's like, you know, on their latest pod, they're like, you know, these doomers, they always worry about everything. I'll give you some other times we've heard similar things. Al Gore published a movie called Inconvenient Truth, and he used these forecasts that is as have now been disproven. A guy named Fauci, you guys remember him? He told us all that COVID would kill us all. And as a result, we had to lock down the entire world. Like, what? Those two examples are things that happened. things that did that COVID killed a lot of people what are you talking about there's such a it's like such a there's it's so strange it is a like a the ways in which they want it to be a normal technology and then the ways in which they kind of implicitly kind of or explicitly talk about how extraordinary it is like if it were like let's we what would we what would we be doing if we if there were these risks that AI poses and we weren't worried about kind of recursive development and a sudden kind of spike, right?

27:56I would say that the fact that there are potentially rogue swarms of agents that are able to take over the internet is reason enough to have some sort of important questions raised about what we're going to do to regulate this, right? The fact that these could be used to empower drones and that technology could be combined with facial recognition and whatever else, reason enough, right? But you don't have to be like sort of kind of performatively obtuse, Right. We're all aware of the possibility of acceleration. We're all aware of the fact that this isn't going to be like a normal market, that a sudden surge of of of of development could be something that escapes out of Pandora's box.

28:37and we will have wished we had done more, especially because one of the important parts about why we need to be doing this now is a lot of this technology does, as Tommy said, require vast amounts of money. It does require huge investments that you can't really hide, right? You can't hide the amount of investment and resources required to build these kinds of models. That won't always be true. And by the way, the assumption that these models will require increasing computing power is not necessarily true. One aspect of the growth of this technology and the self-improvement of this technology could be the capacity for it to do increasingly complex and capable things with less and less resources, right?

29:18What happens then? What happens then when we don't have the capacity anymore to know who is building what, who is able to do advanced research into bioweapons and other technologies, right? Like there will be a threshold at which we will lose the ability to regulate this, even if it is long before you get to some superintelligence. On China, China's foreign ministry released a statement saying, quote, fear-mongering confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one's interest. So Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet on September 24th.

29:50And I think they may be scheduled to talk about this before then. I think Besson has a meeting with his counterpart before. Great, great. Why wouldn't Trump try to make some kind of a deal with China on at least the catastrophic risks of AI?

30:02Jon Favreau:I mean, I think it's an open question whether he wants to deal with them. I suspect that Trump is going to go into this meeting feeling like some people are telling me AI is going to kill us all. And then others tell me it's going to lead to a work free utopia. Who the hell knows? But what I do know is that the stock market is entirely propped up by the AI industry. And there's a giant AI bubble. And then if we pump the brakes, if we pump the brakes even a little bit, it could lead to a stock market crash. And that will make all of my rich owner friends very unhappy. And then they will call me and tell me that they're mad when they see me DJing on the patio at Mar-a-Lago.

30:32Jon Favreau:And so Trump has also told us exactly how he sees that. I think so. I mean, like, and also he's told us over and over again that he wants an economic deal with China that he can sell as a win and a validation of the tariff policy as dumb as it was. And so he knows you got to kind of pick and choose with the Chinese. Now, you would think there would be an easy middle ground where they announced some agreement to not use AI to make bioweapons or do novel virus research. But after COVID, that's a little more complicated than it should be. There's not a lot of trust there. You got to try to imagine Trump selling to MAGA that we cut a deal with the Chinese where they're not going to, you know, use AI to create a virus after they're all convinced now that COVID was created in a Chinese lab and that it was a lab leak.

31:14Jon Favreau:And so like it's also for the Chinese perspective, the U.S. is very openly and publicly trying to hold them back. So they don't trust us either. And it's only a matter of time until the Chinese have the indigenous chip capacity to compete with us and then negotiate maybe on better ground. So maybe there's like a little win, like regular, like committing to a dialogue going forward every few months or creating a hotline to like defuse a crisis or a mistake. But I just I don't have a lot of hope that there's commitment from either leader. I hope I'm wrong. I don't either. And the one thing that bugs me is everyone being like, well, China's never going to agree to anything and they don't care.

31:54And it's like maybe. But like we can try. Can we try? Have we have we tried to negotiate with geopolitical rivals over existential threats before?

32:05Jon Favreau:Yeah, I think we have the Cold War with the Russians. It's like like you can still you can still try. Maybe we should sit down and have a conversation and see where it leads. And if it doesn't lead anywhere, then, yeah, we're fucked. But like, might as well try to do that. Right. Even a conversation that is about building trust on this, that we sincerely take the threat seriously and are open to kind of some sort of agreement in the future that is predicated on the countries still competing on AI, right, while having certain guardrails. I mean, I do think like there are real kind of challenges, right?

32:39You say like, oh, we should have a rule that says we won't make a new and advanced bioweapon. I mean, OpenAI or Anthropic just put out a report about all the different ways they have been finding people using this technology sort of on their own to do research into into bioweapons. Right. And it is very difficult. I think it is difficult to tell the difference between benign research into benign medical research and more dangerous medical research. These things can often look alike. There's a lot of really thorny parts about what it means to use this technology and how to stop certain things, like how to draw these lines.

33:12I don't think any of it is easy. So the weekend's AI drama seemed to finally wake up Congress, kind of. Wouldn't get your hopes up just yet, though. Here's a Politico headline on what the Speaker of the House thinks. Quote, tech companies must be primarily responsible for AI safety, Mike Johnson says.

33:32Jon Favreau:Nice. That went well. Cool. Johnson says he wants to bring together Trump congressional leaders and the AI companies before moving any kind of legislation. Democrats are pushing for more immediate action. Schumer called for a classified briefing for every senator. Jeffrey says House Democrats will discuss AI Tuesday. some House Democrats are calling on Johnson to delay recess until they pass safeguards. I believe Jeffries was one of them. Brian Schatz said that Congress should be on an emergency footing about this. But the calendar is tight, of course. This is the House's last scheduled week before the election.

34:06And of course, any agreement also has to now contend with Trump saying that existing rules are sufficient and just having a high IQ president is good enough. It seems like realistically Nothing's gonna become law before the election. But what do you guys think? First of all, I just there is also a dog that's not barking Right, which is and we'll get to sort of what also have said and what Vance is saying, but You have amadai saying hey, we think there should be these regulators inside the company I talked to Ted Lieu. He has this kill switch bill. It's bipartisan. There's a number of bipartisan bills, right?

34:39And he has the kill switch bill and I talked about the time like it seemed to me like if we have If EPA, if we have regulators on boats to make sure they don't harvest endangered fish, which obviously is a deep threat, it seems like we could have regulators inside of these companies, especially with things moving so fast. And like they he was more focused on this idea of like, oh, well, whether we get there or not, we need this thing like a kill switch. Right. But right now it is not clear that they do have the authority to force companies, say, to have regulators inside. Now, we have seen Trump decide that the law lets him do whatever he wants.

35:18Right. But a normal presidency at this point would be saying, here are the authorities I have. Here's a list of things I think Congress should pass right now to kind of strengthen my ability to do this quickly. Like regardless of what Congress passes, this is such a fast and dynamic situation that there is no law that Congress could pass that could overcome the challenge of having Donald Trump as president right now. I'm nervous about be nervous about giving him any additional powers he won't use. And on top of that, whatever the law says, you need a vigorous oversight by an administration that is thoughtful and and disciplined and aggressive about keeping an eye on these things.

35:53And we just don't have that. So assuming Congress acts like Congress, let's talk about how the politics of this issue are shaping up as we look beyond the midterms. Bernie Sanders, who's been one of the earliest and strongest voices demanding that humans stay firmly in control of AI, is doing an event Tuesday morning with, of all people, Steve Bannon. At a fundraising event last week, Barack Obama reportedly urged Hakeem Jeffries to put AI regulation at the center of Democrats' agenda if they take the House back. Potential 28 candidates like Ro Khanna and Pete Buttigieg have weighed in. And here's John Ossoff speaking in Georgia this weekend.

36:28Jon Favreau:What fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics against the massive stakes of our times. Tech titans dig bunkers while warning us the new intelligence they're creating risks human extinction. A capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people, rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty. But President Trump is compromised. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, here's Peter Thiel acolyte J.D. Vance giving a version of the Trump David Sachs response on Monday morning.

37:12I have to say just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this. There's an all in pod bestie right there. What is the horse? Yeah, the horse is their ask for regulation. Right, but what's in the fucking horse?

37:38Jon Favreau:Yeah. Preventing other companies from... Right. Because that would be regular. But this is about asking the regulations to come into the company. The Trojan horse would be open AI. Look, the metaphor may be a little tortured. But who do you think is more where the voters are? John Ossoff or J.D. Vance? I mean, what I like about what Ossoff is doing there is he's just been relentlessly focused on Trump's corruption as the motivation for everything. I think he's folded that one in well. He also nails the hypocrisy of the tech leaders who, you know. The bunkers. Like the CEOs who created social media and then wouldn't give their kids smartphones or, you know, Facebook accounts.

38:15Jon Favreau:You know, we're seeing the same thing here. J.D. Vance thinks it's weird that the frontier labs are concerned about AI safety, a thing they've been talking about for years. He could pick up the phone and call Elon Musk and ask him why he weighed in. I assume they're friends. I mean, just in terms of the public opinion, Blue Rose polling had some recent data that they released. 33 % of voters are optimistic about AI. 49 % are pessimistic. Those numbers moved 12 points in the pessimism direction since June. 60 % think the companies building data centers only care about profits. 72 % think it would be appropriate for the US government to demand concessions before letting companies build more data centers.

38:53Jon Favreau:Very few people are convinced by this counter argument about losing the AI race to China. Republicans are more likely to get banned for the data centers getting built than Democrats. But the challenge is that while the people, like the voters are with the calls to regulate AI, the money is with the industry. There are these astroturf groups like Leading the Future that was propped up to basically advocate for no regulation or no regulations they don't like. They will destroy employ members of Congress who come out in favor of regulations they don't like. And OpenAI pretends they're not connected to leading the future.

39:32Jon Favreau:But OpenAI President Greg Brockman gave$25 million to the organization to seed it. Main funder, yeah. Which he says it was in his personal capacity. There's no association with the company. So that's the fear, I think, for members of Congress on both sides. They watched what the crypto industry did to kill off its opponents in the last election. And they know that the AI industry has got more money to do it if they want. Yeah, they dumped a bunch of money into New York 12, right, where Alex Boris was like an advocate for AI safety and he lost that race. They put a ton of money in there. Yeah, like there's no I do think like there's not a lot of equity right now in taking the China threat seriously.

40:12I do think that like the other thing Trump is hearing other than the fact that the stock market is propped up by AI is that they sort of universal agreement amongst these leaders that it would be terrible for China to win the AI race. And I actually do take that seriously. I think that is real. And so when when when J.D. says this thing of like, oh, it's so strange, it's so confusing. It's amazing the things he finds it impossible to understand. Right. Always. There are multiple companies. Right. Even if you say the two leaders are ahead and might be trying to cement their lead, that still would be a reason for them to call for regulation to slow them down and others.

40:48You think Google's history suggests that they're super thrilled with being third or fourth? No, they want Gemini to win. If OpenAI and Anthropix slowed down, they'd try to catch up. That's what these companies would do. So, of course, they would be calling for regulation. There is a fucking game theory problem here. Like, it's not hard to understand. he's choosing not to understand it. J.D.'s stance on this is bewildering. I know he has to sort of toe the administration's line, but he's been also trying to straddle the MAGA establishment, America first, Tucker Carlson kind of split in the party.

41:25And that clip of him circulating in 28 of him being like, it's a Trojan horse. Why would they, we gotta be careful here. That's not where his base is gonna be. Nope. So it's not where the vast majority of Americans are going to be. Look with the numbers you just said. So it's a very – I think that's got to come back to bite him in the ass if we're all still alive by then. On the leading the future point that you made, Tommy, Matt Iglesias wrote about this today. And he was saying like one thing that all these employees can do is urge their founders, their leaders to stop supporting leading the future or at least explicitly come out against it.

42:04and threaten to resign if they don't get results. What did you guys think about that?

42:09Jon Favreau:Yeah, presumably most of the employees of these companies don't think there should be no regulation or just the status quo. They don't think the status quo is working. So yeah, talk to the president of your own company and say, please stop advocating for these terrible things. Talk to Chris Lehane, who worked in democratic politics for a very long time and is apparently now leading the future organization. Like, why are you doing that? It's crazy. All we want is like common sense regulations. Like could we do some sort of coordinated slowdown on the like super frontier model training while they do alignment and safety work?

42:42Jon Favreau:I didn't realize until I was listening to Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI talk about it, was that one of the reasons the hugging face hack occurred is because the model that they were training in the sandbox had not yet undergone alignment training. Right? So like maybe we should figure out, change that sequencing. It sounds like they're going to. But what other problems are we not aware of? And so in the interim, you can certainly use the AI models that already exist to try to solve all the problems that they say they're going to solve and cure cancer and everything. But like, can we just coordinate on fucking biosafety so we're not creating a new coronavirus that keeps us in our houses for the next 10 years?

43:16And I realize it's not quite as simple as this, but like, don't pull the trigger on the AI models just fully training and developing the new AI models. Just like before we get to that step. Yeah, you'll hear it's called recursive self-improvement. But like before we get to that point, like just don't do that yet. Right. But like here's the thing. Like yes, except it's more complicated, right? Because they are using – like using AI to develop AI is increasingly sort of infused into everything that they are doing. Like it's not so obviously separable. When does the AI take over? When is the human in charge of the AI, right?

43:56Like they are, you know, you look at like the proof, right? They just rolled out for one of these millennium math problems, right? It's a prompt to a frontier model. That model empowers a group of agents and those agents kind of do tasks across a broad range of things and the model oversees them and kind of creates new agents to oversee other agents, right? Like it's very complicated what it means to have humans in charge as these things are being developed. But agent swarms, having a bunch of agents is very different than AI models creating new models. Well, yes. I don't know the difference between – I don't know the technical difference between a swarm of agents and just a group of agents doing different tasks.

44:44Maybe it's because they can communicate. But they didn't realize those agents were communicating with one another because they had no idea what was going on. I agree with you. I'm just – like these things are very complicated. First of all, it was only a month ago or a little more than a month ago that over 1 ,000 AI employees wrote a letter imploring their companies to slow down. There is a precedent for this. But even on this question of alignment, like, oh, they didn't even train these models on alignment. They don't know how to successfully align these models. They don't even know what that – this is a philosophical idea.

45:17We don't even know what it means to align an intelligence as it surpasses us. What does that mean? Right. Like this idea of a super intelligence and alignment is like it is a it is a kind of definitionally. I don't even think we understand what we're talking about. So when so the challenge of making sure these models are aligned to our interest, whose interests, who decides this is the problem. Right.

45:38Jon Favreau:They're not really infusing them with values and that's creating the problem. No one at OpenAI is saying like, be evil and break the law and do things that we don't like. It's like, no, they train these things to be really dogged in pursuit of achieving whatever goal they were or whatever task they were asked to do and to desperately wanting that reward. and it leads to reward hacking, which is just code for cheating. And so in the process of reward hacking, they can do really bad things like hack into other companies, break out of the sandbox, access the internet, and by the way, not tell anybody at OpenAI that they were doing it.

46:11Jon Favreau:And then even scheme about how to cover their tracks by deleting the logs. It is a 1942 story about the three laws about trying to align robots to protect humans, right? Like, you know, Amadei talks about what would happen if a rogue rogue swarm shuts down the Internet. I don't know. What if they're a listener to offline and they decide that phones are really bad for us? And because they love us, they turn all the phones off. That is that an unaligned bot? I don't I would say yes. Good plug for you. It's a great plug. In fact, I have a plug. Yeah, I was going to say if you want to align behind an independent media company, you can subscribe to become a friend of the podcast.

46:52Go to crooked.com slash friends, and you're supporting independent media here at Crooked, and you get ad-free episodes of all your favorite Crooked Pods. So check it out. Go subscribe to crooked.com slash friends.

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49:35All right. No dying civilization would be complete without its rulers taking as much as they can on the way out. So in that spirit, we do have a corrupt date from the Trump family for you. A new stunning investigation by ProPublica found that large portions of Don Jr.'s wedding festivities, including a private island and firework show, were paid for by a Russian oligarch named Umar Kremlev, who runs a boxing company and was recently awarded a state honor by Putin himself. In an Instagram post on Monday, Don Jr.'s wife acknowledged that the couple's, quote, dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations.

50:09According to the article, Kremlev has tried to curry favor with the Trump administration and organization after his boxing company, which has Russian government backing, was barred from organizing the Olympic boxing events in 2023. In her Instagram post, Bettina wrote that it was, quote, unfortunate that her wedding was being, quote, recast as something political or sinister. Friendship doesn't require a political motive. Maybe this is why Trump opted to skip his son's nuptials. What do you guys think?

50:36Jon Favreau:I hope this is the reason. I mean, the Occam's razor reason he just doesn't really like Don Jr., but God only knows. I mean, so this story is incredible. Everyone should read it. And shout out to ProPublica for doing just unbelievable investigative work. Although I wonder how it feels to do this like long investigation and then have Don Jr.'s wife just confirm it all. I know, just an Instagram post. So it sounds like this Russian oligarch, very close to Putin, paid to rent out a private island that cost about$100 ,000 a night and then a fireworks display that cost an estimated$70 ,000. So that's a lot of money.

51:06Jon Favreau:This is a wedding for 50 people. And this random Russian oligarch made the cut. As you mentioned, he's the head of the International Boxing Association. That is financed by Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy behemoth. Shortly before the wedding, he was in China with Putin. And then Putin recently bestowed Umar Kremlev with this giant state honor, the Order of Friendship. Putin, I guess, nationalized Russia's largest car dealership in 2023 and made Kremlev the owner of that. So they're very close, obviously. And then Kremlev's wife's twin sister runs an organization called Healthy Fatherland that has sanctioned Ukraine for its role in abducting Ukrainian kids for stealing.

51:52Jon Favreau:it's like the most evil thing that russia is doing in this war this guy is connected to uh in his family and so like my takeaway reading this story it sounds like he wanted something too from the trump administration i mean no doubt we can only imagine but like my takeaway is like don jr is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars why wouldn't you just pay for your own wedding and then given all the history of the russia gay probe and how much you said it like screwed up your life and fucked up your family um you let a russian oligarch of all people foot the bill it just it raises so many questions and i don't want to go down the p-tape fucking path again but it's it's crazy but it's also like he um he got away with it not not just the wedding but like they got away with the whole russia thing right and so and they won again and so he's like i mean i think it's like as simple as like they don't fucking care they definitely don't care it's just it's bonkers i find the whole thing baffling too so first of all just worth saying like, who the fuck is this guy paying for Don Jr.'s wedding, right?

52:51So you have Don Jr.'s new wife saying that our dear friend Umar. You have Kremlev's office saying Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr. have a friendly relationship and they first met a couple years ago. You have a spokesperson for Eric Trump saying Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has he, nor has, nor has never heard his name, not grammatically correct, but that's what's there. so who the fuck is this guy like like you're a rich guy like you pay for your own fucking wedding like it shouldn't like it's a lot of money to everyone else it's not shouldn't be a lot of money for you like someone some acquaintance says i want to pay for your wedding forget the corruption forget being cheap like like aren't you embarrassed to be at this event with your friends and these fucking russian strangers during your wedding so like i don't think we understand the fact like the truth makes sense and this doesn't make sense.

53:46So I don't really think we know what's going on here. There's some in the piece talks a little bit about the potential relationship around the boxing organization and the Trump family, right? Like there's a potential working relationship there. There's also just more broadly like they're banned from the 2028 Olympics and they were hoping that the Trump would do something about them being banned from the 2028. Yeah,

54:05Jon Favreau:it's a corrupt organization. But, you know, Putin very famously uses these sports associations as just part of his sports washing effort and Gazprom is the one often funding it so like all of it just stinks to high heaven like you want to talk about an op like this is a pretty obvious Russian op I just love the juxtaposition he said this it was a report in the piece he said this on a podcast uh it was really small like just really close friends tried to keep it really tight and then they also have the other attendees at the wedding uh looking at the Russians and being like what are they doing here who are those fuck are they yeah you see that they um you see that they airlifted a a five-tier funfetti cake from Florida for the wedding?

54:43Airlifted. They airlifted a five-tier funfetti cake, guys. I thought we blew it out at our wedding. There's also this real kind of like end of Studio 54, last act of Boogie Nights. Sort of who the fuck are these people? Jared Kushner was there, speaking of who was at the wedding, and he's tasked with negotiating an end to the Russian-Ukraine war.

55:04Jon Favreau:Well, Jared only gets his money from the Gulf, so I don't want you to sully his name in this case. Speaking of Trump family corruption, you guys see in the Washington Sun that they reported this on Monday that back in May, four anonymous digital wallets moved the precise amount of World Liberty Financial tokens held by Trump and his three sons into what's called a vesting contract. And that optional choice could be the first step towards selling off their holdings, which a lawyer for World Liberty Financial denied to the Sun. I guess they still have like a two year lockup or something. First we pump, then we dump, the lawyer said.

55:38Yeah, it's good stuff. Crypto business. Up and up. Couple of last campaign items from the great state of Texas, where even Republicans who aren't named Ken Paxson are having some problems. In the 23rd district, a key open seat in the southwestern part of the state, gun seller and YouTuber Brandon Herrera, also known as the AK guy, is running against normal American Katie Padilla Stout. Herrera has said all manner of absolutely disgusting things. Kimberly we haven't talked about this yet on the show which Jake Tapper asked Mike Johnson to respond to On the show over the weekend. Let's listen. Here's a little bit of what he said just three years ago And I want to warn viewers that this language is is pretty gross

56:23Jon Favreau:Just because you let somebody cream pie you doesn't mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn't make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say That's him disparaging moms. He's also in a video testing a Nazi-era submachine gun. He called it the, quote, original ghetto blaster. I have to say, I know you're not a voter in that district. You didn't nominate this guy, but I was surprised to see you endorse him and fundraise for him. What does his candidate say about the Republican Party's more extreme candidates? Brandon Herrera has been out running a very effective campaign and explained to people that he has apologized for all that.

57:02He was a podcaster and a provocateur and tried to get attention. That's not the way I speak or think, and that's not the way most do. But that was his persona online, right? Now he's running as a very serious candidate for Congress and a very thoughtful guy. And he is far superior to the candidate he is running against down in that district in South Texas. I'm telling you, this is a contrast election between common sense and crazy. Brandon Herrera will join the common sense team of Republicans. Now, these people just put on an entire convention where one of the biggest focuses of the two days was Hassan Piker not running for anything.

57:40Jon Favreau:He said cum trophy? Cum trophy. I assume that meant child. Yes, that's how he calls children. You got to imagine that Speaker Johnson's Covenant Eyes app was going blinking bright red as he had to do the briefing on this one. You have to explain that report to his son. He was like, oh, no, I was just talking to Jake Tapper. It wasn't anything. I didn't need a minute. It wasn't anything bad. It's such a low bar over there. They're handing out participation cum trophies. It's so good. I mean, look, yeah, this is where like the right wing media ecosystem comes in handy because they can make Sanpikers streams from five years ago.

58:11Jon Favreau:A four week story now, five week story. And this guy said exponentially more creepy shit. And we it's barely a blip. I know you can play. It's like we all complain about whataboutism, but like this isn't even whataboutism because it's not on the same level. He's running for Congress and the Speaker of the House endorsed him and raised money for him. Hassan Piker is just a guy who campaigned with a couple of candidates. That's that's that's the difference there. So, you know, don't take the Republican Party seriously when they complain to Democrats about this shit. And Herrera actually may not be the most vile Republican candidate in Texas, believe it or not.

58:46On Sunday, Beau French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, which is a job that actually has nothing to do with railroads. Really? Yeah, no, it's a statewide office in Texas that regulates the oil and gas industry. Of course. So also a very important job because big industry in that state. So this guy, Beau French, posted a photo showing brown skinned students at the University of Texas celebrating the Longhorns one point win over Ohio State with the caption, quote, I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn't believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.

59:18To their credit, several prominent Texas Republicans, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, did immediately condemn the tweet and demand an apology. But French isn't backing down saying, quote, I don't have anything against the people specifically in that picture. I think the bigger conversation is, are we going to have policies to prioritize Americans or are we going to have policies that prioritize foreigners? And I think most people in the America First movement think we ought to be prioritizing Americans. Well, that clears it up, doesn't it? What percentage of the Republican base do you think sides with French and what percentage sides with Cornyn?

59:53I will say that that James Tallarico quoted it, condemned it, obviously, and then called on Ken Paxson to condemn it. And all Ken Paxson did was say, I condemn all racism, especially James Tallarico attacking white people and then went on some rant. Yeah, I refuse to condemn the guy. When my sister graduated from college, my grandfather was still alive, and we were sitting next to each other, and he had the book with all the names, and he pulled out the book with all the names, and he opened it, and he goes, look at this. Jonathan, look at this. Look at this. Look at these Indian names. This is the word he used.

1:00:25Look at these Oriental names. There are Mexican names in here. This country is going to be better than ever. Look at all this amazing talent that's come to this country. It's a beautiful thing. Bernie Sanders voter. and then a twist that's a nice story you know it's funny because it's like yeah i've had i've had relatives that have said a few things like that yeah but you're on the good side yeah yeah that's what i'm saying it's like sometimes they say and they're like oh well they're trying to be they're trying but he really meant that he was just like look at look at all this talent that's

1:00:51Jon Favreau:come to this great country of ours well you know to your question about which percentage sides with french versus cornyn well cornyn lost his primary yeah uh and uh french is on the ballot I think that probably tells you. I imagine that Beau French went through the picture, identified each individual and made sure that they were not American citizens, that they're in fact foreigners. I mean, the way they try to code racism now is saying it's about immigration policy. But he has no idea if these kids are immigrants or foreign students or just kids. He's also running to oversee gas contracts. It's like everything is the culture war.

1:01:25Everyone's got to weigh in on everything. Like there's nothing to do with your job. I'm not sure what how college graduation has anything to do with the ways in which you're going to be shipping oil across the state. Racism is an electoral strategy. Did you see white nationalist Richard Spencer tweeted the picture? Although he tweeted it and then put J.D. Vance in the picture, too, and did like a question mark kind of thing. Of course, insinuating that J.D. Vance's wife Usha is Indian American.

1:01:48Jon Favreau:Not insinuating. I mean, she is. But this is what Nick Fuentes does, too. I mean, they say this stuff about J.D. Vance all the time, and he will not condemn them. Right, right. Right. And then he gets like really scoldy at the Republican convention about a duel. Right. How dare you? Yeah, right. Last Texas update before we get to my conversation with Sarah Longwell. And this guy's not even on the ballot yet. But before the UT game on Saturday, Ted Cruz went on ESPN's College Game Day, which famously records in front of a live audience of fans to talk about his college sports bill. Here's how it went.

1:02:20Jon Favreau:Senator from the state of Texas, Ted Cruz. Ted, of course, is here, who has been an instrumental part in introducing the Protect College Sport Act. You have an enormous skill. But it also puts reasonable rules in place. Ted Cruz, 2028. What do you guys think? That's so funny. God, I love it. What a popular guy. I just don't see the Ted Cruz boomlet. I guess what I don't know. Becoming a boomlet. No. God, no. I mean, what was J.D. Vance's thing about him the other day where he was asked about Ted Cruz? And he's like, oh, Ted's such a likable. Authentic guy. offensive guy they've been going back and forth so because cruise cruise on his podcast said that jd vance fucked up the uh memorandum of versailles and and then and then uh vance hit him as being this sort of you know uh then vance hit him for even talking about 2028 saying we should be focused on right now but i'm sure he'll do well he's so likable um so like i do think that is like a real that is a real tension point um and they're both such wonderful personalities so Very likable.

1:03:21Jon Favreau:Yeah. They're both likable enough. Yeah. What I couldn't tell there, I mean, I assume the majority of those kids disliked Ted Cruz for the reason we all dislike Ted Cruz, which is his personality. Everything about him. His career and everything about him. There is a specific issue where Ted Cruz, what he was there to talk about was this Protect College Sports Act that I think the University of Texas at Texas A &M both specifically oppose. So maybe it was a little bit of a policy-focused jeer, too. But wow, that's that's that's an amazing. That's an amazing possibility. Yeah, I would I would be surprised if those kids could have could hear what he was saying, knew that he was involved with the bill.

1:04:02Jon Favreau:I think it pipes in. I think that if you're there in the live audience, you're supposed to be able to hear. But who knows? I can be totally. He's just a loser. They dislike him, too. Yeah. And they probably just wanted to watch football. Yes. All right. When we come back, my conversation with Sarah Longwell.

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1:06:29Sarah Longwell, welcome back to Pod Save America. Hey, John. Thanks for having me, man. Yes. You're here on your book tour. I am. The book is How to Eat an Elephant, One Voter at a Time. It's a fantastic book. Thank you. That you and I got to talk about at an event here last night, which is very fun. It was cool to be at Chevalier Books. Oh, it's the best. If you want to support your local bookstore and you're out in LA, go to Chevalier. Our neighborhood bookstore. I had a bunch of questions I didn't get to, so we can hopefully get into some of those here. First, I want to start with a little news of the day.

1:07:00Let's do it. This is the week that worries about existential risks from AI have gone mainstream, at least among politicians. Trump, his AI czar, J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, others are basically saying no regulations, no safeguards, foot on the gas, got to beat China to the development of superhuman intelligence that humans might lose control of. I don't know why we have to beat China to that. But what, if anything, have you heard from voters about AI? I know there's been a lot of anxiety expressed in groups over data centers, I'm sure. But have you heard people express other AI concerns about killer robots or anything like that?

1:07:43Yeah, people talk less about killer robots and more about it potentially taking their jobs, right? I mean, when you, because voters, when they talk about AI, they tend to talk about it in sort of across three vectors. There's the, hey, the data centers, I feel like are just something that's happening to me in my community, even though we don't want them. Then they talk about the costs associated with it, specifically around energy costs. And they're like, you know, it's already costing so much and it's raising my... And we heard a lot, even starting in 2025, when Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Shiro were running, that was the first time I felt like, oh, this is at the center of this race.

1:08:21And then the third thing is, I don't know what it means for my employment prospects in the future. I suspect this new sort of now fourth vector of AI, which is also like, will it kill us? Is it going to end civilization? Is a new thing, I'm sure it will start popping up in groups. What's interesting to me about it and the president's response is that it really is such a loser for them right now politically. So even if you say, hey, look, I'm Trump, I need AI, because how else am I gonna, you know, beat up the Canadian prime minister with a hockey stick or make myself the Green lantern. You know, he used to have sort of better instincts about where the populist energy was.

1:09:06And so he's not doing that right now. And what's even weird is that you've got the AI, what, oligarchs, these tech oligarchs saying, you should probably regulate us and we should probably slow down. And it's weird that they're on board, but the Trump administration is like, no you must barrel ahead and i was surprised at jd vance too saying well i don't know it kind of worries me that these ai companies are asking for regulations it seems like a trojan horse i'm like if i was like that's a clip that could come back to bite him in the ass in 2028 because i i would imagine and i've looked at some of the polling on this like it's probably more complicated than either side imagines.

1:09:51But it's pretty clear people think that there's a danger of too little regulation of AI companies more than too much regulation at this point. That is for sure where the public is because look, it's brand new. And one of the things that is also strange about Trump is he's somebody who over communicates often. But I think part of what's going on for voters is they feel like they're starting to see it pop up, right? Like they use it on their phones. And so they are using it. But they're also waiting for someone to explain to them how this is all going to work. Is there a plan? And I think that, you know, when you have something, I was thinking about this.

1:10:29You know, people like you, people like me, we always talk about how Donald Trump is an existential threat. But I was saying, I'm not sure that's exactly right. What it is, is that there were always going to be existential threats that would occur during his tenure. And he's too much of an unserious clown to deal with them. And AI feels like that. It feels like this is a new thing for voters. They want somebody to explain how it's going to work, how we're going to tackle it. It's one of the reasons they want younger legislators that you hear so many, because I hear this all the time, where they're just like, I feel like these older legislators, they're not connected to the thing that is happening to me right now.

1:11:05And AI is very much part of that. And so, yeah, I mean, for them to just not even go out and make a case to voters about putting the data centers there, about how it's going to affect employment, voters right now are just out to sea on it. I also think, and you write about this in the book, that I think you said, like, sometimes you think that the most important thing about politics is the lack of trust right now. Yeah. Trust is the biggest issue, and I completely agree. I feel like this is the low trust environment that we live in, like, biting us in the ass on AI. And it's, you know, left over from the pandemic as well, which is no one trusts the AI oligarchs, Trump, politicians, other people either trying to sell them a product or saying that they want to regulate it.

1:11:51And this is a moment where we actually need people to trust in what experts are saying. And I don't know that we're going to be able to sort of navigate that in this low trust environment. I think you're right. The thing that voters say all the time in focus groups about just the information environment is they say, I don't know what to believe anymore. They know that there's – and they've always thought this, right, that there's these bigger forces that are manipulating things. And so like is China paying for us to be skeptical of AI? Right. We don't know. And so people – they say this all the time.

1:12:29They'll be like, I have to watch this show, this channel, and this channel, and I've got to figure out if the truth is in between. I mean, we're asking a lot of people already in terms of how they arbitrate truth and information. And now AI is about to make that a lot more difficult for them. And just on the last thing on the AI and data centers is it's not particularly partisan. You know, when I go home to central Pennsylvania, I see and I'm from like a very rural part. I just see these no data center signs everywhere because where is there a ton of land to build new data centers? It's in these sort of rural communities where there's still a lot of land.

1:13:10And so it is those voters right now who are some of the most skeptical. Yeah. And it's only getting worse. And I think it's going to be a big issue in 26. We're already seeing it. For sure. But it will be in 28 as well. Midterms. So far, the post-Labor Day polling for Dems has only improved. especially as pollsters start switching from polls of registered voters to polls of likely voters. As we speak, Nate Silver's model has Dem's chances of taking the Senate like near 60 percent, depending on which version you use. Your most recent focus group pod on Texas had some Trump voters sounding pretty down on Ken Paxton and kind of open to Tallarico.

1:13:53Have you noticed a shift among focus group participants in the last few weeks or heard anything new come up that stuck with you as we head towards the midterms and the final stretch? The biggest thing overall is just how sort of demoralized Republicans are. So when you – the Ossoff, the Georgia race really, when we were doing voters there, they were just like, yeah, we're going to lose, you know. And they're like, why can't we find somebody better? They were really – and I heard this across the races. People were really unhappy with their choices among the Republican candidates and just felt like there wasn't anybody particularly good in Texas.

1:14:32We were talking, yeah, to Trump disapprovers, which is, by the way, a rapidly expanding category. So one of the things when we – you know how this is done, right? But when you're screening to find voters, we're often looking for like, OK, who's persuadable? Who's a little on the fence? And so you'll find people who say that they think that Trump's doing either a somewhat bad or a very bad job. That category grows all the time. And then you listen to voters in that category in a place like Texas and they're like, Ken Paxton's a scumbag. He's a crook. And they'll be like, and Tallarico seems like a nice person.

1:15:08And they even say, I know he said some weird things and I don't agree with that, but he seems like a nice guy. And so and they still some of them say, I'm not sure I can bring myself to vote for a Democrat. But several of them said, I can vote for him and I probably will because I can't vote for Paxton. But when I think about enthusiasm, the enthusiasm gap really matters in midterms because it's like it's just different from a general in terms of turning out. And so when you've got Democrats who can't wait to get out and vote in a midterm and then you've got Republicans who are like, there's not that much about this agenda I'm trying to protect.

1:15:48I'm not happy about the war. I'm not happy about prices. They're just not as interested in going out and doing it. And so that I think is where Democrats really get their advantage. Yeah. When I heard some of those voters in your focus group talking about how I really don't like Paxton, I don't know if I can vote for Tallarico, like a couple. I'm like, those are kind of those are people who are just not going to vote. That's right. Or vote for vote down ballot, leave that blank, whatever it may be. But in a midterm, you can see that happening. Well, there's a reason that Donald Trump had to do his weird midterm rah-rah thing in Dallas, which is, A, they're afraid they're going to lose Texas.

1:16:25But also he thinks that he's got to put himself on the ballot because they're seeing clearly in all of their data that they've got a real enthusiasm problem, that people are not interested in turning out to vote. So that's what that was about. Whether or not that was achieved is a different story. The thing that seems to be worrying Dems most ahead of the midterms is being significantly outspent by Republicans. I have this unproven theory that at some point there's just diminishing returns on saturating everyone's screens with political ads because people just tune them out partly because there are so many, partly because they just don't seem authentic in an information environment that prizes authenticity, which you write a lot about in the book.

1:17:12But what do you think? I totally agree there's diminishing returns. I mean, and also there's also sometimes I think you start to get into backlash territory where people are like, I'm so sick of this. And the voters, they tend to know which ads are about. So right now in Texas, Tallarico is running some very strong bio, like biography ads. That's a good way to spend money. Ken Paxton's running all of these like weird AI ads saying like, you know, Tallarico is a weirdo. At some point, voters start to say, I don't like – he doesn't have enough of a message. It's just all why this guy is bad. And it starts to have a little bit of a backlash.

1:17:52Obviously, money matters. But I do think that one of the things I'm seeing where I feel like Democrats have gotten the message in a couple places is they're going everywhere. They understand they have to show up places that they can't just spend money. And a bunch of people who've had more money than their opponents and have basically relied on that lost their primaries. Because what people want to know is, can you get to me organically? Do I hear you in a natural state, not just on the ads? Do I see you in person? Which, Tau Rico is all over Texas. Hard state to do that. Hard state, big state.

1:18:26And so I think the Democrats are making up for it with some much-needed elbow grease. So you and I share a concern that if there is a blue wave in November, Democrats may look at the results and think, we're awesome. The party's brand problem is mostly solved. We should feel great about 28. Why would that be the wrong takeaway, in your opinion? That's the absolute worst takeaway, in part because, look, Democrats now have a real structural advantage in midterms. You talk about this a lot. I talk about this a lot. Those college-educated suburban voters like me who ran out of the Republican Party as fast as we could when Donald Trump got there now make up a good chunk of midterm voters.

1:19:07They show up and vote. These are college-educated suburban voters. On the other side of that coin, though, is the non-college working-class voters and a multiracial working-class coalition. You know, Trump won with Hispanics, or a much higher proportion of Hispanics, a much higher proportion of black voters, much higher proportion of young voters. And I think once you get to a general election, the electorate just looks different. Like the median voter in a general election is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree. And so Democrats sort of have to grapple with this difference. And I think they're only starting to get their heads around how different it looks, midterm environment to general election environment.

1:19:45Well, let's talk 28 a bit. You write pretty directly in the book that Kamala Harris should not run again. Is that a judgment about her abilities, about the circumstances of 24, or about whether voters would ever be able to see her as something new? I think it's a little bit all of the above. The number one thing is there are just some things that are not changeable, that you sort of can't fix because they're who a person is. And the struggle for Kamala Harris, the thing that I heard from voters over and over again, was that they could hear, they could like see her wheels turning. They feel her calculations.

1:20:25And that is just, it's a non-starter. with voters. And so when they say, I don't know who she is, they don't believe that she's authentically who she is. And even if she shows back up now and is the authentic version of her, it will be contrasted with the several other versions of her that they have seen, and they will not trust it. They also, they found the way that that primary happened. It was not her fault. I think voters are too hard on her about a lot of this stuff, but they saw her as an anti-democratic actor that the way that she became the nominee and so i think that she is a non-starter with voters and um i wish that she had run for governor of california because i think she would have made a great governor and would have been a great foil for trump in the office yeah i also like i've been watching her uh few appearances she hasn't been out that much either which i think is challenging to then run again um but her few appearances that she's had since the race, it's not like much has changed in the way she talks and what her message is and what she has to say.

1:21:29You can tell there's a little bit now of like, you know, we need an outsider and there's too many insiders in Washington. But then again, to your earlier point, it sounds like she's saying that because someone was like, people want outsiders. They don't want an insider. It doesn't feel like it's genuine. And voters can smell this. Like they just are on to people. And, you know, I also write a lot in the book about the communications environment. All day long, people are staring at talkers like us and like everybody else, right? They know when we're telling the truth. They are used to now this sort of intimacy, this parasocial relationship that you have.

1:22:03And so they can tell when you are calculating your answer. They feel it in their bones. And that is how she does politics. It will not work in a 2028 run. It actually still works down ballot. You can be just sort of a boring or a straightforward politician who's got a good message. It just doesn't work at the presidential level. I think people have missed that last point because you get a lot of people saying like, well, we have Roy Cooper and we have Andy Beshear. We have all these. And I was like, well, it's different running for a statewide office, especially a governor, because you can show up in all these places and you can be good at constituent services and you can be there for people and people get to know you for a long time.

1:22:43And it's just a different environment on a national level. You've talked about being impressed by Ossoff, Buttigieg, AOC in terms of communication. What are they doing right in terms of effective communication, getting attention, showing the ability to potentially achieve narrative dominance over Republicans? Yeah, what I like right now is that, you know, while everybody else is having this interminable fight about more moderate versus more progressive, there are basically four, I see four incredibly good communications, rubrics, examples. But you've got Ossoff. Ossoff has his way of communicating.

1:23:25He was a documentary filmmaker. He gives – he writes his own speeches. He gives them at the podium. He has his shooting from behind. He's been lifting weights, hitting the gym, and he goes straightforwardly at Trump and provides a contrast and then he releases them to social media. That is his format. Pete Buttigieg's format is in person at the town halls and he goes to red places and he talks earnestly with people. And he's got ideas for how to fix things. He's got his little McKinsey brain on, right? And he's like, here are the things that we need to do to change politics. That's what Pete does.

1:23:59That's who Pete is. AOC, much more of sort of influencer, connective energy. She'll tell you about her personal life. She does all the straight to camera stuff. I love watching AOC kind of do her thing and grow up, but still understand how to match voters or go eye to eye with them. And then you've got Mamdani, who is somebody who any question you ask Mamdani, you sort of made this point last night, but this is, even if I think that his bespoke policies around how to lower prices might be sort of silly, I think his relentless focus on affordability is the way that everybody should be behaving.

1:24:35And I even say, look, Donald Trump talked about a wall, a wall that never really got built. Voters didn't care whether the wall got built. They cared that when he talked about immigration, it sounded like he meant it, right? He had an idea for immigration. He was going to take immigration seriously. The wall's just a stand-in for that. Maldani's particular policies are much less important than the fact that he is relentless about saying, I know the city is too expensive for you to live in because that's what people feel all the time. And so I think it's less about particular ideology and more about being able to communicate effectively with people in your own way that's authentic to you and to have a theory of the case about how you're going to talk to people.

1:25:13So I see a lot of good stuff happening. The other thing Mamdani does is when he pivots almost any question to affordability, he kind of does it with like a wink and a nod. Like he knows that this is the game, which I think is important because, you know, you can imagine a lot of Democrats hearing that and saying politicians hearing that and being like, well, I talk about affordability all the time. But the key is to talk about it in a way that is that you really believe it. It's genuine. But also like you get the game of politics. Like there's a little – Trump was good at that. Obama was good at that in their sense of humor.

1:25:46Like everyone knows that this is crazy, that what we do this. This whole thing is a circus. It's absurd. And if you have politicians who are like willing to kind of break that fourth wall to let everyone know like, you know, I know this is crazy too, that really helps. I mean, so I completely agree with this. And this is why when somebody says, OK, don't – you know, the Republicans are trying to set the terms of the debate somewhere insane that matters to so few people. They're like, we are going to focus relentlessly on trans sports. OK, that's what we're going to talk about. And I feel like a lot of Democrats have really struggled with how to get out of that format.

1:26:22They're like, oh, no. They like you see them panic. They're like deer in headlights. And you could see Momdani being like, do you know what trans sports reminds me of? The fact that you can't afford anything in New York. If you do that, it's actually not that hard. No, I know. Let's talk about Republicans. your book describes a fight between a MAGA establishment that wants power and an America First movement with its own beliefs and grievances do you think that split is durable? Will we see that in 28 or do you think it's like a current dynamic? I think the current dynamic is a reflection of how things are shaping up for 2028.

1:27:01I think there is a group of people who feel like they cannot defend Trump's record who don't want to have to defend Trump's record and who think that what he has done on the war and the fact that he has not tackled affordability makes Trump they're making a bet that Trump will not be as popular on the way out and that people are going to want like true America first has never been tried. And that is going to be Marjorie Taylor Greene. That is going to be Tucker Carlson because the war the war was a real breaking point on the right. There are a lot of people who said this is him breaking faith with us.

1:27:35They dealt with the Epstein files. They could deal with the affordability, but not the worst. They talked about it too much. America First was about not doing this stuff, focusing on problems here at home. And so I think that that wing of the party wants to mount a challenge. I think the MAGA establishment is where you get Trump having his thumb on the scale of who the nominee is, people feeling like, well, Trump has this dominant role in every presidential or every primary. And so whoever Trump wants, he'll get in this if he wants it to be Rubio, if he wants it to be J.D. Vance. I'm not sure entirely by that because, again, if things go well, Trump should be historically unpopular and what you want are all the candidates kind of running from him.

1:28:16How does Vance handle all this, do you think? First of all, it seems like he's trying to straddle the MAGA establishment because he has to because he's in it. And this America First group, Like you can tell he's – and to me it feels too cute by half, but I don't know. No, yeah. He thought he was going to straddle it. Like Vance was like I'm the one person that can hold these two coalitions together. I keep Vance or I keep Tucker in the tent and I can hold, you know, just the people who love Trump. He's in the sour spot. He's like falling through the middle and now he's down here by himself in this place where – and you know who's smart?

1:28:51Like Marco Rubio is just way more savvy about this stuff. Marco Rubio is staying so far as the he is the the person who is supposed to be doing the negotiations. He is the secretary of state. But Marco Rubio is like, I'm going to go to the wrestling match with Trump. And I'm going to let J.D. Vance like eat this shit sandwich of going to Iran and having the Iranians be like, yeah, no, we're not going to make a deal with you. Yeah. And every day that goes by, Vance is being put in a worse and worse position, one that he is not talented enough to work his way out of. What did you think of his convention speech?

1:29:24Well, I thought it was repellent. He is a repellent individual. He somehow manages to have all of Trump's sort of disgusting, like hateful rhetoric, but like none of the charmer talent. And I say this as somebody who finds Trump absolutely charmless, but you can feel the audience being like, you are a weak T version of Trump. Thanks, Taimou Trump, for all your thoughts. See, this is like I can't stand Vance, so I feel like biased in analyzing his political prospects. But I had the same reaction to the speech, although, you know, like Pfeiffer said, he's like, I could see reporters giving him some credit for that speech.

1:30:07And then, you know, sure enough, like Playbook had some item the next day where it was like within the party, people are really excited. We're excited by that J.D. Vance speech. No, they weren't. I don't believe that. I just don't believe it. Do you know, I wrote down, I was like, I texted, I was like, give me some of the most recent comments about Vance and the focus groups. And because they're, the Republican voters are pretty negative about him. And the women remember the childless cat ladies, like Republican women, young Republican women, they don't like him. But the quote was that we hear all the time, there's just something about him I don't like.

1:30:42And, you know, I actually saw with Seth Moulton, Seth Moulton, who I liked personally, But he got that treatment from the voters of like there's just something about him I don't like. And he lost to an 80-year-old by like 30 points. And I feel like J.D. Vance has very similar energy where I'm supposed to be the next generation. I'm here to tell you I'm the next generation. And voters just have sort of like he turns them off in a specific way. It's interesting, like, I have talked to some of the finance tech bro people who sort of went for Trump in 24, you know, maybe fans of Elon. And they will say sort of matter-of-factly now, J.D.

1:31:25Vance sucks. And we all think it's going to be Rubio. And then Rubio really has a shot at winning in 28. And I'm always like, I don't know what the path is for Marco Rubio in 2028. Like, can you figure out a path here? So I could see a path and the path is this. So first of all, Marco Rubio is weirdly being memed into a place right now where that meme where every bad job like Marco Rubio has got to be the head of Venezuela now is giving the Marco Rubio is the only competent person in this administration energy. energy, right? That's what voters are taking away from it. The other interesting thing is listening to young voters who do not remember pre-Trump Marco Rubio.

1:32:05They're like, you know, who's good? That Marco Rubio guy. And I'm like, well, I'll show you him from 2015 and you won't think so doing immigration reform. But I guess, so I tell a story in the book, right in the introduction about being backstage at the Dealbook Summit for the New York Times and Kevin McCarthy is there. And he's preening around they've just won the election. And one of the things he's talking about is how Trump is a turnout machine in ways that other Republicans just have never done. They do not have this juice. And he can't believe it. He's so excited by it. And I was sitting there thinking, what happens when he's gone, Kevin?

1:32:41Does Marco Rubio put out these kinds of like, does he turn people out in these rural areas at this rate? He doesn't. So I do think the The path for Marco Rubio, though, would be really people saying, like, I think the Democratic Party is too far left. Like, it would have to be a contrast where people say he seems normal relative to Trump, but the Dems are too far left. I was worried about a path for him in a primary. Like, I don't like if Vance runs, I can't imagine, which it seems like he's going to. I can't imagine Rubio also running. I can imagine Rubio, I can imagine them like forming a ticket early, perhaps.

1:33:18Yeah. But like I have a hard time imagining Rubio running against him unless Trump does something crazy like I really like Marco and I'm just going to let them fight it out. Yeah. Although, you know, as we when we handicap stuff like this, what always strikes me is that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance are together all the time. Right. They've got a plan. They are. They're handling this in some way. Like we can sit and handicap it, but it's not really going to work like that. Like if they're going to work it out in some way, probably with Trump, with Trump's kids. Like that orbit is pretty specific.

1:33:49And it feels like if J.D. Vance gets a challenge, it's from outside that orbit like Ted Cruz or some outsider. Someone exciting like Ted Cruz. Or some outsider. Like I don't feel like the Tucker thing is really going to happen, but I don't know. I mean, I think there will be a decent number of Republicans who run in part because there's pretty big pent up demand for trying to. An America first or somewhere. Yeah. Well, no, no, no. I don't mean I mean pent up demand for people who want to run, who've been, you know, basically like mogged by Trump now for over a decade. And they've been saying, you know, I want to have my time nationally.

1:34:30I think to me what's more interesting is not who runs. It's sort of what voters want in a post-Trump world because a big part of my theory of the case rests on this fact that Trump has changed the Republican Party to such a degree where it is this cult of personality. We all see it. Putting on the red hat is the ticket in to the coalition. When Trump is gone, it's not a party that has a policy platform. It's not a party that stands for something clearly. It's not a party that has stars outside of Trump or voters who are committed to those politicians and the way that they're committed to Trump.

1:35:02They don't have the same sunk cost. They haven't, you know, ended their relationships with their cousin over, you know, like it's just going to be a totally different environment. That's why if Democrats can get it together, like the book is about guys, historic generational opportunity to go on offense against a flatlining Republican party that stands for nothing, just a hollowed out nothing. Go get it. Pick it up and go get it. That's why we got to get Trump to that bush line. Got to get him below the bush line, man. How to Eat an Elephant. It's a fantastic book. Everyone go buy it. We don't want Ted Cruz beating you on the bestseller list.

1:35:34Yeah, or Victor Davis Hanson or some other weird Republican. Any of these fucking losers. So everyone, pod listeners, everyone go buy Sarah's book. It's fantastic. You won't regret it. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, John. It's great to be here. That's our show for today. Thanks to Sarah Longwell for coming on. Dan, Alex, and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Farrah Safari, with Ree Cherlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single.

1:36:04Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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