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Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled

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As Trump’s war of choice continues to expand in the Middle East, it’s clear that the president is desperate not to show how weak he really is. The administration is out of time and out of both strategic and rhetorical options in Iran. Another sign that he is flailing: Trump is trying to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press pool. But other TV outlets are pushing back in solidarity, forcing Trump to choose between two of his favorite things: punishing his critics and dominating the airwaves. Plus why the triumphal arch would be the silliest possible place for a military installation, Trump’s American Idol-style vote on what to call AI, and the unaddressed, ongoing education crisis.

Sitting in for Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger joins Tim Miller on the Monday pod.
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Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled

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The Bulwark Podcast — Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background Play. So you can lock your phone and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. How eligibility varies? Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Your So-Kahonda Dealers are honored to help the community. Our program started the first deaf and hard of hearing football team of its kind in our league. The helpful So-Kahonda Dealers surprised us with brand new uniforms and giving our athletes more than just jerseys, a community investing in their program. And we want to help you too, with 1.99% APR on a 2026 Rigline for well-qualified buyers. Take your So-Kahonda Dealers. Make their contract limited. Must finance. We're honoured financial services. Non-obniers will qualify. Take delivery by 11. 226. Hello, I'm loving the baller daily.

I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday. It is Yam Kappur. So Bill Crystal is off. We have his younger, handsomeer Christian Gentile replacement on the morning shots newsletter in this morning. Great replacement. It's having all over. It's having all over. Also, quasi-white house correspondent. Most importantly, author of the morning shots newsletter, it's Andrew Agar. What's up buddy? Hey Tim, I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing pretty good. I'm going to talk about my weekend on tomorrow's podcast. So we're doing as good as we can. We're going to talk about the chiefs playing overtime game on Sunday night football into Yam Kappur, where I'm the Bill Crystal replacement writing morning shots by myself coming on the pod with you. It's a lot. It is definitely a Monday. Okay. Here we go. Let's get into news of Warren Peace and the state and the economy.

We've got so much to talk about today. I was mostly struck by the spin coming out of the right white house this weekend. I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift as we get into the home stretch here of the midterms about kind of how to handle the rising prices, particularly at the pump. Kevin Haset is the gift that keeps on giving the White House economic advisor. He was on Fox. You wouldn't think that you'd struggle with your talking points on Fox with Peter Ducy. But I think it shows you how dire of straights therein that Haset couldn't handle that. Let's watch him and Peter together. This is down like a rocket ship in reverse when well, one of the things you've seen first of all is that how I guess out of control the Iranians and now the hoodies are. And again, this whole thing started because the Iranians told us like we don't have to talk to you anymore because we're two weeks from having a clear weapon. And you see that there's like shooting ships like crazy in the straits and everything

the president had to act. We don't play Trump's the way son here, but the lead in was Peter playing Trump over the weekend talking about how you know, it's we have to pay a little bit higher prices because what we're doing with an Iran, it's totally worth it. But as soon as we resolve this, they're going to go down like a rocket ship. He also bleeding over the weekend gas prices were higher under Biden and under Trump all caps. So we're almost all other prices and Haset's going, what are we going to do? These crazy Iranians, the crazy hoodies. What are we going to do? How do you how do you feel that's going to land? I think that first and foremost, they need to revisit this image of a rocket ship in reverse. Typically a rocket ship that is like pointing downward is not something that anybody actually wants is not going to go well for anyone. But I do think that I do think that like the fellow 13 vibe. Yeah, exactly. Or one of one of Elon's sort of like misfires, right? We have seen so much hope for so long among these guys that like some way somehow Donald Trump is going to land this plane of the Iran war such that even if prices have not

recovered at the very least, they'll be able to spike the football on that. They'll be able to say, you know, mission accomplished and we're heading in the right direction and you just need to have a little bit more patience until we kind of get back on the economic trajectory Iran before, which was not that good of an economic trajectory either by the way. But you know, that is the argument they have wanted to make and they've been dying to make for months and months. And I think what we are seeing right now is that they are finally waking up to the fact that they are out of time. There's no more room for this to happen. In fact, the conflict is moving the opposite direction, right? I mean, the conflict is metastasizing. It's getting worse. The supply shock, the energy shock with the Red Sea now also being a hot combat zone that the president is trying to figure out whether or not to get involved with, you know, no arrows are pointing in the right direction. No arrows seem likely to be pointing in the right direction ahead of the midterms. And so they're just kind of stuck. Instead of getting this pivot that they have desperately wanted, that the president has desperately wanted. The only card that they have left to play is this, well, you know, if you squint, you got to trust that the president is doing these things for the right reasons.

And you know, look on the bright side, there have been worse economic times in world history, you know, back in the day we didn't even have, you know, fossil fuels at all to be mad about the price of them going up, you know, that kind of thing. So like, so it's really, really dire. And they have to go on the shows. They have to keep talking about it. They have to keep saying something. Do they? Do they? I don't know. The idea that it's like, oh, it's the crazy hooties. Look, you are a young man after 9-11. So I'll have a more clear memory of this. But it'd be one thing, you know, if this was George W. Bush going into the 2006 midterm, when like an attack on the country was fresh in everybody's memory. And it's like, guys, you know, that we've had this energy shock by this little hive, or one the right path. We have the surge. That didn't really work for him in 2006. So we've discussed, but like, that's at least you're trying to offer, you know, something that resonates with some people. Who in the country is this for? This idea that it's like, oh, the Iranians and the hooties are crazy. And you know, I mean, they weren't even going to negotiate. It was like, there were two weeks away from a bomb.

And it's like, literally, who believes this besides people that are just deep, deep, deep in the cult and just are like not willing to even contemplate the idea that Chairman Trump could do anything wrong. I got, you know, I mean, we've talked about this before, even like people in our lives, like who are Maggard, listen to the focus groups. It's like, nobody thought this was a real threat. You know, and so like now to fall back on that, be like, you know, the pain that you're feeling right now with these prices, it's really the fault of these crazy Iranians and the caves who are going to nuke us any minute. Like, it's just, it doesn't pass the smell tests or even close. To me, the resetta stone, maybe of this entire war is just remembering that never in a million years, did Donald Trump think that this was going to be and become the defining crisis of his second term, right? If coming out of year one, he didn't mention it was going to be the same. Yeah, he thought this was going to be exactly the same sort of thing as bombing the boats

off the coast of Venezuela or, you know, kidnapping the president of Venezuela or going and attacking Iran's nuclear program. It's like just keeping up this drum beat of USA flexes its muscles around the world and beats up some bad guys. It has a way of just kind of keeping the base, you know, Jonesed up and patriotic while he pursued the agenda, he really cares about it at home, right, which is going after the domestic enemies and the immigration stuff and all of these sorts of things. And instead, because Iran did not immediately buckle like he expected it to, he's just, I mean, he's been stuck since February, he's been stuck since like the first week of March with no way out of this thing. And it just keeps getting worse, it keeps deteriorating further, and there's no off-ramp for it. And so like, like I was saying before, like, that is why they're just left with this unbelievably paltry bag of like plausible arguments they can go out there and make. And they just have to keep their fingers crossed that like tomorrow Iran will buckle when Iran hasn't buckled so far. And then again, they're still at the end. I know we have the opposites. I mean, yeah, they're on the prime minister of the weekend saying, you know, we're not going to change until all of our demands are met.

And then you have on the other side, as you mentioned, you know, the Houthis are continuing to expand attacks on Saudi Arabia and in the Red Sea. This is what's going to happen last week, because for the NDR times, on Thursday of last week, we discussed this a little bit. Trump had decided to strike through the targets and like engage in that expanded theater of the war that he started. That was after MBS called him and urged him to step in. But by Sunday, he changed his mind and decided not to do that. We had approved target lists. Troops were loading bombs onto US warplanes and Trump was like, eh, nah, I don't want to get involved. So the thing is expanding, not contracting. If you're MBS, you're like, man, what is $2 billion buy a guy? Not even a couple of bombs anymore. Yeah, it really is. I mean, they are so far up a creek on this stuff. It is amazing. And like, it's not going to get better. It's not going to get better. We're setting new records in like diesel prices, basically every single day now.

I mean, it's just, it's astonishing how completely hosed they are in terms of just like any strategic or even like rhetorical options for selling people on this anymore. Just for fun, because there is worse spin out there than Kevin has. It's just like to do a little bit of shot and Freud just, you know, a little treat for all of us on a Monday morning. I was looking through a collection of posts by MAGA influencers talking about this topic. Is there kind of working around how to do it? There is Hunter Eagleman related to Gunther Eagleman. They're very popular. Hunter was talking about how people are walking around with $2,000 foldable phones, $800 shoes and a $14 pumpkin spice latte. Who's paying 14 bucks for a pumpkin spice latte? And then they're saying they can't vote for Trump because of gas prices, whatever. Phil Mitchell, like the OG Trump influencer, people complain about being broke as they watch one of their three flat screen TVs or decide which of their two cars they want to drive. To buy their overpriced Starbucks coffee. And then this is the best one that you find from this morning. I guess a memo went out.

And there were several people that posted the same, extremely long essay, too long to read all of, but I'm going to read just a little bit for people. These are a series of MAGA influencers all posting the same thing. I keep hearing people complain that gasoline is over $4 a gallon. And yes, I'd love to see it at $2 a gallon again. But before we declare gasoline, the most outrageously expensive liquid on earth, let's put things in perspective for $4. I get a gallon of gasoline all caps. I poured into a $4,000 machine, turn a key in that gallon will haul me my wife, the groceries, the golf clubs, and half the junk in my trunk almost 30 miles down the highway. That's pretty impressive days work for four bucks. Now let's compare. That's correct. A restaurant that sells me five ounce glass of wine for $9. That's about $230 a gallon. How far does that transport me just from the dinner table to the men's room? I want those little two ounce bottles of energy shots at the gas station. That's $192 a gallon. At that price, it shouldn't give me energy. It should mow my lawn.

Vanilla extra, $6 for two ounces. That's $384 a gallon. For $384, I expect the vanilla being to come to my house and take the cookies, goes on and on. Take me, Libs. Total victory. There. I'm sure that there are a lot of people reading that going, you know what? That's true. That's true. I am paying too much from I have vanilla extract. Yeah. I mean, like, obviously, this is just stupid on its face. They're grasping their ridiculous. These are crazy people. It's very funny that like nine people posted this, you know, pretty much verbatim with like little tweaks here and there. But also, all that other stuff gets more expensive too when the price of gas goes up. The entire economy runs on the price of gas and diesel. That's like the biggest part of the problem beyond just what you pay at the pump. You know, that stuff has to get to the grocery store. It has to like pay to transport everything around. You don't want to monkey with the cost of energy when you are trying to get inflation under control. That's just one of the very basic problems about this war, which again has been one of

the basic problems we've now been talking about for like what, seven months since early March, since the straight up where moves became a problem in the first place. And like, they weren't making this argument back in March. And the reason they weren't making this argument back in March is because they thought they were going to have better ones to make. And all those better ones have been systematically squashed by events since then. And this is what they're left with. And it is kind of amazing. You're right, Andrew. We have been talking about this for seven months. Let's move on just to a new item in the news. The war abroad is moving back home. We also have to prepare ourselves for attacks on the homeland, particularly our nation's capital. And Donald Trump made a pronouncement this weekend about the proposed glorious arch that is going to go above Arlington Bridge. He wrote this at the strong request of the United States military and for national security purposes. I've agreed to convert the magnificent triumphant arch plans since the Civil War era many years ago at the receptive circle into a top grade military complex slash triumphant

to house store and have the rapid ability to use large number of drones plus snipers both on the roof and plaza areas and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There'll be no facility like this anywhere in the world. I don't quite understand why we need a big arch with snipers on it. And it is for people who haven't spent any time at DC, like the memorial bridge goes from the Arlington cemetery to the Lincoln memorial. So we already have a memorial there with a high roof where we could put snipers if we needed snipers. It's also quite near to the pentagon, which I would assume has very good sniper ammunition storage possibilities. I don't know why we need to put it inside the triumphant arch, but maybe there's another reason he might be doing this. Andrew, what do you think? Yeah, so this is one of those ones where you almost have to be familiar with the layout of DC to really understand how insane this is. Like if you live in Northern Virginia like I do, this circle that is right in front of

of Arlington National Cemetery, as you say, it's a big giant traffic circle. It's important. It is a part of basically everybody's commute who's coming in from Northern Virginia into DC. The idea that first of all that you would put anything in the middle of there other than just like something decorative, the idea that a military installation, it's like the silliest possible place that you could imagine to put a military installation that in theory would need checkpoints and security. And like you can't imagine that continuing to serve. It's very crucial current traffic related role under these circumstances at all. But as you say, there is a secondary explanation here. It's exactly the same reason why the president started talking about how important the drone port on the roof of his east wing ballroom was going to be, even though what he really cares about is the ballroom, what he really cares about is the arch. He believes or he has been told or he thinks he has this one weird trick to prevent the courts from snaring up, from monkeying with his plans to unilaterally build all this stuff without any congressional approval.

He thinks that the courts will give him a lot more deference if he claims that there is a national security rationale for this. And it's not just beautification, it's not just a memorial. He thinks that they are going to steer much clearer of the executives' authorities in terms of shoring up America's national security. And again, he has done that now both places, even though it is obviously nakedly protective. There is zero reason why national security or military security or even just any sane purpose would be served by putting a bunch of snipers up on a roof. Some sniper and the nation watch on everybody's commute. Yeah, it's really, really, really crazy. But that is the thought process here, such as it is. I do wonder, I kind of as an academic exercise, if it wasn't representative of the fall of our republic and this idioticist, aristocracy, I'm kind of curious how it would play out in the courts. Because it's free textual in both cases.

You can imagine a legitimate argument for why the White House would need additional security. I mean, we're a quarter century after 9-11, but there was a potential attack there at the White House. I mean, it's the same category, but like there's a difference in how preposterous the argument needs to be in between the ballroom also being a military installation and having to put like bullets inside of the arch. And it's like there's a million places in DC where you can have sniper storage. Like there's no, there's obviously no need for this. And you do wonder how that would go through. This is an incredibly congested airspace for traffic, you know, passenger planes coming into and leaving DCA, which is also just snuggled right up there on the Virginia side of the river. There was very famously, infamously, that crash that happened, you know, just a year ago where it was a military helicopter that collided with a passenger jet. The idea that we are now going to treat that exact corridor as a launching point for drones

is crazy. I mean, it's just not going to happen. It's never going to happen. There's no point for it to happen there. But again, the president wants the arch there. And so the post-talk military explanation needs to come into. I went out to GW. My apartment was right there senior year. It was great. We could sit on the back, you know, balcony, occasionally with a marijuana cigarette and you'd watch the planes come in. And it was just constant, like a constant, you know, plane traffic coming in right there. So I don't think, I don't think it's going to happen. JVL's not take as he wants Trump to tear down the Kennedy Center. I'm not there, but there is something about it would be nice for Trump to do some structural damage to the Kennedy Center so that we can just move forward with tearing down the triumph floor, which without any concern. Because I do think that they're going to build it, don't you? They do seem to be trying very hard to move toward building it. They don't seem to think that their case is bulletproof. Their legal case really Trump has continued to say, we're going to do the groundbreaking. It's right around the corner.

And then when they file documents in the court, they're like, don't worry, judge. This is just, you know, some, some like pre, pre, pre, pre construction survey work that we're doing. It is not at all clear that he has nearly as much authority to do this as he did to do the East Wing. So I do still think that there's a chance that this really does get bottled up in the courts. That said, if they do put it up, it will be fun to tear it down and they should do that absolutely immediately, no matter what happens to the Kennedy Center, which I do hope survives. It's easy for JVL to say, you know, he's, he's off and he's off. I'm off in New York now. I want to take my kids to the Kennedy Center, you know, they should keep that one up in my view. That's a good point. This might be a job for like the no kings, people and our listeners, you know, it's kind of like the old days, remember when the hippies used to kind of like create circles and stand around trees. So like the businesses couldn't tear down the trees. Maybe we're just going to need that like a permanent running human chain, which will also be really great for traffic. They're on the circle so good. Good luck with that. It's just an idea. I'm just spitballing. And now a message from our sponsor, the reading room, as of this week, Todd Blanch has

been Trump's attorney general for over a month and the full Epstein files. Well, they're still in that public. You know that. So instead of waiting on the government to stop its cover up, the Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial reading room is printed out three and a half million pages that the DOJ has released and built a free travel exhibit that puts the files on display. It's a museum you can actually walk through to see the scale of the release files, the timeline of Trump and Epstein's relationship and attribute to the survivors. It's open now in Des Moines. What's up to all my pals in Des Moines and then heads out across the country for 20 plus stops in the next eight weeks. You won't be surprised to hear the moving 70,000 pounds of evidence and the bookshelves needed to hold it across the country, ain't cheap and the reading room runs entirely on donation. So if this is something you want more people to see, you can learn more and ship in to fund the tour at TrumpEbstineReadingRume.com slash Bol work or check out our morning shots newsletter. The other big news of the weekend, Donald Trump decided to ban three outlets from the White House press corps, Politico CNN and MSNOW. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the brains behind this was none other than Natalie

Harp, the human printer, Mashnote writer. The general reports this, Trump's frustrations with the press reached a fever pitch on Friday when one of his closest Asian Natalie Harp showed him clips of anchors on MSNOW criticizing his administration. According to people familiar with the matter, hours later, Trump banned the network and two other news organizations from the White House reporters that go to the White House press briefings, reporters that are part of the pool that covers Trump and his events. They had their key cards revoked basically blocks that could not get into the facility. This morning, the other TV networks in solidarity with CNN and MSNOW said that they won't be providing video footage for Trump's pool events. That brings us to a head somewhat, though, maybe he'll just make OAN and Newsmax the permanent TV video poolers. We'll see how that goes. What do you make of all this? That is essentially the move that Pete Hegseth went with when he pulled a similar stunt at the Pentagon last year.

He basically said, we're just getting rid of all normal press. It's just going to be the podcasters and the right wing sites from now on in the press pool. I do not think that Donald Trump will consider that a durable solution that he likes. I think that in fact, if this embargo proceeds, and there's reason to think that it will, that the TV pool in particular refuses to carry his events for as long as he keeps this up, I think he could very well blink. I do not think that Trump wants to be the kind of guy you can only find on one American news and Breitbart.com. I think that he likes the adulation he gets from those places, but he wants to be McDonald's. He wants to be Coca-Cola. He wants to be everywhere. He gets very upset when the news networks do not cover his rallies, his speeches, these sorts of things. In primetime, just broadcast out there on his shows. He is a TV media guy. He is a mass media guy. He sees it as important. Who knows exactly the way this will shake out? He is so far off of his ordinary moves in so many different ways here.

He's taking more erratic steps than he's taken before and across a whole bunch of different things. Maybe now is different. Maybe he does dig in his heels and just in a total fit of peak says, fuck you, everybody. I'm just going to ban more people. I'm going to keep throwing out more and more and more outlets. I really do think that he is likely to be rattled by the different organizations of the White House Corresponds Association linking arms around these people, but he has unconstitutionally thrown out of the pool. We may see a resolution on account of that. He's definitely rattled. It's just like, MS now was mean to me. Now I'm going to start banning people. Trump had a lot of hubris in the first year. There was a lot of football spiking, a lot of confidence. This is not the action of somebody who's confident. Trump wants would then call on us now into the White House and be right them and say, call the reporter a piggy or whatever. You know what I mean? Not just say that's a bet, but I just think that I can analyze and Trump, like this is

a move of somebody that is frustrated with the state of Plot. And just totally flailing, right? I mean, like Donald, MS now viewers are not the people you need to worry about in the upcoming midterms. They are lost to you. They have not been Trump voters ever since you had any points. You came down the escalator. MSNBC now, MS now viewers were not Trump people. You have a lot more to worry about when it comes to Fox News viewers and Joe Rogan experienced listeners and people who turn on their local, you know, Sinclair affiliate. Like these are the people in the middle who are just tuning out from the Trump show in droves. And I think that you should not accelerate their trip away from you by cutting off your last access to them. What do I know? I like when you call Donald, it's very dismissive. I like when you can address them. I don't know. Yeah, that's kind of weird. I don't usually do that kind of thing. That's Donald, you're rattle like a George Conway. Yeah. I don't know. The laws are closing in on you. Donald, you're rattleed right now.

Donald, you're showing no confidence. This true. Here's kind of the depressing part of this for me though. Some of these things are unfixable. We talk about this sometimes from time to time. Like, you know, that having him go back in the second time, you know, created a change in the way that business is done that I think is going to be hard to unravel across a bunch of different verticals. But in this case, I just think we've permanently moved to more partisan press being around the president in both parties. I mean, I saw Mediasan posting over the weekend about how the next Democrat should kick Fox out of the pool. It's interesting that head of the White House Correspondent Association right now, Jackie Yandrick is a Fox reporter. So that's kind of an interesting pickle that she's in because she knows that depending on who the Democratic president is, there would be pressure to come for Fox in a future term and their access. And they've been leading the charge on this, by the way. I mean, it's the Fox, Fox News is currently, you know, helming the TV pool and they are the ones who led the decision to say we're not going to cover Trump's events while CNN

and MSNOW and Politico have been kicked out. So it's interesting from that point of view as well. Yeah, for sure. So maybe I'm wrong about this. But I just worry that like, you know, we've already seen this at the Pentagon, people get used to it. Like we have these crazy pools now with Trump where people ask like dear leader style questions, you know, it's just like we've moved to something that is more like what you see in soft authoritarian and hard authoritarian countries in the way that the press covers the president and to kind of mix, but like there's been this gradual move to having more propaganda press around. I don't know like who is going to be the person that tries to pull it back, especially if you think that the other side will just go back to the Trump precedent as soon as possible. I can already imagine the, you know, the stupid circular arguments in the future when someone, you know, whatever president J.B. Pritzker says, I'm not going to have Breitbart in the White House. It's like, well, what the hell is that different than Trump kicking out MSNOW, you know, and

so I don't know how you unravel that. Am I too pessimistic about that? Do you think? On this specific side of things, on the cutting people's access outside, I think we are unlikely to see other people follow the same strategy as Trump, at least in the near term. I mean, this is already kind of blowing up in his face a little bit in the same way that it would sort of blow up for anybody's, for anybody because it lets all these net other networks, you know, sort of link arms and solidarity and, and, and refuse to give the president what he wants. And what we are likely to see a lot more of is the stuff we've been seeing all along, where you just, you add more and more just sort of like silly, grotesquely partisan elements to the pool, to the, to the press rotation, all these sorts of things. You prioritize them in briefings. You let them, you know, you give them priority access because they're going to give you the, the, the best gloss and because the, the sort of big independent hitters just don't have the power that they used to punish you for that and make you look silly for that. And I think that is likely to be a bipartisan problem, you know, for as long as the current

sort of media structures and incentives persist. But I, I do think, I mean, depending how this one shakes out, I think there's a chance that, that Trump ends up feeling stung by this and that future president see this particular thing, you know, making martyrs of some of these institutions instead of just letting them sort of slip into further relevance and inside the pool. I think that might be a, a decision that they realize was foolish for the president to go down now. I don't know. You just kind of see this from the top down now, like just a lack of, there's kind of no incentive for politicians to deal with just regular mainstream media or adversarial media anymore. And, you know, influencers mixed in with the press pool and a lot of this is kind of naval gazing stuff and sometimes like a cringel a bit when the, when media members are like, it's not like the old days with our W apple from the New York Times going by and the boys on the bus. And so there is some like eye rolling part of this, but I just, I don't know. I mean, the, a lot of the attention on both sides has now moved to much more partisan media

and, and it's kind of like, okay, well, why should, you know, it's about the asymmetry that we talk about, like the Democrats start to be like, why should we put ourselves in situations where we're dealing with challenging media when these guys just have like North Korea and scribes covering them constantly. And I, I think it's a problem that's going to, it's tough to untangle. All right, guess who our next sponsor is? I'll give you a hint. Yeah. They won't need a meow. They literally, they're asking me on the script to meow. Meow, meow. We can use that on a blipper reel or something at the end of the year. Meow. My cat is meowing. I bet a lot of you out there are just wondering for cat updates because we are the saga related to our sponsor, smalls. We're going to get to smalls in a second. We had a saga related to smalls for years now, where we had a neighborhood cat, a retha, that we were kind of taking care of, particularly after the weird Northern snow storm. And then I got bullied into getting an actual cat.

Slinky is now in the house with us. And the latest is things are going pretty good. Slinky is pretty codependent with my husband, though, I would say. And he was going this weekend. And so I was stuck with them. It's okay. We're doing our best. You know, me and Slinky are still kind of checking each other out. By the end of the weekend, he comes to getting pets from me because I just think he was in need of a human touch and I was the best option available because, you know, him and I daughter have more of a child cat, like kind of cat and mouse play vibe than they do. A calm petting vibe, as you might have mentioned. So he came to me and one thing that I think I did to, you know, start to bring a thaw into the relationship to make Slinky like me better is feed them the great food from smalls. They make fresh human grade food for cats. It's made from the same stuff you or I would eat, but formerly it's specifically to help the cats thrive. Cats are carnivores and need lots of real meat to stay healthy, but most cat foods out there use meat by products and cut their food with cheap grains, fillers and artificial

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Your newsletter this morning is on artificial intelligence, Trump's AI hubris. You talk about all the ways where you think that Trump's position on AI is going to hurt him politically and he doesn't see it coming. Why don't you just give us the big picture pitch and then we'll kind of go to the various elements of it. Donald Trump has carried himself as a pro AI president. Basically, since his second inauguration, he's much closer to tech. Alligarchs of various stripes than he was in his first term. He's laid out this regulatory framework where he does not want states to be himming in or fencing in AI in various different ways. It certainly does want the federal government doing that. This has been a very secondary or even tertiary political issue for a lot of his term so far. A lot of it has been this secondary issue of data centers, then whether they should be constructed, whether they have these environmental impacts. Trump has been very pro-dates in our construction. Just in the last couple of weeks, as we have turned as a nation or at least as a commentary

it into this conversation that a lot of these AI people have been having all along about like, wait a minute, what if the robots, what if it's not a bubble, what if in fact they're too good, what if they're too smart, what if they're going to start getting smarter too fast and start being able to do too many things too well and get hard to control. There has been a lot of new energy around that conversation, especially after at least one high profile exodus from Anthropic, a safety researcher who quit and sounded the alarm. We've talked about all of that. Bernie Sanders, a lot of these guys have been using the opportunity to vlog their own packages to say, slow down AI development. Let's put a ban, a permanent ban on super intelligent AI. We do not want these things to ever get smarter than us. No matter how possible that is, we want to just say, let's not go there. One has taken a completely different tack on all of this. I have even been surprised. When he posted last month, you should let people build data centers in all your communities and he said, let data rain. I thought that was a funny way to put it, but it's actually turning out to be the thesis

statement of his entire AI build out. He says he had a post over the weekend where he seems to think that the problem for AI is just bad branding. He doesn't like the term artificial intelligence. He thinks we should call it superior intelligence or perhaps supreme. Let's pause on that for a second. I think it's pretty interesting because it shows you where he's at right now. It's like he's not reflecting at all on whether going full speed ahead on AI is bad politics for him. He's bought in on that, as you say. As Trump wants, he thinks, well, maybe this is just a branding issue. Maybe I just need to get a new hat, get some new words that people can resonate with. He posts first and he starts with a poll offering three options for renaming for his followers on Truth Social. He offers supreme intelligence, superior intelligence and extreme intelligence. He did a follow-up lead. See what you want about the guy? This is how to do content engagement strategies.

The follow-up lead read this, supreme intelligence, probably because of its relationship to the Supreme Court is losing badly to both superior and extreme intelligence. Therefore, we're going to take supreme intelligence out, deleting it as a qualifier, and let you vote for the final two, superior intelligence or extreme intelligence. A fresh vote begins now. Isn't that just such a beautiful little window into this singular mind that we all have to pay so much attention to now? He brings up the possibility, what if we build this machine and it's called supreme intelligence and we let it run everything from now on? But don't worry because I will be president and I will keep it under control. That's the future that I'm promising. And we'll decide how to name it using an American Idol style. Yeah, yeah. That's the time. We'll fully reality show. When people are like, actually, that sounds terrible. I don't like that at all. It would suck a lot to live under Donald Trump's joint rulership with supreme intelligence.

The place his mind jumps to just by complete sort of like broken brain word association is they must not like that one so much because it makes them think of the Supreme Court which has been so mean to me this year. I mean, it's like, he's a maniac. He's a lunatic, but he actually does have a lot of control over all of these different policy things. And he's not farming it out to the people whose brains work, whatever their other deficiencies to have like come up and flourish and thrived in Trump land. He is just word associating his way to policy about these extremely consequential things. And he is all for our new robot overlords. He thinks that's going to be great. Superior intelligence, an extreme and extreme. These do feel like words like that something they would come up with in a kind of a low rent futuristic dystopia sci fi movie, maybe even kind of like a spoof movie. Right? I go there not even serious like a space balls movie about dystopia.

They come up with this. But Trump is like, yeah, people love that. Extreme. And if we just change it from AI to EI, then all of the other problems are people are concerned about the probability of doom or losing their jobs. So the fact that their kids won't be able to read or they won't be able to know the difference between truth and fiction. Like all of those concerns will wash away once it's just called extreme intelligence. It's got electrolytes. You pointed out a poll that I hadn't seen. The gap when it comes to like what people's priorities are on AI development versus whether they want to prioritize safety or rapid innovation was 76 to 12 that wanted to prioritize safety. The pollsters I think are still just trying to figure out how to phrase these questions to get at people's real opinions because it is confusing. A lot of people don't really understand it. And people have mixed views about various things. And so you see something like there was that one poll like last week or something where it was like, could you trust more the Republicans or the Democrats?

Everybody's like shrug, you know? But I think so this gets added a much more clearly, which is like, do you want policies to prioritize safety or development? And just a total blowout on the safety side of things. And Trump is on the 12 percent side. Yeah, it's a really well tuned question because it actually does get at the current political split on this. Like this issue is so much in its infancy. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of further sorting and further different politicians of different parties staking out different territory here. But right now, the two main political polls for this issue are Bernie Sanders on the one side saying, stop development. You know, give us a moratorium on further improvements of these models for a while. And also a hard cap of we can never let them be smarter than us. Now you can, you can quibble with a bunch of different things about that proposal. I would quibble with a bunch of different things about that proposal.

But that's one poll here. The other poll is Donald Trump, who says, let it rip. It's going to be great. We have to beat China. And you don't have to worry about any of this stuff because I'm in charge and no super intelligent AI would dare cross me while I'm president. I mean, that's basically the case that he is making. Right. And if those are the two political polls, the public is dramatically in favor of the Bernie side rather than the Trump side because they say safety is more important in this moment than innovation is. And the whole Trump argument is based on we have to innovate absolutely as fast as human ly possible because otherwise China will leave us in the dust. I love your sentence describing Trump's economic views. Contrary, like depending on the topic, sometimes I'm railing against Trump for him acting like a communist or a socialist in the way that he handles the economy and then there are other times it's like total laissez faire capital. And you summed it up this way. Trump's view as let business leaders do whatever they want. So long as they're willing to bend the need personally to me. I'm like, that's basically it. And these guys have bent the need personally to him, unlike whatever Disney or CBS when

they didn't want to change the way they edited a television program. And so these guys get to do whatever they want. When it comes to AI specifically, the weird wrinkle here is that Trump, he is very close to the tech industry, but he is not close to these actual leading AI labs. He does not trust the guys who run open AI. He does not trust the guys who run anthropic. He thinks they're a bunch of liberal wacko egg heads who maybe have this psychosexual fetish thing for their own AI chatbots. He does not like Dario or Sam Altman at all. The people that he talks to are the people who are the big investors in the AI build out. It's the David Sacks of the world. And Jensen, the people that are building the plants, because that's another thing that he cares about, so the chip makers, the manufacturers. And so these are all the people who are heavily incentivized to whatever, even though the labs themselves are now kind of like sounding the alarm, like these chatbots are getting kind of freaking out of control and scary. And we're having second thoughts about how fast we're developing them.

It's all the people who are invested in the build out more than the chatbots themselves where they're like, wait a minute, we can't stop now. We can't slow things down now. We've got a trillion dollars in CapEx tied up in keeping the pedal push all the way down to the floor. And those are the people who are intrumsier on all of this stuff. More than either the people, the populist types who are like, we don't like this, or even the people who are in the biggest position to know who are actually developing these advanced AI's in the labs. The opportunity for Democrats to get into this here, I saw a story over the weekend where they were some Democrats of consultants, basically advising Democrats of candidates, like not to lean in on this. The AI guys have so much money, they'll dump a bunch of money into your race. It's just not worth it. Like keep your head down, focus on kitchen table issues to me. That's like classic, terrible, cautious consultant advice. I would say that. But you keep mentioning Bernie. On data centers, we've seen some Democrats lean in. I think I saw somebody in Ohio who was like, all of shared browns ads, basically, are

about the data center build out and how we need to slow it down. So you've seen some of that. Democrats have been pretty cautious overall on kind of wanting to take an AI safety, like an aggressive AI safety position into the campaign. And it seems like you think that's a mistake. Yeah, and I don't want to give people the wrong idea. I mean, it's a target rich environment, right? I mean, this guy has a lot of weaknesses. He is taking on water at every level, basically. And I do think that there's an argument to be made that some of this stuff is so sci-fi and flecked that when it comes to the midterms in particular, Democrats are better off with focusing on some of the stuff that's hitting people more directly, harder, closer to home. I do think, though, that as we're looking ahead to 2028, this issue is going to be more and more and more and more salient. And whether Democrats are really able to slam the door on Republicans over some of this stuff, while also, by the way, hopefully rolling out a policy package that lets us keep

some of the good things about AI, right? I mean, it's not necessarily the case that just slamming the door on this industry is a good thing for the country, for the world. I mean, there are a lot of unknown unknowns here. And I think that, but I do think that the position that Trump is taking out is so extreme. And so far out over his skis, it's so completely disconnected from where any real people actually are on this, that he has given Democrats an enormous opportunity to carve out more and more space going forward because this, the super intelligence stuff, that's only going to get more salient. Like it's only the possible future risk of this that has people so freaked out right now. There's a very plausible pathway to that becoming a realistic, like, present tense problem for politicians to have to deal with before, you know, we're even nominating people in the primaries for 2028. So it's only going to get more fraught. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you already know how much I love Souls out of office THC beverages. Definitely needed one of those watching the football game on Saturday.

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The same Democrat has taken out, staked out a kind of serious sober minded, be center left position on this. So it would be encounter to Donald Trump. He's not up for an election this year and I don't think he's eligible anymore. You might have heard of him. Barack H. Obama, let's listen to him. The models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace, at an exponential pace. What are the risks of that? Because the big science fiction risk of these models get smarter than us and they decide humans are fine but not necessary. They start setting their own goals and we, the killer robots, kill us. Or we bow down to them. I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk but I will say there is a non-zero

risk, a non-zero chance of that happening. But that's not actually the risk that I'm most concerned about although it's the risk that gets most attention. And the reason that's a risk is not because the computer models are conscious necessarily. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily feel malice towards humans. It's just that if they start setting their own agendas, they, you may get a misalignment between what they want to do and what we want them to do and that gap can be dangerous. That's problem number one. The more serious problem is these models are getting powerful enough that if they get in the hands of bad humans, they can do bad things. They can be weaponized in certain ways.

They can do a lot of mischief. I guess he is the benefit, right? Of not being in the middle of a campaign. Sometimes when it's in a campaign, that doesn't really serve you to talk about the potential worst case scenarios and cashock or thinking in real time. On the other hand, I think that there are a lot of people who care about this stuff right now. They're looking for somebody that is offering some kind of comfort and security about what would be a smart way to move forward might be a model for some 2028ers. I don't know. What do you think about Obama? Yeah. It's not a super high bar to clear to read the articles, to read six or seven articles about where we're at. I mean, the way you and I have been have been belatedly getting up to speed on a lot of the AI safety stuff that people have been talking about for a while. But you would much rather have that. You'd much rather have a guy who is able to converse on it at a very basic level than what we have now.

I mean, it's just crazy. It's crazy that the level of policy work that is happening on this issue at this moment where we're not at superintelligence. But we are at this moment where maybe if we take three or four more steps forward, we'll be stepping onto a treadmill toward superintelligence, right, with these recursively self-improving models and things like that. And the visible policy action that is coming out of the White House is a truth social poll on whether or not we ought to rename the concept to make people more comfortable with it. I mean, that's insane. That's insane. That's insane. And I think it would be better if it weren't that way. I want to talk about the Stephen Whitt episode from last week because I got a bunch of pushback from it. I did my best to read all of the emails that people sent, particularly people because I asked for them who are smart on this stuff. In either the AI industry or computer science or cybersecurity. And there were two critiques basically that were being offered. One was on the more optimistic perspective that we're giving too much credence to the

P-Dume, probability of doom, arguments, and all this potential good stuff that's happening. I just want to dispense with that side of it really quickly because I actually think Stephen Whitt did talk about that some and I had been a while now, but I'd read Hoffman on where he talked about that. I do think that there's some positive, and obviously particularly in health and a bunch of areas, like there's huge potential positive opportunity here. So the question is just more about how to balance that with the risks. But the pushback that I really wanted to focus on was the much more common pushback, which was that we're overhypidness, AI's a bubble. These guys are all lying for profit. The quote-unquote effective altruists or the rationalists, whatever you call them, that are the most concerned about this are kind of like a cult of their own and it's a little bit of like a super intelligent Q and on. That's like kind of a summary of the pushback I got. And a lot of those who were asking me like, we have one on the super on and I'm working on trying to have somebody smart on the other side of this. There was not a single person that emailed me or I can't find a single person even online

pushing back on this that is are you in that this is a bubble and these guys are lying for profit? You know, AOC put out something about this this weekend. It's like these guys want to convince you that they have a super robot that's going to kill everybody because that's how they increase their whatever market share and that's how they protect, you know, put a motor around themselves and protect their profits. And like maybe there's some motivation there among Sam Altman, I don't know, but like that doesn't deal with the fact that there are like a lot of extremely smart people who are at the frontier to his word of the this type of research who are not in the effective altruist cult who have like changed their mind recently based on what happened with hugging face, etc. And I brought this guy up in several podcasts now, but I just want to say it one more time. James Dan Celsam. He is a top researcher at OpenAI working on all this stuff. He was one of the people that had working on the alignment problem, which is like this question of making sure that the, you know, AI is aligned with what humans want.

And he wrote a very long Twitter thread. I'll put it in the show notes again. And so this I want the glorious Renaissance future as much as anyone I've worked for it. Torturously my whole career it breaks my heart to see the potential and site and for go up. But the argument that if we get there by growing models rather than engineering them, we'll lose everything in the end. Seems very strong to me. I'm wrestling with it and it's staggering implications. Like I've not dealt with, I've not heard from anybody who has dealt seriously with like this, this person's critique, who is somebody that like wanted AI, thought that AI was going to lead to a great future for humanity. And like is not, you know, doing some sort of, you know, whatever financial spin for the company is an engineer who like thought this was going to be great and has looked at what has happened late in the last few months and has said, guys, I'm freaked out now. We need to change course. And I don't, I haven't heard from anybody who has like compellingly like dealt with that person and their others like it, but I'm just going to use Dan like that person's concern.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I absolutely think it's fair and true that that we should all keep in the back of our minds that one possible motivator for motivation for some of these executives to speak in this way could be a profit motive. Like of course, of course everybody is self-interested. These people want to make a lot of money. They have more money than the increase is already and maybe they're diminishing returns there. But of course, that's plausible and a possible thing. But I just, when I see people make this argument, I have not really seen anybody account for the number of people to whom it could not apply who are also raising these same concerns. People who are quitting these companies, I mean that is, that was the big significance of the Jacob Coxen quitting anthropic that kind of kicked off this whole conversation, is that he was a guy who left open AI over some of these concerns, who went to anthropic because anthropic was supposed to be and bills itself as and is in some significant ways. The more AI safety focused of these companies, he's like, I'm going to go help them build

their thing. He gets there. He's like, whoa, they don't know what's going on either. These concerns have not gone away at all. He quits to blow the whistle on this stuff. He loses his economic exposure to anthropic. His shares do not vest. What else could you ask a person to do to specifically push against that exact argument than what this guy did? And still people make the argument. And that's to say nothing of people who have never had any exposure to any of these companies who are not involved in anthropic or open AI or XII at all, who are just outside researchers who are crunching the numbers on this stuff and trying to figure out the implications for the future of humanity, same as everybody else. I just cannot get my head around seeing that argument, treating it as dispositive to the whole question and letting it reassure me so totally that I don't have to pay attention to this issue anymore. I do think that is the main draw for it. I don't mean to say that people are diluting themselves to give themselves a false sense of security. But look, again, I don't want to impure anybody's, but it's like some people don't want

to update their priors. Like I've changed my view on this literally two weeks ago, right? Like I started paying more attention to the concerns being offered by people that I felt seemed credible for a variety of reasons. So I think that some people, it's like there were reasons, I think to have a counter view. And even though it's by the way, like, dance also might be wrong, but these people might be wrong. But I just think that it's important to deal with it seriously. So people have pushed back on that in particular, fire away. I'll listen to it. And can I just say one other thing, which is that like I totally recognize to the like we're laymen here. Like we are generalists. We are coming in to this conversation that is ongoing for a long time. Like I've had a lot of people in the morning shots comments who are much closer to this industry than I am who disagree with the things I've written in various ways. I have very much appreciated like getting their pushback on various things. It's helpful. And like I don't want to, I feel like I was kind of inching toward imputing motives a minute there in a way that I should not be because I have not earned that at all. So like just to say that, that part of it as well.

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ways to pay. It helps you make smarter money moves without the stress. That's the goal, right? Having tools that make your money work with you. Download the Clarna app today or visit clarna.com to learn more. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license. In MLS number 1353190, Clarna balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. Okay. Final topic, those in the discourse over the weekend. Nicole Hannah Jones is the writer for the New York Times. You excited about this? Oh, yeah, man. She wrote a column about 10 years ago about how she was going to put her daughter as a very prominent column in the New York Times. She's got a lot of attention about how she was going to put her daughter in the neighborhood school, rather than giving her a chance to go to a better school. Because she thought that was important for commitment to the community. She talks about her and her husband or black, her daughter's black, about how people had made sacrifices like their parents and generations before.

I made sacrifices in order to help de-segregate schools and give more opportunities. They should do the same and they should use their power and influence and privilege to make the neighborhood school better. And the advocates with the principal and on this PTA for the school. So that was a decision that she made 10 years ago. She wrote a column this weekend saying that her daughter is now a believe in eighth grade and is pissed at her. And basically said, mom, I can't believe you did this. Like this school has been terrible. And I just was at the beginning. I actually wanted to engage with you on the substance that was happening in the school rather than the Collin of Jones. Like she's really hard on herself. And so kind of props for anybody that writes something that's really hard on themselves. And I want to talk about this in particular because like, well, I myself am obviously white breaking this like I, but like, I thought about this with with to lose and like what school to put her into and we're living in Oakland. We put her into the neighborhood preschool because we thought it would be good to kind of like be part of the community and for that. It meet other kids that look like her and you know that the tea we went and met the preschool teacher.

She seemed like way overqualified, frankly, she's a really awesome woman and just in a class and like her entire class was black girls and we're like, this is so cool. We're in the neighborhood school and like this is great rather than put her in the private school at the rich tech teach back skits, right. And preschool ends and we go to end the teacher calls us in and she's like, Hey, I want to meet with you guys. And we're like, great, we came in. We sat down with her in the classroom and I'm like, sitting in the little kids chair. So you always feel like you're a little that brings you back to like being a kid and having a teacher lecture you when you're in trouble. And the teacher looks at me and she's like, you have to take her out of the school next year. Just like totally blunt. Like appreciate what you're trying to do. I see what you're trying to do. But like she's like, this isn't going to serve her for her to be in here. And like that was like a real rude wake up call for me. And I appreciate that she did that and obviously it can be change. We ended up moving to New Orleans and it's becoming not material about Oakland anymore. But like, I understand that point. So on that part of it, I'm kind of sympathetic to her.

The part that I'm not is where you get into where she starts talking about what's happening at the schools. I just want to read a couple of parts. She talks about she's an elementary school. She decided to visit during the lunch period. Her class and other class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild chasing, hitting and pushing each other. All the teachers, aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored. It was during elementary school. Also during elementary school. A few days before school went up for winter break, I got a folder in her backpack with the math assignment. I'd been requesting since our conference. I sat on my dining table, scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking her work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. She believed herself to be good at math. It was her favorite subject. But now I understood that she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher wasn't checking the work. This is an elementary school. She goes on, it happens again in middle school with algebra. Her daughter thought she knew algebra and was good at it. But it turned out she knew nothing. She ends up going to a better school. I'm Nick Krakman.

Now she's at high school. She ends up going to a different school for high school and goes into algebra class. She thinks she's good at this subject and she's not. She hasn't learned anything. I just look at these stories. I'm kind of gump smack. I do feel like both parties at the national level. It's different in some states and cities. The national level. I've just abandoned this and decided that no child left behind was a failure and standards are failure and teaching to the test and blah blah blah. Now it's not even talking about this anymore. This is a huge subject conversation in the 90s and 2000s. Now nobody even talks about this. It's like fucking crazy. The schools like this exist at all. To me, I was reading the article. I was more riled up by that than I was by the personal issues of the author. Yeah. It's hard when an article like this blows up on Twitter and that's how you kind of experience it as like a Twitter fight. First and foremost, because everybody has lots of pre-existing baggage baked in about Nicole Hannah-Jones.

I do not care about that stuff at all. I thought that it was an extremely bracing read about the total lose-lose situation that a parent in this school or a parent in this position is placed into. Where the only option that you're given for your own kid is bail out on the public school system that's there because the public school system that's there is so completely dysfunctional and broken. Just abandon that with all of the sort of corollary stuff that she struggles with with that. I don't want to abandon all of those kids to that just because I have the ability to kind of like pluck my kid out of there and put her in a more sheltered, privileged environment. You can totally understand where she's coming from with that. She's like, I think I have the ability not just to sort of like cocoon my kid off but actually make a difference in this school because it has been failed by all of the other people who are supposed to be making it like a workable place to get an education.

The article is so compelling because it's her struggling so hard against that and actually trying very hard to make that happen and make that work and failing. Then grappling with, okay, I was not able to exert this kind of like positive influence on these institutions like I thought I would be able to. Maybe all that I did was failed my own kid because I was not only unwilling to sort of cocoon her off from this dysfunction early and just put her in a different school where she would thrive. But also I didn't really make things better for anybody else either and so like I really do encourage people to go and read the thing you're absolutely right about the sort of main problem on a political level being. You know, Republicans who have given up on this system altogether and just want to you know give people more and more pathways to opt out of public schools and Democrats who you know have have. You know, reverse polarized into saying you know fuck you guys for wanting to opt out of the public school the public schools are great the public schools are fine public schools are doing well they just need more money there's more funding. I mean like it is such a dysfunctional horrible mess and like I you almost struggled to really know what to say other than like what a shame what a mess what a tragedy yeah.

I don't actually I've more to say this is where my old sometimes my my old Jeb Bush muscle start firing because this school that she went to the kid there's $52,300 per student the school this school is getting funded in New York like New York has plenty of funding this is not worth it she's not in. We're all Louisiana or whatever with the school is not getting enough funding Louisiana schools are doing pretty well well Louie not really Mississippi Louisiana we're copying now we're trying to catch back up but but miss the Mississippi miracle it's done better. DC is actually DC schools are trying to do better because they made changes we tied to this in the Kristoff Cup episodes ago he's like he's an Oregon and he's like the Mississippi schools are not doing better than Oregon schools and he's like this is crazy and it's like what is it it's accountability it's like standards it's making sure that the kids actually learn and not just moving them along and so like the like you said about the reverse polarization the stuff gets like all wrapped up in like these arguments from fucking 30 years ago about like oh teaching to the test and. No child left behind and like or whatever common core and all this stuff it's like my recommendation to a 20 20 eight Democrat is to pick up this issue and be like we should pay teachers very well and we should have high fucking standards for the students and like we should be really serious about this and committed to it again and like I'm sorry if some teachers don't like that or some schools don't like that or administrations don't like the standards that we're setting but like we are failing these kids and we're failing these kids.

And certainly some schools need more funding. Like I'm not saying that that's not nothing. But like the kids are, if you look at where school districts are doing better or worse, like a lot of it is just, are you committed to actually serving these kids and making sure that they learn what they need to learn? And like to me, the most damning part of the story is like it's, like makes you want to cry. Like this girl who like thinks she's good at math and isn't because they're not even grading the papers because like whatever, either because Steve's was lazy or because they've decided that grading and testing is, you know, some whatever, like is unfair. There's not, doesn't include equi, it's not equitable. And it's just like, no, like kids have to fucking learn. And I don't know, you look at this and it's pretty, pretty dispearating. So there's my, there's my final rant. Sometimes people ask me, you know, if I'm going fully native and everyone's like, I like to bring back my kind of Jeb Bush education reform type. That doesn't, I'm not even fully on board with all that stuff but in order to have full school choice, which I think is also huge, it's a problem in itself

because it's like, all it does then is really helps the poor kids that have very active parents because they like are on the ball enough to like sign up at the right time. And so anyway, I'm not, you know, like there's challenges to every system but the standard part is, it's not negotiable. I don't think, all right, that's Andrew Eiger. What else do you have any other final thoughts for us? No, man, here here to that stuff. My oldest kid is four and it's terrifying. Yeah, no, man, they just, the kids fucking deserve better. The kids deserve to learn. So we'll see how it is. I appreciate you, brother. We'll be back here with Bill Crystal next Monday. For those of you that missed Bill Crystal. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show with a Mississippi and it's going to get to rub my nose and the outcome for the football game this weekend but we'll give it to you some fun politics as well. We'll see y'all later. You can put your clothes back on. She's leaving you. No time to apologize for the things you do.

No renta for Rory. And sing the blues. Believe that Clapton was the second comment. Far so far, we all got work to do. It gets dark, we all got work to do. Long got work to do. She's leaving you. She's leaving you. We still make us forget. The Bullwork Daily is brought to you. Thanks for the work of lead producer Katie Cooper,

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