Chaos in and Around Iran. Kash Patel’s Drinking. AI Job Losses - Tax the Bots? Andrew Yang.

Kamala Running Again is Madness. Labor Sec Chavez-DeRemer Resigns. Tim Cook Out Too. Dozens of Vets Arrested in Capitol. Tucker Done with Trump. Dua Lipa Steps Up.

Welcome to Independent Americans with Paul Rieckhoff, Episode 499—an all‑new, all‑gas, no‑brakes conversation with entrepreneur, anti‑poverty activist, Forward Party founder, candidate for President and NYC Mayor, and Noble Mobile CEO Andrew Yang. From Nas and Knicks heartbreak at Madison Square Garden to Mets misery at Citi Field, Paul and Andrew break down why basketball, baseball and hoops culture offer a positive, global vision of the America we could be—while Trump’s chaotic presidency, Iran war “mayhem,” and a broken two‑party system drag us backward. They talk New York fandom, James Dolan’s facial‑recognition surveillance, pricing regular people out of the Garden, and why the NBA is one of America’s best cultural exports right now.

Then they go deep on the issue Andrew warned America about years ago: AI. Paul presses Andrew for a blunt strategic assessment—“how fucked or not fucked are we?”—and Andrew lays out three core pillars: AI gutting jobs and super‑charging corporate profits, Washington’s utter failure to build real guardrails, and data centers quietly becoming the “new humans” as they devour power and water. They dig into AI in the nuclear kill chain, Anthropic’s internal moral fight, “tax the bots,” and why Dario Amodei says AI will wipe out half of white‑collar entry‑level jobs. Andrew also unveils Noble Mobile—his new effort with Scott Galloway to lower your phone bill and your screen time—and explains how the Forward Party, open primaries and a fast‑growing independent ecosystem can finally give Americans a real alternative to Trump’s MAGA GOP and an out‑of‑touch Democratic establishment

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