10/23/26: Midterms Bloodbath w/ Richard Ojeda, TX Voters Overwhelm Polls With Huge Turnout, AI Doomsday Hacks

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0:21 Good morning, everyone. It's Friday, October 23rd. Here with a Breaking Points Friday for a lot of midterm madness. How's everybody doing?

0:29 Doing good. Hoping that the Internet survives long enough to both record the show and get it out, since apparently that is very much in doubt these days.

0:37 That pitch that I made before that you really should spend your money on breaking points now before you lose it is much more relevant today. Like these robots are knocking on your door like as we speak and just suggesting to your bank that they go ahead and move your money over their way. So might as well. Get your premium Breaking Point subscription before they do that.

1:00 You might as well get it into our account before our money also gets stolen.

1:03 And then the robots will take it from our account.

1:07 We're all going to wish we had gold.

1:08 That'll be our problem, not yours.

1:10 Some of us might have gold, Emily. How do you know?

1:12 I believe you do.

1:15 Absolutely.

1:15 Sager?

1:16 I am in my proper era, I will tell you that.

1:18 We all should be.

1:19 100%.

1:20 We have cash under the mattresses, and we're ready to do another Friday show here. We've got a lot of midterm stuff to cover. We have Richard Ojeda running for Congress in North Carolina.

1:31 Ojeda. It's Ojeda. Damn it.

1:34 It's okay.

1:34 It's kind of interesting because he has, it's his grandmother that's Mexican.

1:38 Is that right?

1:39 I think that's right.

1:39 Yeah.

1:40 So it was originally Ojeda. He certainly will not be upset being called that, but they pronounce it Ojeda in a very West Virginia-like fashion.

1:47 All right.

1:48 We're doing a hard J this morning. Said with love.

1:51 As a daughter of a West Virginia dad. So there you go.

1:55 And as a prepper.

1:56 Are going to be looking down at Texas. We've got Theo from Twitter, x.com, who's doing a lot of incredible data, specifically on the Texas race. And as Crystal alluded to, if you're still listening to this, that means the internet is still on for now, but there are a lot of alarm bells being sound in terms of AI exposing the majority of the internet, bank accounts, and a whole bunch of other great stuff creates the infrastructure of society is now exposed to AI hackers. We'll be looking at a lot more of that. But let's turn to a much more calm topic, the midterms. I've got a few things that we should start off with here, but I did just have sort of a roundup of organizations and their congressional control forecast. This is from Zachary Donini, who's

2:50 going to be on the show later next week, but he says by Silver Bulletin has a 95% chance of Democrats taking the House and a 76% chance of Democrats taking the Senate. 50 plus one, that's 99% House, 75% Senate. Split Ticket is 89% House, 65% Senate. And Vote Hub is 88% House and 60% Senate.

3:17 Yeah, I mean, it's easy at this point to kind of take for granted that Democrats have a very strong chance to win back the Senate. But it's worth reminding that going into this, everyone was looking at the landscape just of the map that they would have to prevail in and going, I don't think so. Like, y'all are going to win Alaska. and Ohio and Texas.

3:40 Texas.

3:41 I don't think so.

3:42 Right.

3:42 That is the level of what it takes for Democrats to be able to take back the Senate. And at this point, every major analyst is saying that is more likely than not. And then so that's already a crazy scenario. Democrats winning Texas is already a crazy scenario. And now we have it seems like every day there's a new state that's like maybe that one's in play. Maybe Mississippi is in play. Maybe Kansas is in play. Maybe South Carolina is in play. You're looking at the early vote coming in, and this is part of why we're going to have Zachary Danini on next week, because he's one of the few people I trust to actually do this in an adequate fashion and not just cherry pick and look for what they want to see. But early vote

4:20 is looking very much like the polls have been looking. So the notion that there is going to be this big polling miss, a 2016 or 2020 or 2024 style polling miss, that is underestimating Republicans. Well, when we talked to Rich Barris yesterday, who's a MAGA-friendly pollster who called those particular misses correctly, he says, I think it's more likely it goes in the other direction. I think it's more likely that the polls are underestimating Democrats. That's what he said. And again, this is someone who has called the other cycles where the mainstream polls were incorrect. He called them correctly. I want to put this up on the screen because, frankly, I think this might be the most important metric that we can look at here going

5:01 into the elections. Look at the price of oil this morning. Brent crude at $ 1. 14 a barrel. This is approaching— Scroll down.

5:12 Scroll down.

5:13 What are you looking for? 10-year Treasury yield.

5:17 It's not on there.

5:18 What are you looking for? The gas price?

5:20 Very tough, right?

5:22 Oh, Brent at the top there. I see it. Yeah, Brent's at the top.

5:24 114.

5:24 114.

5:24 They're keeping it small so you don't get scared. Good Lord.

5:29 Approaching the peak.

5:30 114.

5:31 Approaching the peak of what we saw at the height of the war. And this is heading into the midterms. And that is going to show up in gas prices over the coming weeks, inevitably. So, you know, gas prices have been holding steady somewhere around 430 a gallon. Diesel continues to go up. It's sky high, still continuing to hit records. those prices per barrel in the market that are being reflected are going to be reflected also at the gas pump. So, you know, this is another thing Rich said to us yesterday that really landed with me.

6:01 He's like, forget about the polls. Like, just pretend like you don't see any polls. Pretend you're a historian looking back at this period. And you would say, deeply unpopular war, sky-high gas prices, president is one of the most unpopular in history. What do you think is going to happen in the midterm election? Like, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how this is going to go.

6:24 You know, the question of underpolling Democrats, I'm so glad you guys have to go back and watch that interview. I'm glad you guys got to that. That is one of the things that I think is totally possible as well, and especially possible in a place like Texas. Now, it's also possible that there's not adequate rural polling in places like Texas and Maine yet, but it is also possible that pollsters have been overcorrecting for the Trump era in ways that have missing voters because Trump voters are flipping.

6:47 And if you're trying to overcorrect and overweight for people who are with Trump, who have moved since, it completely messes up the modeling in especially like a Rust Belt place like Ohio, where you did have Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump voters.

7:00 Go ahead, Ryan.

7:01 No, yeah, that's just such a key point that what we can model when it comes to the early vote is party registration coming out to the polls. And then you bank like, OK, in the past, X percent of Democrats voted for the Democrat, X percent of Republicans voted Republican. And then in this state, X percent of independents split this way. But there's no reason to think, to Emily's point, that those splits are going to break down in the same way that they were in earlier pieces of the Trump era. Like, I would imagine that you're going to get more Democrats voting for Democrats, more unity, and that at least some non-trivial sliver of Republicans who are in that early vote number are voting for Democrats and that

7:45 the independent number is probably going to be a little different. Speaking of cherry picking real quick, here's that South Carolina number that I was looking at first day of early voting. In 2024, it was a 27.8 Republican margin. In 2026, it's 1.7% for the Democrat now. And they're showing that a huge, this is a huge turnout among black voters, which is something that isn't getting talked about as much, but the attempt to knock down the voting rights act and to really, uh, gerrymander out a huge portion of the congressional black caucus has apparently deeply resonated with black voters, particularly around the South. And they're coming out in ways that I think Republicans did not anticipate. And if they

8:36 had might not have, um, kind of made this move.

8:40 Ralph Norman probably would not be struggling. He would be struggling.

8:42 I don't think he would be struggling on the level of Darlene Graham because people now resent that she has all of the baggage of her brother, who's increasingly unpopular, but they also feel like it was jammed down their throats by people in Washington and the president.

8:55 It's like the exact wrong time.

8:56 She doesn't have that Lindsey Graham charm.

8:58 Yeah, well, it's the exact wrong time to try to do something like that. And she immediately made major mishaps by saying, well, I don't really know about foreign policy.

9:05 It just.

9:06 If she loses, it's going to have been very predictable when people look back on the arc of the campaign.

9:11 Yeah, and that's a Trump fail right there because he just he, you know, blessed her and really pulled her through the primary. Otherwise, she wouldn't have have won. Just on the note of potential Democratic polling underestimation, there is there are a few points of data that do support that theory, which is. First of all, all of the polling has shown that Democratic voters tend to be more enthusiastic this cycle than Republican voters, again, for obvious reasons.

9:37 Yet you have a number of pollsters whose registered voter model is showing better numbers for Democrats than their likely voter models. That seems very unlikely, given the fact, OK, if you take the entire pool of voters and you say, OK, I'm going to apply my likely voter screen and try to figure out which ones of these are most likely to show up, that should be leading to. more Democratic overperformance because those are the people who are definitely the most hyped up to vote, according to all of the polling and all of the sentiment and all of the conventional wisdom that you could possibly find. So that would support the theory that they are really scared of underestimating Republicans.

10:17 And so they're putting a thumb on the scale with their likely voter screens to really juice up those Republican numbers. The other thing I would point to is while we obviously have some really high profile examples of Republican underestimation in 16, 20 and 24. Well, what are those three elections have in common? Trump is on the ballot and it's a presidential year. In the midterms, the story's been quite different. In fact, in 2022, Democrats were underestimated. You guys will remember we thought there was going to be a red wave. There was not a red wave. Then in the most recent election cycle and off your election cycle of 2025, huge Democratic underestimation. you know, the New Jersey polls were looking like it was going to be close.

10:56 And then Mikey Shera pulls off a blowout double digit victory. Abigail Spanberger, it looked like she was ahead, but it was close. Again, blowout victory. So there are some reasons to believe that that could be the case. I'm not saying it is, but it's not a crazy thing to imagine that that's the case. And I would say at this point, there's probably more evidence in that direction than in the Republican hopium that the polls are all wrong. And, you know, Rich Barris, who's caught these things before. He's wrong and everybody's wrong. The sentiment's wrong. And actually, everybody loves the high gas prices and the pedophile protection. Final message here down the stretch.

11:30 The two places before we get to the guests, the two places that I think it's possible that it could go in either direction are Maine and Texas because of the rural polling, which is so difficult when landline use is going down. We saw a huge polling error in 2020 with the Sarah Gideon Maine race, and they're trying to correct for that now, which could create interesting things if you have Trump voters flipping or Or if you're still just not picking up on genuine support for Collins, which isn't always Trump supporters are not always Collins supporters are not always Trump voters if you're looking at the polling.

11:59 So I would I would just be I'm more cautious about those two places. But even in those two places, it could go the other way. It could be that the poll is running the other direction.

12:08 Well, we're going to talk to a Texas analyst later. He can tell us what the early vote looks like there. And whether it supports a possibility of, you know, Republicans overperforming the polls, I'm sure that's still a possibility that's on the table. Maine, from what I've been seeing also, has been rich. Yesterday said that the Maine early vote data looks disgusting for Republicans.

12:29 That was his.

12:31 And to your point, Crystal, the recent poll that came out, the very sophisticated one, had Collins and Jackson 49-49 among likely voters. But then among registered voters, it was like, 51-48 or something, Jackson.

12:45 Jackson.

12:46 So if, I think your point is excellent. Who's more likely to come out? The people that want to come out or the people that are like not enthusiastic about coming out? And then you map that against the early voting data that you're seeing. You're like, if I have to choose between the pollster trying to, you know, cover their ass and what registered voters are saying and doing when it comes to turning in their ballots, probably want to go with the registered voters.

13:10 Only pollster I believe is Wedgwood.

13:12 SoCal. I would add them to the list, Emily. Very high quality.

13:16 In SoCal, we trust around here. All right.

13:18 We've got Richard Ojeda standing by. He's a congressional candidate in North Carolina's 9th congressional district. Let's go ahead and bring him in. All right. So retired major Richard Ojeda joins us now. He is running in North Carolina's 9th congressional district. And part of why we wanted to talk to him is he's running in a district Trump won by something like 16 points. A normal cycle. No one would be talking to him. No one would be interested in this race. It would be a blowout. It would be a foregone conclusion. However, that is not what the polls are showing. And Richard can give us an update from the ground about how he's feeling about the early vote numbers that are coming in here. But it's so

13:59 narrow and so much in play now that you've got some significant party packs that are taking a look at this, sending polling memos around saying, hey, this one may be in play. And the incumbent that Richard is up against is a guy by the name of Richard Hudson, who who leads the RNCC. So he's like the chief fundraiser for the Republicans in the House. That's, again, a sign that they think, oh, this is somebody who's in a safe seat. He can just run around fundraising. He doesn't really have to worry about his own district. Richard Ojeda has something else to say about that. So, Richard, welcome.

14:28 Great to see you.

14:30 Awesome. Glad to be on here. Glad to finally be on a camera with Ryan Grimm again, too. You know, that's always great to see you. Let me tell you. So we're breaking records in North Carolina. In Cumberland County and in Hoke County, I mean, people are on fire. They're tired of this garbage. Richard Hudson has given them a representative that has never shown up in 15 years.

14:52 He doesn't live here. He just shows up down here, takes a couple pictures in gated communities and disappears. And we have put the work in and we have showed these people that there's an alternative that actually puts boots on the ground and works its butts off. And that's what we do. And I'm going to tell you, if you look at right now versus two years ago, two years ago is a presidential election. Most people vote in presidential elections and they do midterms. Republicans are at a 42 percent decrease in where they were right now, this time two years ago. OK, I'm telling you right now.

15:24 Right now, I feel very comfortable that I'm leading in six of the of the seven counties. And I'm talking by quite a bit. I think right now they were saying that something like Guilford County was a D plus 38. Alamance County was D plus 18. Cumberland County is a D plus 46. Hoke County is a D plus 50.

15:44 Chatham County is a D plus 46. Moore County, it looks like him and I are almost in a dead tie, but there's 37% unaffiliated. We're killing it with unaffiliated voters. And of course the reddest county in the state of North Carolina is Randolph County. But I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm getting every democratic vote. I'm getting the majority of the unaffiliated votes. And every single day we have more people saying, I've never voted Democrat in my life, but I'm voting for Richard Ojeda. And we're seeing this all over the district. I got Republican farmers that have met with me that said, my family's, you got our family's support and we're going to spread the word. I'm telling you, Richard Hudson has taken this district for granted

16:26 for far too long. And we are going absolutely nonstop. And I'm telling you, you can feel it. I mean, people are coming up to me everywhere that I go. You know, most people don't even know what Richard Hudson looks like. The guy never shows up. But another big piece here is the whole affordability piece. He's doing nothing.

16:47 And this administration is doing nothing for these people. And these people are struggling greatly. I got farms that I'm going to and visiting that are struggling because the diesel prices are making it almost impossible for them to be able to, you know, farm their land. You know, people people can't afford the seed. I mean, everything is more expensive right now. And Richard Hudson is not showing up and basically going to gated communities and golf courses. And I'm showing up and explaining to these people what I want to do, which will absolutely help, you know, make things more affordable. So, you know, I think people are starting to to to hear our message. And I think they're fired up and I think they're fired up all

17:26 across this country.

17:28 Richard, can you just give people a little bit of a sense of your district? Fort Bragg is in your district that they may not be familiar with these counties. It's mostly rural. You know, give people like a little bit of the lay of the land here.

17:39 So so obviously the part that I have in Cumberland, I have about a third of Cumberland County, maybe even less than a third. But it's got all of Fort Bragg, Spring Lake. Cliffdale area and the area that goes into Hoke County. Now, Hoke County is another county that is on fire. They are rushing to the polls. They're doing phenomenal.

18:02 This district's kind of gerrymandered, but I don't think it benefits him that great right now because what they did was it's a lot of communities of color and he never shows up in communities of color. And I spend most of my time in communities of color. So Hoke County is absolutely killing it right now. Moore County, of course, where I actually live, this is where the U.S. Open was recently held. You know, this is a really big golfing and horse community. And then, of course, I've talked about Randolph and Chatham. Chatham County's biggest issue right now is a pipeline that they're trying to push through that Richard Hudson said, that's not my lane. I'm sorry, but that's your constituents and this is your district. It is

18:42 your lane. So you need to get involved with that. But then we have Alamance County and Guilford County. Guilford County is basically I have all of the eastern, northern and southern part of Greensboro, but not Greensboro itself.

18:57 When the Iran war started, we did a survey where we asked people, do you think that President Trump started this war, at least in part to basically push the Epstein files off the front page? And this is a national survey. And by a 50 to 42 percent majority, American people said, yeah, at least in part, he launched this war to cover up the Epstein files. So I'm curious, as you go around the district, the war did kind of push the Epstein files off the front page and off the off of cable news. But did it push?

19:31 Did it push it out of people's minds? Do you do you hear it in relationship to the Iran war? And like, what are the things that are really kind of resonating with people now?

19:40 Well, I mean, obviously, the war is we've got to stop this war because the prices are just they're killing people. I mean, let me tell you, people. are severely struggling right now. And I tell people, look, MAGA, knock it off. You know, you're not doing better than you were two years ago. There is no way, shape or fashion that you can be doing better. Grocery prices are up. Gas prices are up. Diesel prices are up. Everything in the stores is up because of what's going on in Iran.

20:08 And we have to First, we've got to stop this war. And as far as how do we stop this war? You know, right now, I honestly I don't know any other way other than basically us looking at Iran and saying, look, you know, we're going to end this this nightmare and we have to come with hat in hand. I mean, you know, we we we we we attack them. We killed children. We blew up a children's hospital. We blew up a school. I mean, these are horrible things that have happened. And there's going to be people that are going to be held accountable for these atrocities. But I'm telling you right now, people have not forgotten about the Epstein files. People are still very, very agitated about the Epstein files because once again, we know what happened. We

20:53 know that this was the billionaire boys club. And we know that these people absolutely deserve to be held accountable. And that's what they're doing. They're trying to do everything in their power to make this not a thing anymore because they know that if this could crash, maybe our economy could destroy the corporations that run this country.

21:11 So?

21:12 I don't care if you molested children, beat, trafficked, raped, threatened, maybe even murdered. You need to go down for that. And people have not forgot about the Epstein files. And they're not going to forget about the Epstein files. But as far as having Fort Bragg in my district, let me tell you, I'm going to paint a picture for you.

21:32 So every time I got ready to deploy to combat, We knew it was going to be a year-long deployment. So not only was I training, there was also things out there for my family to prepare them for what's happening. When you leave and you don't come back, especially if you're a child, you know, we want to make sure that the families are prepared for this. That's not what happened here. They deployed an entire brigade combat team to combat.

22:01 And of course, you know, daddy got up, mommy got up, kissed her kids and said, we'll be back in about two weeks. And then they got told when they got there, it's a year-long deployment. I'm going to tell you that those families are literally just, it's like at their wit's end right now. Because I actually have a family member who just had a brand new baby girl. And now he left, but was told, hey, don't worry about it.

22:27 We'll be back in a week. No biggie. Year-long deployment. I mean... People are devastated. People are angered. They're mad about this garbage. This is not the way that we treat our soldiers. But what do you expect when we have an administration that doesn't understand how to treat soldiers? And that's including Pete Hegseth, who absolutely is. I'm more qualified to be the secretary of defense than Pete Hegseth is.

22:55 And I'm not nowhere near qualified to be the secretary of defense. That's a fact.

22:59 You know, I have heard from Republicans who say they voted for Trump and are considering not just sitting it out, but actively voting for Democrats. As you said, you're hearing that yourself. So I wonder, one of the things that I hear from those people who are going through that decision personally is, well, what are Democrats going to do when they get elected to bring prices down? If they get the House and the Senate, what can Democrats do if Trump is still president to bring prices down and stop the war?

23:22 OK, so, you know, I obviously I'm not sitting inside those those circles right now talking about this stuff. But ending the war has got to be a number one priority. But here's another thing, too. We can't just jump in there and impeach Donald Trump. If we impeach Donald Trump on day two, they're going to martyr this guy. The MAGA will always scream, you did it because you couldn't handle him. We need, and listen to what I'm saying, and maybe we need to spread this word. We need to investigate Donald Trump and this administration so thoroughly. And we need to do like 6 o'clock to 8 p.m.

24:00 every single night. Tune in and you get to watch it all. Because here's the thing. We may never wake MAGA up. Unless we show them everything, the worst of the worst, because maybe then they'll go, wow, I'm not okay. I got to walk away from this. That may be the only way we help these people. Look, I want to bring people back to reality. I don't want a whole entire group of millions of people that are going to spend the rest of their lives griping at the fact that how somehow we stole their messiah. You know, we've got to investigate Donald Trump. But we also got to figure out how we're going to be able to stop this war with Iran, open the Strait of Hormuz.

24:47 And and we've got to figure out how we can do that without them saying, no, we're going to just keep going, because they've said that they're not going to open the Strait of Hormuz until Trump is gone. So maybe I don't know. I mean, I just there's got to be something that we have to come up with, you know, with with Iran to get things moving again.

25:06 And once again, Iran is not the enemy here. You can claim. But it wasn't they didn't attack us. We attacked them. Benjamin Netanyahu has been looking for his useful idiot for the past 40 years and he found it in Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is willing to do anything to keep people's eyes off of the daggone Epstein files.

25:26 Because guess what? He raped kids. You think I'm scared to say that? I'm not scared to say that. I'll say that on the House floor. And once again, you want to sue me, sue me, because we'll bring the records in to prove that I'm telling the truth. And the reason why I'm so confident in saying this is because I've watched Ted Lieu. look into a camera multiple times and say, the reason why they're doing all this is because Donald Trump raped kids. And Ted Lieu has looked in those files. So he's seen it. So I'm not worried about it.

25:54 Richard, you seem anything but scared. You also served multiple tours in Iraq and received two Bronze Star medals. Trump seems to be prepared to strike Iran again. this time with a lot less resources, a lot less U.S. Army bases, and a lot less ways to protect our troops. A widower recently spoke to J.D. Vance at a town hall and talked about how his wife, who died in a strike, was saying that they didn't feel safe, that they didn't feel protected. What do you think about the current state and if we strike Iran again? What do you think about the safety of our troops?

26:39 I think that they're in serious jeopardy here. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I've been on some of these bases. The protection are HESCO barriers and things like that. That's the protection. You know, very, very little protection from mortars and rockets from the sky. You know, that's just a fact. And everything is within reach, easily within reach. So our troops are definitely in harm's way.

27:05 I mean, we've already had over 800 wounded in action. Because of these attacks. It's just the way that it is. You know, it's extremely dangerous. The way that you make it even safer is inside the area. You still put walls everywhere. But I mean, literally, I'm telling you right now, you can get the sense where you're literally just walking around in a maze the entire time you're there. And with these bases getting hammered and hit, a lot of people don't understand. Now, a lot of those bases are closed.

27:36 And we got troops over there that don't really have access to now mail capabilities and resupply capabilities. And that's what's really the worst for those troops over there right now. Because they're not getting to do anything, see anything. They're lacking in food and all this other stuff. Kind of like looking at the USS Abraham Lincoln. And how dare, you know, Donald Trump, when they finally was going to leave, he was like, they should have stayed longer. He was mad because sailors got tired of being stuck on a ship for literally nine straight months with not one port call.

28:10 That's what makes life hard.

28:12 Livable on these ships is that you stop at ports quite often and you get to get off and stretch your legs and spend a day or two looking at things and hanging out with your fellow sailors and going and eating and stuff like that.

28:28 And that didn't happen. I'm going to tell you, if you've ever been on a naval ship, Everything is really, really close in proximity to one another. So you only have like a small section here with where you can put your knickknacks. And that's pretty much. And then you've got like a closet for your clothing. That's all you've got. So, I mean, it's miserable for these people over there. It's absolutely miserable. And it just it bothers me as a person who spent 24 years in the military, how callous these people are towards our troops. You know, they want to act like they they walk with every single troop.

29:01 They don't care about our troops.

29:04 I've heard from several service members and a few family members of those serving who say that after they've been wounded in combat, the Pentagon is telling them because Hegseth declared a ceasefire or declared the end of major combat operations, that they don't actually count as being wounded in combat.

29:28 And this is not a service-connected injury. And as a result, then they're not eligible for all of the various VA benefits and other benefits. that come from a combat-connected injury. Have you heard of this from people that you've been talking to around Fort Bragg or elsewhere?

29:48 I haven't, but let me tell you something. These people are wounded because of strikes.

29:55 Yeah, from Iran, literally.

29:56 That's right. That's right. That's right. So let me tell you something. Every single one of those people that served are going to get 100 percent of the benefits that they deserve. And we're not going to let people like Pete Hegseth and them try to say, well, we we we we said no right before this time. So they don't get nothing. They're deployed. They're serving their country. They were in and they are in harm's way and they have been wounded and they're going to get every single benefit that comes from that. And if this administration wants to sit there and say that they won't, then fine.

30:29 That'll just help us send this administration to the damn dustbin. And that's what's going to happen when this is over with.

30:37 On the Epstein files, just want to note that President Trump has not been charged with any criminal conduct and denies any criminal conduct. On the note, though, of Republicans closing here with an Epstein files related pedophile protection message. Richard, have you been following this thing that's going on with Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio?

30:54 I have. I have. And once again, I mean, look, first off.

30:59 Let me play for you. Let me go and play for you. Griffin can pull it up. President Trump is standing by this ad. I'm sure everybody watching this knows at this point Vivek Ramaswamy has now put $ 4 million behind an ad of Amy Acton's estranged mother who stood by the rapist of her daughter and fled the state along with him and hadn't seen her since she was 12 years old because she chose the abuser over her own daughter who had been accused not only by Amy but by the daughter of a previous one of his wives in a different marriage. So a court, of course, removed Amy from their custody based on the evidence that they saw. President Trump lauding that ad and saying, you know, standing behind it, saying that he thinks anyone would would

31:40 want to run this ad. And the only reason that people don't like it is because it looks so bad for Amy Acton. Let's go and take a look. Listen to this.

31:47 Great state, a great state.

31:49 And.

31:50 If it's even a little bit true, you don't want her as governor.

31:53 That's her opinion. I'm defending it because I know that if that ad were about my mother, you would love it.

31:58 You would love every inch of it.

32:00 Of course, he's going to take the side.

32:02 Of the rapist.

32:03 He's Donald Trump.

32:17 You know, he's going to take the side of the video. Vivek Ramaswamy is absolutely sick. You know, we now go back and look and find that, you know, he took some type of a scholarship or something, whatever it was called, that was supposed to go to poor immigrants. And he had about $ 800, 000 in the bank when he took it.

32:34 This guy has no integrity whatsoever. That's the thing about this whole MAGA and all these people within that circle. They have no integrity whatsoever. But for them to do something like this, because let me tell you something, What that did right there, that brought back so much pain. to that woman that's running for governor. It brought back memories that she probably has worked her entire life to try to hide. And that was as cruelty as what that is. It is unacceptable. It just tells you what type of people that we're dealing with here on the Republican Party. And this is the reason why, you know what?

33:14 I'm glad that we are seeing people rising up across this country and pushing back to this garbage buffoonery I'm glad that we're seeing that, but we have to continue pushing and we've got to win in 2026 and we've got to win in 2028. And then we've got to make sure that we hold everyone accountable for the crimes that they have committed. We've got to get this country back on track. You know, we got to start going to Washington, D.C. and pushing legislation. that elevates people's lives.

33:41 And I'm talking about the working class people in this country. We got to stop giving everything to the billionaire class. I'm sick and tired of us, daggone, finding money. And instead of using it for the people, we just figure out how we can shove it in somebody's pocket who's got more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

33:58 It's time for us to stop that. The billionaire class will be OK. Those that didn't, you know, handle their business on Epstein Idol because we're going to go after them. This is my thoughts with that. Like I said, I'm I'm just a candidate. And, you know, I'm not on the inside right now. But my thing is, is, you know what? We'll take every single one of those billionaires, corporate owners. I don't care what crashes. We're going to take them. And every single person that they preyed upon, we're going to make them make those people, those victims vulnerable.

34:27 Multi-millionaires and then I say we take everything from them seize everything their jets their homes their land Their cars everything they have we sell it all and we put it towards our national debt Maybe we could get this national debt down by doing something like that because those people do not deserve To live the rest of their life and be able to just get away with what they've done They need to pay for it dearly and then they need to pay for it with their with their freedom period Richard, do.

34:56 You have any big money packs coming in off the sidelines? We saw some. What was that? Ryan House majority pack that put out that memo polling memo saying, hey, this race, you may not have it on your radar, but it's in play. Are you seeing some people come off the sidelines for you? We are.

35:12 We are. You know, we just recently got the bold pack. We've got quite a few congressional endorsements. We've got all the union endorsements for the most part. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I think, I think things are looking good. The DCCC is, is now really, really, you know, basically they're with us. They're standing, they're like in the rooms and stuff. So, uh, they're definitely, uh, you know, interested in this race and, uh, yeah, I'm telling you, it feels really, really good to be at this point right now and, and looking at the numbers that we're seeing, uh, because I'm going to tell you, we, we, we're going to win this. We are going to win this. The people showing up at the polls, they're breaking records right now.

35:53 And they're not showing up. I mean, the Republicans, once again, negative 42 percent of where they were two years ago in a presidential election. That tells us that it's not like they're waiting for November 3rd. That tells us they're not showing up. Who do they have? Who are they voting for? There's nobody exciting on the ticket for them to vote for. So they're staying home. And the Democrats are showing up. African-Americans absolutely showing up everywhere. And I'm telling you right now, I love it.

36:23 The PAC for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. At the top of the show, I stupidly said I thought your grandmother might have been from Mexico, but obviously it would would have been one of your grandfathers. Then he come and become a coal miner.

36:35 Yes.

36:35 So very, very wild. My grandfather left home when he was 13 years old to ride with Pancho Villa. And he ended up he ended up having to swim across the Rio Grande to keep from being killed by the federales. And he made his way to Chicago and he worked in the steel mills of Chicago for a while until somebody said, Hey, cause people were dropping dead by from the heat. And somebody said, Hey, anybody want to share gas?

37:00 There's jobs in West Virginia in coal mining. So he did, he went to West Virginia and my father was born in Philbert, West Virginia, which is in McDowell County, the poorest County in the country right now. And, uh, right after my dad was born, a person knocked on the door and it was, uh, His name was Condido. And he said, we're your family and our father's sick and you need to come home. And my family moved back to Jalisco to a place called Techiluta del Montenegro. And they lived there until my dad was eight. And then they went back to West Virginia. And when they got to West Virginia, the reason why we say Ojeda is because when my grandfather made it back to the coal fields of West Virginia and Logan County, They didn't understand

37:43 that J and H very well. So he just thought that for them to be able to have a better life, they needed to assimilate and say, hey, we're just Ojeda. And that's how it was. But yeah, I'll be the first Hispanic person to ever represent North Carolina in Washington, D.C. And I'm very proud of that. And I'm going to tell you, I'm trying to mentally do it. I want to bring it back. My name is Richard Ojeda.

38:04 I want it to be Ojeda. That's how Griffin started the show.

38:08 Griffin, you didn't even know.

38:10 And can they roll their R's in West Virginia?

38:17 Your grandfather might be the first guy who went to the coal mines to get a more laid-back job.

38:21 Yeah, and he had a reputation. You know, he laid track in the coal mines until he was in his 70s. He had a reputation. Even when he retired, they brought him back because the new people had no idea how to do that job the way he did. So he had a great reputation. And you know what? I'm going to hang his picture in our Capitol.

38:43 Wow.

38:43 Well, we're going to have to have you back on to hear more of these Pancho Villa stories. But for now, we're focused on the midterms. We wish you luck. Where can people find you or support you in these final days? Yeah, your website.

38:56 So Ojeda4NC. com. Every night I do a nightly live. But for some odd reason, I'm telling you, somebody's doing something. I have never in my life ever had a problem getting on YouTube and now I just can't do it. So it's happened within the last couple of days, but nothing would surprise me here. But yeah, ojennifernc.com. If you want to actually meet me, just go anywhere in the ninth district and just stand there. Make no mistake about it.

39:23 I'll come by.

39:26 I love it. I love it. Well, maybe we can talk to you two about that. I'll talk to my guys at YouTube. See what's going on behind the scenes there. See if we can help you out. Richard, good luck. We'll be tracking your race on election night and we'll hope to speak to you again soon.

39:43 All right.

39:43 Let's take a look at Texas. We have a Texas data expert here, Theo, who we've been following from Twitter. He's been doing some excellent reporting on the polling and data coming out of Texas for a race that everyone is very interested in. Theo, welcome to the show.

40:03 Welcome, everyone.

40:04 Oh, thank you for welcoming us. I appreciate that. It's nice to be welcomed.

40:08 We all live in Theo's world. It's true.

40:09 That's right. Texas is the center of the universe right now.

40:13 Now, Theo, I want to throw up your website here. This is, of course, TheoElections.com. It's very beautiful here. And you've, of course, been doing a lot of great data. And I encourage everyone to keep checking that out and following him on TwitterX.com. But, Theo, we just wanted to start more generally. You know, it's Friday right now. What are you seeing currently in this race, in particular with the Senate run with Tallarico versus Paxton?

40:41 So far, we are seeing the highest ever midterm turnout in Texas history since 1976. We are on track to seeing almost 10 million votes, which is only one million short of a general election. And it's really impressive that we are at this point in the midterm.

41:00 Let me go ahead and pull up, Theo, something that you shared here on Twitter, and you can just talk us through what these maps are. So you've been tracking. The reason I wanted to talk to you is because You've been tracking the early vote really carefully, and I'm a little bit leery of reading too much into the early vote. Maybe you can speak to that, what can be learned and what shouldn't be learned from early vote.

41:22 But here you say day two is almost done reporting all of the early vote. This map visualizes primary voters in early vote. There's a significant drop in turnout the third day in the reported counties. I'll update the map as soon as they report early. So talk to us about some of what you're seeing in the early vote, what we should read into it, and what things we should still be cautious about.

41:43 The first thing I can say is that the early vote is not the end results. There are going to be almost 60% of non-primary voters that we have no idea who they're going to vote for. But primary voters are indicative of party's in lean and Democrats have started really strong in the first and second day while Republicans are improving. We need to see this going into the second week. If this keeps up, this is going to be a really big advantage for Democrats.

42:16 And can I ask the broader question? Ryan brought this up the other day when we were talking about early voting in Texas. How does post-COVID population increase.

42:27 Affect some of these numbers?

42:28 Like you mentioned, highest early voter turnout since the 70s. Is any of that explained by the fact that Texas has just grown since 2020-ish? Or are we genuinely seeing shocking numbers here? This is about the same turnout as 2018. It's going to land around 53%.

42:48 So it is not actually that unusual. It is with the political environment that we are in that voters are driven to a midterm election. So this is just, I would say, a polarized environment going to the ballots.

43:09 You're seeing Republicans say that as more and more votes are getting turned in, Republicans are narrowing the gap a little bit. How much truth is there to that? How much of the gap is narrowing? Is that something you would expect at this point, or is it sign for hope for Paxton and for Republicans?

43:29 For the side that we know, Republicans are improving their results, but again, they're about 60% non-primary voters that we really don't know what they're going to vote for. If they really significantly lean towards Democrats, maybe every single Democrat will have an advantage in the statewide races. If they lean towards Republicans, maybe it will carry everyone to the finish line.

43:59 So that's the most important group of voters in the electorate.

44:03 Do you have any sense, Theo, of what the numbers would need to be among those voters, like for all the Democrats to prevail, how much of the nonpartisan, unaffiliated voters would they need to be able to secure?

44:18 They would need to win them really easily. And if they end up really closed, Republicans will have an advantage because Trump won the state by more than 10 percent. And it's a Republican-leaning state. Even if it's a blue wave or a blue midterm, the best way for Democrats to win is the non-primary voters.

44:43 Let me put this other chart that you made here and you posted this. You said, as we get full results from day three of early voting in Texas, we now have a clear picture. From now on, we will see a substantial amount of turnout. from voters who do not vote in primaries. And let me just blow this up a bit. Can you explain what you're tracking here, what we're looking at?

45:02 Texas does not have a traditional party registration. So every user, every voter goes to the ballots in March to pick a party primary because they're not assigned as Democrat or Republican. In two different years, they can pick Democrat and Republican in two different years. In the past six years, right now, we are at 36% Democratic primary voters and 34% Republican primary voters. And as the election continues, more non-prospanity.

45:40 Voters go to the ballots.

45:41 So we will have more voters that have an unknown history go to ballots every single day.

45:50 So I've also heard people say that there are more polling locations this cycle in 2024, that it's just kind of there's more hours that they're open. It's easier. It's a little bit easier to vote than 2024. And so there's an apples to oranges element that gets inserted into the calculation that way. Is that true? Like what like what what on the ground changes should we be incorporating into this analysis?

46:19 There have been a lot of lines in front of voting centers that More than 45, 60 minutes of lines. I have heard a lot of people not vote the same day that they go. They just going to say they're going to vote later. We don't know if they're going to vote later.

46:38 If they do, voting.

46:40 Centers should not be a criteria to decide the election, but it's going to come down to the election day if they really going to vote because Voting centers are, I would say, not enough because this was a midterm and no one was expecting a general election like turnout. And some counties have gone to decrease their number of voting centers. I think Dallas County has increased them. So Dallas has seen higher turnout than 2024. Wow. We just have to see where this ends instead of where this starts.

47:20 Yeah, I just want to underscore that for people to take in. Theo's saying that Dallas is seeing higher turnout in a midterm election thus far than they saw any presidential election, which is damn near unprecedented. Theo, I'm just curious. This is my last question. Others can jump in. The polls have tended to have Tallarico up by a little bit.

47:43 Is there anything that you're seeing in the early vote that is changing your opinion of where the numbers may ultimately end up and your sense of whether those polls are more or less accurate?

47:56 In the last polls in the last few weeks, Ken Paxton has... has been losing about 10% of every Republican. So even if we have a really Republican-leaning electorate, I think Ken Paxton would have this disadvantage going into election day. So in any scenario, Tallarico would be the more confident side going into election day. I think governor's race will be more of a decider on who the electorate has more.

48:35 Mm-hmm. Yeah, I wanted to ask about the governor's race, actually. Sorry, I'm like, do you want to go first?

48:39 Well, I was just saying, are we seeing anything interesting in rural areas? Any patterns that are interesting there?

48:45 Definitely rural areas have seen less turnout than urban areas. But again, we have to see two weeks of this election to see who's actually turning out.

48:57 Yeah, and I wanted to ask about the governor's race because, you know, most of the nation is more focused on Tallarico. But, you know, I... Grew up summers in Houston, and then I lived in Austin for a lot of my adult life. And Greg Abbott has been such a large character and fixture in Texas for very long, for a large portion of my life. I actually remember being a busboy at a restaurant in Austin, and I actually wheeled Greg Abbott through the restaurant to his seat. So I have very intimately been aware of Greg Abbott for a long time.

49:31 Your forecast here that I want to put up, shows that it may still be looking pretty good for Abbott. You have here Gina Hinojosa at 46.8% and Abbott at 51.3%. You think her chance of beating Abbott's around 22%. Can you tell us more about that race? And do you think that it's not going to be that close? Do you think it's going to be a nail biter? What do you think about the governor's race?

50:04 This forecast was updated on October 12th. So this is not updated with the early vote. I think it's going to be, it should be updated by weekend. But pre-early vote, Greg Abbo had a confident, he was confident going into the early vote because he's not as unpopular as Paxton. He does not get affected by the national environment as other people do. And he gathers support from all kinds of demographic groups that usually do not vote for Democrats, do not vote for Republicans. So he's kind of an unusual candidate, and we have to see if he will be unusual this election, too. I mean, a lot of things have changed in the last four years, so we have to see the ballots counted.

51:01 You said he was confident going into the early vote.

51:03 Has.

51:04 some of that confidence eroded, you think, as the early vote numbers have come in?

51:09 I think three days of early vote is still not enough data, but if Democrats keep this lead, I would not say he would still be confident.

51:22 All right. What about the House races? Republicans redrew these districts in order to add. They were trying to add five seats. to their Texas congressional delegation that triggered Democrats then redrawing districts in California and elsewhere to add seats to their own tally. Are they going to end up adding seats in Texas or what's your sense at this point?

51:48 A lot of the redistricted Southern districts are leaning towards Democrats because of the Hispanic shift from the 2024 election. So I think Republicans may add one maybe two seats, but it definitely backfired that the redistricting was focused on the Southern voters.

52:12 Um, sorry. Uh, you got another one, Griffin.

52:16 I just want to ask Theo, do you have a car or you're in college? What's the gas prices like and where you are in Texas? Do you even have a car?

52:25 Yeah, I have a car and this, I think I opened that for you a few days ago. Um, The gas station near my campus ran out of diesel. And I was really surprised by that. I've never seen that before. So I think that's maybe affecting a lot of people.

52:45 And you're driving a big truck, right? You're driving like a giant truck. That's Crystal. Well, Crystal, do you have a last question or do we want to send Theo off?

52:55 I was just going to ask Theo what he's studying in college.

52:59 I'm studying astrophysics.

53:01 Oh, there you go. The ability to crunch the numbers makes a lot of sense then, given that. Theo, thank you so much for hanging out with us and breaking down the numbers that you've been seeing. I've been really appreciating your post on Twitter and getting a lot out of it. So we really are grateful and our audience is grateful for your time and your analysis this morning.

53:23 Thank you for having me.

53:24 TheoElections.com. And what's your handle on Twitter so people can follow you and keep tracking these races on their own?

53:31 It's Theo Elections.

53:33 Theo Elections. All right.

53:35 Easy.

53:35 Easy to remember. That'll be in our video description. Theo, thank you very much. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you.

53:45 Let's take a look at what's going on this morning in the stock market, which has not been doing well. And this is one of Trump's favorite metrics heading into the midterm elections here. We've got everything in the red, some pretty significant drops here to start the day. This follows on a very bad day yesterday as well. Griffin, click on the oil tab there up at the top.

54:07 We checked in on this earlier, but this continues to be increase. We've got now Brent up to 116 a barrel, again, approaching the levels that we saw at the peak of the kinetic action with regard to the Iran war. So really dire landscape here. And in terms of the stock market, there's a lot going on. There's fears that the AI bubble may be nearing the top. Don't know if that's real or not, but there are some indications in that direction. Obviously, you have the continued hostilities with the Iran war and some indications we may be going back to, you know, more kinetic action there. Continued attacks from Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously, you've got the Houthi, Yemen, Saudi Arabia situation with the Bab al-Mandab as well. But in

54:59 addition to that, you also have what is being described as Black October. Sagar and I covered a bit of this yesterday, but effectively, we are now experiencing historic levels of cybersecurity incidents that are quite grave. And the people that I'm reading online and watching their podcasts, many of whom are experts and many of whom are sort of optimistic about AI and haven't been in the Doomer Club and aren't effective altruists, are saying, We have a major problem on our hands because the cyber, the hacking capabilities of the AI models, including not even the frontier models that exist now, are at the level of the most expert of human beings. And then guess what? They don't get tired and you can deploy a thousand of them

55:50 at a problem and they can work 24 hours a day. So what does that mean? You already have superhuman hacking capabilities in the hands of literally anyone around the world who wants to have them. Couple that with what Sagar and I talked about yesterday, which is this major security flaw they found in PHP. Again, they used AI. They literally gave AI the command, find vulnerabilities in PHP.

56:17 It did.

56:18 It was something that had been identified previously, but they thought previously when they identified it, oh, this would be too hard for a human to exploit. Well, now with AI, it is no longer too hard to exploit. And this is a flaw that is estimated to impact, ready for this, 70% of all internet websites worldwide. You've already had a bunch of governments take down their websites, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The number of cybersecurity incidents is truly spiraling. Griffin, I think you have a list here.

56:48 of some of the ones that have been tracked. And what people are saying is we are now having many multiple, what would have been the worst of the year incidents that are coming within 48 hours. So you've got Microsoft, you've got CrowdStrike here, autonomous AI agents reportedly used to compromise 100 plus corporate websites. Major US banks say they're dealing with issues with AI agents inside of bank accounts that likely people gave them access to by the way.

57:15 that are taking actions that may not be sanctioned. I saw there was a big, what was the big medical organization?

57:23 Quest Diagnostics, which I just paid a bill for, by the way. So I'm very excited.

57:29 I mean, I can't wait to see it.

57:30 You would be hard pressed to find any person in the country that hasn't had some interaction with Quest Diagnostics because that's the kind of place that you go. I mean, even like if you have to get a drug test before you start a job or you get any kind of blood work done, like, Did we drug.

57:45 Test Ryan before he started this show?

57:47 Yes, and I passed.

57:49 He passed because he had all the right drugs in his system that we were looking for. But in any case, this is extremely dire and I'm seeing all kinds of crazy like, oh, the Internet may just not really exist anymore the way that we feel, you know, the way that it is now because it can't be protected. These things are already out of control and sort of taking over.

58:10 in a way that we didn't expect. Much of this done, of course, this isn't like rogue swarms. Some of it might be, we don't know, but this is war being deployed by malicious human beings because of the expert level of capabilities that you've now put in the hands of anyone who has any sort of nefarious aims.

58:26 Yeah. Go for it, Ryan.

58:28 The thing on the AI bubble front that really sparked the sell-off was that Facebook put out, or Meta, whatever it calls itself now, put out in its SEC filings Basically, they were seeing a drawdown in capital expenditure when it came to this data center build-out. And it's like, oh, we might have reached peak data center build-out. And the revenue coming in isn't matching the $ 10 trillion in debt or whatever that has been piled on top of it.

59:00 And very interestingly, in that same filing, as Gabriel Zuckman, the economist, flagged, they mentioned the California billionaire's tax like 25 times. and say that they are preparing to restructure the company so that Mark Zuckerberg can pay his $ 10 billion wealth tax to California without it diluting his voting shares.

59:22 So they're putting out this new class of non-voting shares connected to the AI build out. giving him a bunch of those shares so that he can then sell them. And because they're non-voting, he remains in full control of the company. So in other words, Zuckerberg promised that he was going to leave California if they passed this wealth tax. Clearly, it was a bluff, and they're structuring the company so that he can pay it if it does pass. Now, polls have it losing very narrowly. Well, maybe this helps.

59:54 But guys, if you're in California, the brother is sitting there waiting to write you a $ 10 billion check. You just have to, like, ask for it. Jensen Wong also said he was not going anywhere. He's like another $ 10 billion guy. That's $ 20 billion from two guys. The number of billionaires in California has actually increased since they put this on the ballot, not decreased. Anyway, that's a side point.

1:00:20 And also, these guys are collectively destroying the internet, so why are you being so nice to them? Like, pass the billionaire's text.

1:00:28 I also just wanted to say what's happening right now is vindicating for the people who are not necessarily like, quote unquote, doomers, but are pro-AI and said that the rollout was wild and irresponsible and reckless and extremely risky. Because obviously right now people are discovering or AI is discovering and then people are discovering what the AI is discovering, which is vulnerabilities that they hadn't even thought about.

1:00:48 And they hadn't even been.

1:00:49 It's like a scenario where you don't know what you don't know. And that is what is especially frightening with AI, because when you don't know what you don't know, the AI might find out what you don't know before you do. And that's kind of what, Griffin, maybe we have some examples that we can put up, but it's happening at a really quick clip right now. That means it can snowball.

1:01:08 People genuinely should. I'm not fear-mongering. I guess in a literal sense, I am mongering some fear because I think there's rational fears to be had right now about what could transpire, not just in the weeks and months to come, the days, weeks and months to come, but in the years to come. And on a political note, people won't forget when this starts going really south that it happened under the watch of this administration that has refused to do virtually anything to rein this in.

1:01:32 And that could haunt them. That could haunt J.D. Vance. that could haunt Republicans who have their.

1:01:38 Fingerprints on this for literally years to come because it is likely to get very bad.

1:01:44 So... Can I just.

1:01:45 I just want to drill down on Emily's point there in the best way as a non-technical person, as I understand it. So normally in the before times, in the before superhuman AI times.

1:01:57 You would.

1:01:58 Like a year ago.

1:01:58 Yeah, like, you know, let's say six months ago.

1:02:02 You would.

1:02:03 hacker would discover this potential exploit. These are things, by the way, that you can sell on like an open market, like, oh, I found a problem in this program, you know, and then companies buy it. And then there's a patch that's developed. And then the patch is deployed so that people can fix this security vulnerability in whatever it is.

1:02:21 Okay.

1:02:22 And over time, given enough time, hackers who would like to exploit that vulnerability can can dig into the patch and see what it is doing and sort of reverse engineer what the problem is, what would be available to be exploited here. Now, when you put the patch out, anyone can go and use AI to say, what is this patch? What is it doing? What is it fixing?

1:02:50 What is the exploit? And like this, you know right away. So whereas previously there was a benefit of time, Because, I mean, with something like PHP, again, 70% of all websites, these are, I was reading someone who was like, we're trying to find our, sir, we can't even find what all's running these things. Like, it takes time for small business owners, you know, the government of Topeka, Kansas, like, I'm just, you know, random entities and small businesses, all these people all around the world have to find and apply this patch. You have to absorb this information, apply the patch. Previously, you had some time. You no longer have that time. And so now the race has sped up to this extraordinary degree. And that's part of why

1:03:34 it's a different landscape now between the people who are on the offense and and the people who are playing defense to try to protect from these hackers who want to get your data and do nefarious things.

1:03:47 And I'd like to read a story from an IT guy who is trying to patch the PHP right now. Now, what I've kind of heard from online is these bigger banks who have large teams are able to patch this easily. But as Crystal said, This is across small businesses, and this is just one story from an IT guy. He says, security called me at 6.12 a.m. today, patch every pH server immediately. I asked what happened, two critical vulnerabilities, no authentication required. He says, how many pH servers do we have?

1:04:21 According to inventory 12. According to reality, nobody knows. We found one running WordPress, three running old internal tools, one under someone's desk. two inside vendor appliances, a forgotten employee directory from 2016, and a server named PHP old do not touch. Naturally that one runs payroll exports. Then the documentation says the documentation for the box. The documentation on the box says, Brian, Brian left in 2019. We called Brian.

1:04:57 He said, oh, wow, that's still running? By 8 a.m., leadership joins the call. CEO, can hackers get in? Security says, yes. Without a password? Security says, yes. CEO, then why do we need passwords? It goes on and on. But, you know, this happened for multiple days without anyone even knowing where the hell the boxes are or what to shut down.

1:05:23 And that is currently happening across companies. all over the country and potentially world. I wanted to pull up this tweet from an anthropic employee, Jason D Clinton, who says as bad as things have gotten in the past four days, they're going to get a lot worse before they get better. Security leaders never let a crisis go to waste. Please go to your boards and ask for help right now.

1:05:46 Not for AI for the basics. We need to hold on for approximately 18 months. Um, and then, let's finish it off with.

1:05:56 A, I am so sick of hearing that shit from people at anthropic and open AI, especially the people at anthropic who at like want us to believe they have moral high ground and all of this.

1:06:05 And they're not the same. I'm just so fucking.

1:06:07 Sick of seeing this stuff from, It's like someone setting fire to your house and being like, someone's got to figure out how to stop these fires.

1:06:16 It's like someone looting small businesses in Paris. Like, come on, man.

1:06:20 Like, if we care about that, it's happening just digitally and you don't give a damn about it.

1:06:24 I don't even know what a dramatic enough word to use. But the problem coming towards us, I think, is still something that we have not as organizational leaders or countries or individuals taken seriously. There was like a moment earlier this year where it was like the mythos freak out or whatever people called it. And I think things did get somewhat better. Like people definitely patched some bugs, but it was another one of these cases where people didn't really intuit the exponential. So it's like, okay, there are these models. They can find a bunch of security vulnerabilities.

1:07:01 Those are probably all of the security vulnerabilities that exist or all the security vulnerabilities that models are ever going to find. And I don't think most people sort of said, okay, the models are going to get much smarter.

1:07:12 They can probably find bugs.

1:07:14 Like crazy bugs, you know, bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do. You know, hardware level, insane stuff, whatever. And so people fix some bugs. And, you know, security professionals still freaking out. CISOs still freaking out. But largely speaking, I think most organizational leaders have.

1:07:36 Somewhat moved on.

1:07:40 And the models have kept going. And I no longer think we're going to be able to just patch all the bugs. I think we're going to have to completely switch the defense model to sort of using the same technology for sort of a new kind of defense shield. And I think it's a huge safety and security issue.

1:08:01 I like the passive voice that the models have moved on as if the models are just independently. I mean, we haven't gotten to full recursive self-improvement yet. So it's not just the models moving on. You, sir, have decided to move the models on. But I love the complete, to Emily's point, you know, denial of any responsibility as if this is all out of their hands. But he's like, yeah, it's going to get worse. The product I am releasing and training and continuing to push the boundaries on is is going to make everything dramatically worse. And by the way, if you're loving the massive cybersecurity hacking incident and potential end of the internet, you're also going to really enjoy the job loss that is apparently picking up steam. This

1:08:44 is from Zero Hudge this morning. He says, the AI layoffs are here. American Express to cut 5% of jobs. They specifically named AI. Now, sometimes these companies, by the way, they want to do layoffs anyway, and they use AI as the excuse. Keep that in mind with these, but still. Barclays to cut 5,000 jobs as AI starts creating efficiency.

1:09:03 eBay confirms job cuts of about 9%. Netflix to lay off 6% of global staff or about 1,000 jobs. And there's more and more data coming out showing that college graduates in AI-exposed fields are getting absolutely fucked.

1:09:20 So.

1:09:21 It's here. So, you know, even the good scenario, and this is something actually Ezra Klein really drilled into this week, and Sagar's been making this point as well. Like, we know the bad scenario, we're all dead. The good scenario is that nobody has jobs and all the power and money is concentrated in the hands of like two people.

1:09:39 So that's, you know, that's the track that they're hoping for here.

1:09:43 Which goes to directly to the point that Sam Altman was making there towards the end. Notice he said, unfortunately and totally unforeseeably, everybody's going to have to use our product for defensive purposes against the offense that we've basically created.

1:10:00 It's a real shame.

1:10:01 Nobody saw that coming. But luckily, we can patch that up for you. And so basically, he would then control the entire internet. Now, the good news is I'm older than all of you guys. I can tell you life before the internet was actually great.

1:10:15 It was fine.

1:10:16 I had to bring a magazine if you went to meet somebody because case they were late you couldn't just scroll your phone you're in the post office line you'd read a magazine instead of being on your phone like it's it's gonna be you know you you call somebody on a landline say we're gonna meet at this time and then you both plan to arrive there at that time and you don't have to actually text walking up around the block turns out you can actually meet without doing that like it i know it sounds crazy How.

1:10:49 Do you find the place, Ryan? You have this thing between your ears.

1:10:54 So we used to put numbers on the buildings.

1:10:57 There's numbers on the buildings?

1:10:58 Numbers on the buildings and the streets would have names and the streets have numbers too. And it corresponds to a location. And then you get from where you are to there based on your kind of knowledge of the area.

1:11:11 You can even use the sun for this, I'm told.

1:11:13 Oh, wow.

1:11:16 Emily's taking it way back. Well, we're going to have to.

1:11:21 We've already discussed that we're becoming preppers. We're in our prepper era. And so we might as well be in our orienteering era.

1:11:26 But I actually just want.

1:11:27 To make a follow up on that kind of like one off line that I made when I was having a temper tantrum earlier about the like looting that people are mad about. That is happening on a massive scale. And it's not poor people or middle class people who are doing it. It is the richest of the rich that are doing looting at a mass scale or enabling looting at a mass scale for the sake of we have to beat China or it's going to happen anyway.

1:11:51 So somebody has to do it responsibly. Well, if somebody has to do it responsibly, this sure as hell isn't doing it responsibly because nobody People are genuinely, like, we will be so lucky if people don't die because of this, but there will be serious, like, what we saw with.

1:12:10 The OpenAI, I'm just.

1:12:12 It's escaping me, Hugging Face.

1:12:14 That's a real company. That's a real company that had to deal with real consequences of essentially somebody breaking into its business. Right. Just like someone would break into your business and move stuff around. That was a real just because it wasn't brick and mortar break in just because it wasn't that doesn't mean that it wasn't a break in.

1:12:31 And because these things are digital and virtual, Sam Altman can get away with talking about them in this passive voice. And because it feels like it's different from our physical world. But these are like real flesh and blood conversations. people that are going to be affected. And it's out of control.

1:12:47 We're seeing the consequences of it on a day-by-day basis. And I feel like what's happening in the last couple of days should be a massive wake-up call. Like, Hugging Face was a wake-up call. And then it still wasn't enough because this is moving so quickly. But hopefully before something horrible happens, truly horrible happens, there's a wake-up call.

1:13:04 I can remember Annie Jacobson talking about how she used AI to find essentially classified information. That's possible right now it's been possible for months and so as the technology is gaining steam it can do things that we don't even know to look for right and that's how she has talked about using it to track down classified information so god give us luck everyone because this is escalating so.

1:13:31 Quickly Yeah, because we clearly don't have wisdom, so we have to rely on luck. Your point is so important, Emily, and really your point about the lack of focus on the rich people looting and the obsessive focus on the poor people looting really warms my heart to hear you say that. It's one of my favorite points I've ever heard you make.

1:13:50 I don't like any of it. I feel like that's consistent.

1:13:53 Anti-looting, I absolutely agree with you 100%. Looting starts and shooting starts. Let me also just say on Hugging Face. is anyone being investigated for these crimes?

1:14:04 No, no.

1:14:06 There's not even a, I mean, there's not even a pretext of it. And OpenAI, they let some researchers in to do a limited analysis. And I really emphasize limited, and we're learning more and more about just how limited that analysis was. We are just, you know, subject to their good graces and their whims as to what we learn about what's going on inside of this company. And so, yeah, they're just that has set now the precedent that your AI that you're training, clearly irresponsibly so, can go out and commit crimes with impunity and no one is held accountable.

1:14:44 That's the precedent that has been set right now.

1:14:47 Because they have ownership over it.

1:14:48 They act like because it's distant and their intention is not to loot, even though they know that the technology that they have developed is going to loot. But because their intention is not to loot, it's different.

1:14:59 It's not.

1:15:00 They know that this is a risk right now.

1:15:03 It kind of feels like they released not a technology, but like a disease that now is spreading like around the world. It has a pandemic feeling to it. And I guess there's these like long term scary things of it all being owned by billionaires and all this job loss. I'm not even sure if that's the most immediate thing, because I mean, what happens if Wells Fargo gets zeroed out?

1:15:27 What happens if an electric grid gets taken down? Those are the things that could happen maybe in the next couple of weeks, potentially.

1:15:35 Wait a few months and we'll find out.

1:15:37 Yeah.

1:15:37 Yeah. And then the anthropic says we have to make it through 18 months and then it'll all get figured out. And their assumption is, is that 18 months from now, the whole world will have AI cybersecurity that they're selling them that's strong enough to fight the AI attackers. And that's all going to happen in 18 months. But it does seem sort of like kind of like a power scaling arms race where it's like, well, even if we make our AI security defense a certain X strong at some point, well, there's just going to be another AI that exploits that one.

1:16:11 And we'll be not just that. What Sam Altman alluded to there is that having your site secured by these super strong AIs creates its own security vulnerabilities. Because they're so strong that we don't understand how they operate. So why, you know, it's like the king who has the Praetorian guard that becomes very strong. Those kings don't tend to last very long. The guards are like, wait a minute.

1:16:40 Why are we protecting this loser?

1:16:42 Right.

1:16:42 And then they just become the kings. That's what's happened throughout history.

1:16:47 But I want you guys to understand this logic that you're laying out right now, Ryan and Griffin. This logic is core to the way that these AI people think about how progress is going to work. I mean, we're already in a place like to analyze the hugging face hack. you had to use AI because it was like, what's the term? I can't even remember the term. It's like an amount of data more than every book that's ever been published.

1:17:15 It's a petabyte.

1:17:16 A petabyte, multiple petabytes, okay? That they had to analyze. So you're already dependent on the AI to analyze the AI's behavior. And nobody understands how these things really work and what they're up to and whether or not they're quote unquote aligned. And the biggest hope of people who are in this space who are hoping to achieve some sort of whatever alignment means is that you will have a smarter AI who's going to tell us how to align the AI. Like, I'm not kidding. This is already where we're at. And so with the hacking thing, in a way, Sam Altman is right. We are already no match for this stuff. We already are in a position where we do have to rely. By the way, the way that they shut down the Hugging Face AI hack, AI,

1:18:02 that's how they did it. So this is already the world that we live in. And so I hope people can use a little bit of imagination to think about where this leads. We're already outsourcing key security tools. components to AI because it's already beyond our capability to deal with. That's where we are today, not in the future. That's where we are today. So what is going to look like a month from now, two months from now, a year from now, when as much as they say, oh, we got to pace the frontier, no one's doing it.

1:18:33 The government is not solving collective action problems saying, no, we're going to pause until we figure out what the fuck is going on here. No, none of that is happening.

1:18:40 Also, can we get a tiny bit of humility from Ed Zitron and his people at this point? Like, this is quite obviously not just made up hype in order to scaremonger for their IPO. Like, I understand why people had that impulse to believe that because these are untrustworthy scammers. But at this point, it's time we kind of shed that idea. Like we're beyond that. I've seen no humility at all from Zitron.

1:19:12 Thoroughly discredited idea.

1:19:14 Zitron is out doing like victory laps about the AI bubble popping, which is like, well, nobody ever disagreed that there was an AI bubble.

1:19:21 Right.

1:19:21 Both can be true.

1:19:24 Yeah.

1:19:24 Well, and that's what I was going to say is it's brilliant.

1:19:26 That goes for a bunch of bunch of y'all viewers, too. Like a little humility on this.

1:19:30 Well, yeah, I'm.

1:19:31 I think they've moved on this, to be honest with you, Ryan. I've seen an evolution in the audience and how they think. Because it's just- Which is fine.

1:19:38 Of course.

1:19:38 How are we supposed to know? I was sympathetic to the.

1:19:41 View, too.

1:19:41 I was in the hype camp for a while, too, myself.

1:19:44 Because it makes, oh, these corporate- I mean, you're right to mistrust these people. Continue to mistrust these people. But the truth is- What you will hear again and again from people who are journalists and people who have been on the inside is, no, they are not hyping it. They are underselling the risk. That's what they're actually doing.

1:20:03 The problem is on the other side. That guy, Dean Ball, came out and admitted, like, oh, yeah, I've been underplaying the problems here.

1:20:08 My bad.

1:20:08 I'm going to do better. He used to be in tech policy at the White House. Now he's back over at OpenAI. And though my bad, I was just lying to the public about the threats here, but I'm going to do better in the future. That is actually what's going on. When you talk to these people one-on-one, it's what Kevin Roos told us when we interviewed him over his book. They are much more dire in their predictions.

1:20:31 Their P-doom is much higher now. then they actually put forward publicly because you sound insane when you talk about some of this stuff. And because guess what? When you want to sell a product, it is actually not good to... advertise to everyone that the product is going to destroy the entire world. That is actually not a good sales pitch.

1:20:49 But now they have a better sales pitch to the point that Ryan made earlier, which is that, yes, the product's going to destroy the world, which is why you need the product to prevent the product from destroying the world. They've created an army, and now they're saying the only way to defeat that army is actually to hire our army, to buy our army government contracts.

1:21:06 Like, that is.

1:21:08 Self-licking ice cream cone.

1:21:09 Disgusting behavior.

1:21:10 That's what they've designed.

1:21:11 The left needs to move from its hype to lock them up. The 2028 candidate needs to start locking people up. And maybe this is Pandora's box and it's too late, but people need to start being punished for this. Yeah, 100%.

1:21:27 Shout out to Bernie. Shout out to Greg Kazar, who've been on it. Shout out to Abdul, who I've seen really focusing on this as well. Yeah, I mean, there have been some good voices, but yes, I agree, Griffin. We need to evolve to that position 100%.

1:21:41 And I'm very scared for our internet business. You know, I am not a coder. We don't have an IT guy on the staff. If something goes wrong, me and Mac have to figure it out. I'm screwed.

1:21:52 Mac's a pretty good vibe coder.

1:21:53 I trust Mac.

1:21:53 All right.

1:21:54 Well, okay. All right. Well, then it's all in Mac's hands. And if Mac can't figure it out, I'm going to have to start sending the show out to people on DVD again. So everyone get a DVD player. It'll be like Netflix. We're going to be mailing breaking points like Netflix.

1:22:08 We'll do that. We'll just go out and stand in the town square and do live performances.

1:22:15 This is going to turn us into open micers.

1:22:17 We'll become like a roving band of performers.

1:22:22 Which people would love. They miss the live shows.

1:22:24 We'll find our way by the stars, as Emily has indicated.

1:22:30 All right. On that optimistic note, let's move on. And it's our favorite time of the Friday show where we answer some of your AMA questions. Let's start off with Evan Riley, who says, with all the AI discussion, can you, or if available, an expert provide some practical steps to safeguard your data from AI?

1:22:53 No.

1:22:54 We have no idea.

1:22:55 You can do some basic stuff.

1:22:57 Really?

1:22:57 What you got, Ryan?

1:23:00 Well, one, you can put your devices, if you want to get hardcore, put your devices on lockdown mode if you use Apple. I don't know. Apple products. I'm not sure what they have on the Android side there. But also you should be using an authenticator app. Like too many people are still, by now everybody understands you got to do two factor, right?

1:23:21 I just don't believe that's going to stop these super intelligent AIs.

1:23:25 All right. Griffin is one of your first targets.

1:23:30 No.

1:23:33 Griffin, password 12345.

1:23:35 If Griffin gets hacked.

1:23:36 We all get hacked.

1:23:37 I'm not talking about what I do, but there are authenticator apps out there that are good for two-factor so that they can't basically steal, get a SIM and steal your phone number so that they can then They can get through the two-factor that uses mobile or email much more easily than they can in an authenticator app. My point about Griffin making himself a target here, you guys know the joke about the two guys who are at a campsite and there's a bear.

1:24:06 And you only have to run faster than the other guy.

1:24:10 Yeah, the guy's lacing up his shoes every time. You can't outrun a bear. And the guy's like, I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you. So all you have to do is outrun Griffin.

1:24:20 Now, the problem is there are now.

1:24:22 Infinite bears with infinite speed. So that's a problem.

1:24:27 Yeah, that that does change the calculation there, doesn't it?

1:24:31 Yeah.

1:24:32 I mean, I saw I was reading someone online who was like the authenticator app. Use like the password generator thing.

1:24:40 One pass.

1:24:41 Yeah.

1:24:41 One pass.

1:24:42 Let them generate the passwords.

1:24:43 Yes.

1:24:44 Yeah.

1:24:45 Yeah.

1:24:45 Do all that. And it's really easy. It's not it's not that hard. Like authenticator app. One pass or some other password app that then generates brand new passwords for everything you use. Stop using the same password for everything.

1:25:00 I mean, the problem is going to be when they get around those security things. They find ways to get around any authentication anyway.

1:25:07 Well, let's not go full nihilist.

1:25:10 We can do what we can do, and it may or may not be sufficient, but at least we won't be the easiest targets to pick off.

1:25:16 Right.

1:25:16 How about that?

1:25:18 It's like the image of when people are like it's like the lock on the door held by like a Cheeto. Like to me, that's that's two factor authentication at this point.

1:25:27 So you have none?

1:25:28 Oh, no.

1:25:30 I mean, I do it. But it was your email on one side. You give them your number on the other.

1:25:34 Exactly.

1:25:35 So don't do that. Use the authenticator app.

1:25:37 OK. Gotcha.

1:25:38 Gotcha.

1:25:39 Gotcha. Gotcha.

1:25:40 Yeah. Did you guys see one of the hacks was of signal and some sort of bug that can make it so that it leaves your mic and your camera on after you've hung up the call? Oh, that was a bad one. That's a really bad one.

1:25:55 Start start taping your webcams or have a business business computer and personal computer.

1:26:01 It's so bad, though. I mean, we freaking carry these around everywhere with us. And so we carry a literal camera and microphone around with us everywhere we go.

1:26:10 Connected straight back to the oligarch database.

1:26:13 Yeah, it's not great. It's not great out there, folks. But do what you can do. At least you won't be the first wave of targets. And maybe they'll start taking things seriously before they get to you then.

1:26:29 This next one for BP from the surprising TYT documentary revealing Lindsey Graham as gay. Will BP create one about a closeted bisexual president? He hides it so well from loving musicals to objectifying men's bodies.

1:26:43 We should.

1:26:45 I was thinking yesterday, I was thinking to tweet out like, I've got a hot scoop on how Sagar and Jenny actually really hates weed.

1:26:53 Yeah, that's the thing is like surprising documentary. You know what would have been more surprising? If the documentary revealed Lindsay was straight. Like they're like, we had him hooking up with women. That would have been more surprising.

1:27:06 Well, you know what's hilarious? Kyle and I interviewed Tim Miller yesterday from The Bulwark. We got, by the way, plug for that because we got into all the, like, left liberal drama stuff.

1:27:17 Oh, good.

1:27:17 So people will probably enjoy it. But anyway, at the beginning, we were just gossiping about Lindsey Graham. And I was about to make the obvious joke of, like, oh, my God, who could have seen this coming? But Tim jumped in and was like, I actually thought he was straight because I hung out with him at a bar one time and he didn't hit on me. He's like, I actually am the one person who is a little bit shocked.

1:27:41 Or Tim.

1:27:41 The old ego is taking a hit there.

1:27:43 Tim, you've aged out. Tim was flirting poorly. No, Tim's aged out. Tim, if you're listening. Look at the guys from the doc. You know, I think Tim is.

1:27:52 I think this was a while ago.

1:27:53 This was a while.

1:27:53 Yeah, Tim would have been in his Republican era, you know.

1:27:57 Yeah, his 20s and 30s.

1:27:59 Yeah.

1:27:59 Julian said he was still hitting on him. And Julian's more in his age category.

1:28:04 Demographic.

1:28:05 Now, that's what I was going to say. I did a piece on this.

1:28:08 And I think the problem with that documentary is they do have this massive claim, which is that Lindsey Graham taped sex with a man who says he was underage. Now, he said he told Lindsey Graham at the time he was 18. But that if you have like news judgment, you realize that's the whole ballgame. Like these people who have already made comments about being hired to have sex with Lindsey Graham. The documentary should center around this brand new piece of information, which is that he potentially taped himself having sex with somebody who was underage. And that's before he gets into the Senate. And then there's possibly this blackmail that's spinning around out there. so i think the documentary didn't do itself any favors by not like

1:28:44 they kind of buried the lead that was literally the last interview yeah but it's just a claim though yeah but it was backed up by documentation so yeah it is just a claim but if you're gonna have someone go on the record with a major claim like that you should make the lead of the documentary anyway.

1:28:57 It's also a bit grandiose to call it closetocracy when you're just talking about one dude who we.

1:29:02 All already knew was gay. Who's not there anymore.

1:29:04 And who's dead. Yes.

1:29:05 All of that.

1:29:05 If I want, yeah, if we're going to get a documentary, I want to know how he died. Like, that's the rabbit hole, the conspiracy theory.

1:29:14 Now we're talking. That's true. Now we're talking.

1:29:17 I know enough about how he lived. Don't need to know anymore.

1:29:22 And to the point of this closeted bisexual president, it does seem like every rally now and it's almost a little tired. But Trump is basically just like, I'm attracted to these guys. Yeah, he's very out. He's very out. And it had me thinking. Our second president. Our second. That's right. You guess who the first one was?

1:29:44 James Buchanan.

1:29:46 James Buchanan.

1:29:47 Have you guys seen the way that Eisenhower serves? The way that Eisenhower serves, you could, oh, well, Abraham Lincoln, there's really something to that one.

1:29:54 There is.

1:29:55 No, there actually is.

1:29:56 Yeah.

1:29:57 But it had me thinking about if Trump somehow lives and continues like surviving, not just through 2028, but maybe even like a 2032, just how disintegrated his mind will be at that point that he will just be just like moaning and commenting and all these Republican primary presidential candidates and just talking about their looks.

1:30:22 How advanced will the gay dementia be by that point?

1:30:26 It's just going to be unreal.

1:30:28 He will be with us for another 100 years.

1:30:32 I see. Emily, I totally agree with you. Kyle is all in on the like the health thing and the hands and all this. And I'm like, you are fooling yourself. This man is never going to die.

1:30:40 He will never die.

1:30:41 He's too powerful.

1:30:42 He has made a deal with the devil and he is going to be with us forever. That is how this is going down.

1:30:48 How is he not ailing right now with his diet?

1:30:52 He is ailing.

1:30:54 Physically, he's not. He looks fine.

1:30:56 Have you heard the sounds that he's making now?

1:30:58 I know he is.

1:30:59 There's a sound that he keeps making. He's like... I know, I know.

1:31:04 But he should be in a wheelchair. He should be in a wheelchair. That's all I'm saying. Based on diet and lack of exercise, he should be in a wheelchair at this point.

1:31:11 Actually, I'm on Majority Report later, and Emma said that one of the things we might talk about is the weird noises he's making. So I actually hadn't tuned into this particular thing to do some research.

1:31:20 There are neurological analyses out there. You'll want to peruse before you go on.

1:31:25 I'm sure Kyle will be all over it. I'll just ask him for some updates before I go on.

1:31:30 He's doing noises like that. So I don't know what that means.

1:31:34 All right.

1:31:34 Our final question from W. Buddington. What are the host's thoughts on Mehdi Hassan's interviews slash debates with Neera Tanden and Matt Iglesias? Have you guys watched any of these?

1:31:44 I haven't watched.

1:31:47 I have only watched a couple of clips. I feel like if I had more time in the day, I would love to like do that sort of thing.

1:31:56 Yeah.

1:31:56 But it's just because it's just raw entertainment. But I just haven't had time to get to them.

1:32:04 Yeah, I actually haven't watched it either because, I don't know, I just, like.

1:32:08 I.

1:32:10 Know Mehdi, I'm sure, did a fantastic job because that's just what he does, but I'm also just... Like, I'm very familiar with the contours of this debate. I don't really need any education on it, so it hasn't made it into my playlist either yet.

1:32:23 Yeah, but that's... Go ahead, Ryan.

1:32:26 I mean, the commenter says, I'd probably agree more with Mehdi on most issues, but I think he's doing a real... disservice to the moderate versus progressive conversation by being overly personal with these interviews slash debates. Emily, what do you think about that?

1:32:42 I haven't watched the debates.

1:32:43 Neera kind of deserves it. I know the one that I did see is him talking about her bringing Netanyahu In to cap. And then she was caught afterwards being like, yeah, it was worth it because, you know, we like got some wealthy person on the board because of it. So, I mean, it's worth getting into some of those things, I think. And maybe that reads as personal. Maybe there were other things. She's kind of personal, too, though.

1:33:09 Of course.

1:33:10 Yeah. Yeah.

1:33:12 She's a big girl, man. She's she's very smart. Like, she's very capable. She handles herself. You know, you don't need to have kid gloves there. She knows what she's doing.

1:33:21 Iglesias, though, can't quite handle it. He's like basically bailing on Twitter.

1:33:26 Yeah.

1:33:28 Really?

1:33:28 Yeah. Iglesias has been face-planting a bit. But Nier is a shooter. I got to respect her, you know? I was like, she's very intelligent. And sometimes I think we can make our ideological opponents stupider in our minds when we're just engaging with them on Twitter. But she's very, very smart. She doesn't really get flustered. And, you know, sometimes it seemed like Maddie was the one getting a little triggered. And so I think, you know, Neera has, it's also impressive that she's showing up to these spaces where people are very, very aggressive to her and she's ready to go. So I had to get some points to Neera for all that.

1:34:10 Ryan, you might remember this famous Real Housewives of New York City quote where Kelly Ben Simone is telling Bethany Frankel, Well, you are in or no, it's not Kelly Ben Simone.

1:34:19 It's I think it's Alexa or Alex McCord, who says, well, you are in high school. I am in Brooklyn. And my version of that right now is, well, you are in. Well, you are in the.

1:34:29 Medihacid near a tandem at Iglesias debate. I am in PBD and Adam Friedland.

1:34:33 That's the place to be. And Griffin is too. And Griffin is too.

1:34:39 What do you want to get out of this, Emily? Like, what did you expect?

1:34:44 Fan experience.

1:34:46 That's really what he said. We got to get on TV sometime.

1:34:50 You do.

1:34:50 All right.

1:34:51 That's going to do it for us this Friday. I hope you enjoyed the midterm madness and all of the AI hacks. Hopefully the internet is still here when we're back Monday morning. We've got one last regular show week. And then the week after that is going to be a massive live stream election coverage. Lots of exciting stuff to get into there. We will also have some exclusive content.

1:35:15 content and exclusive parts of the live stream just for our premium members at breakingpoints.com, which you can, of course, as always, sign up for a free trial or convince, harass, coerce your friends and family to do the same. But yeah, everybody put some money under the mattress and we'll see you on Monday.