10/29/26: Ealy Vote Doom For GOP, Shock Polls In SC & KS, Bill Gates Dire AI Warning

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Join us now to break down all things midterms, the early vote, how the votes are going to come in, what the polls look like. Is Zachary Danini someone I've been really looking forward to speaking with? He is with VoteHub and his analysis on Twitter and elsewhere has been invaluable, certainly to me.

So, Zachary, welcome.

Thank you very much for having me on.

Yeah, of course. So we were just talking to Abdul El-Sayed. So I thought we would start with this because you just posted a long piece on how the votes are likely to come in in Michigan. And so for all of the people who are anticipating these results on election night, how is this going to unfold? Where are the votes going to come from initially? What do you expect here?

Yeah, so I'll zoom out a little.

The U.S.

Doesn't make it easy on us, right? Because each state kind of conducts their own elections. Obviously, there are federal laws and regulations they need to stick to, but how ballots are cast, how they're counted, up to the states. Within each state, usually, it's counties counting the specific ballots.

Then even within Michigan, within counties, you have towns, cities, townships counting in different ways. So this makes it for a pretty chaotic process that we study up on a lot before a big night like next Tuesday. And how Michigan works is there is a bit of preprocessing of absentee ballots. But these mail-in ballots that come in late, on Monday, on Tuesday, so not late as in after the election, I mean, but just later, are often counted right at the end in these major cities, Flint, Saginaw, Detroit, Ann Arbor. And these are very blue areas, and these are very blue ballots. So what this means, just all together, is after 3 a.m., when we have almost, I don't know, 15, 20% of the vote left in Michigan, those last 15 or 20%

of the votes are going to be very good for Al-Sayed, and he could come back if he's losing by a little.

Was this similar, Zachary, to what happened in 2024? I know Mike Rogers and others have said stuff like this in the past.

Go ahead. Yeah.

So in 2020, we saw across the country these absentee ballots getting counted last, and that was the whole thing that happened with January 6th and the fraud claims, et cetera. So a lot of states were like, okay, we need to fix this basically after 2020. So now in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, those ballots are counted first. Michigan, Wisconsin are the two states still, and we saw this some in 2024, where you get still these late drops of tranches of blue ballots from places like Milwaukee, Detroit, that can shift toward Democrats. And we saw this with SLOC in closing really well in 2024.

Gotcha.

So everybody can go ahead and drop your nightmare scenarios. The Senate is coming down to Michigan and it goes late into the night and then there's a big Detroit mail drop. And you can imagine how much chaos Trump is going to pull if that ends up being the scenario. But, Zachary, I wanted to get your overall take on what you're seeing in the early vote. And perhaps you could just start with what we can and can't learn from the early vote because those caveats are important. but also if there are any particular trends that are sticking out to you that you have found noteworthy thus far.

Yeah.

So, of course, caveats with early voting. We don't know who people are voting for. We know many of the people who are voting. We don't even know everyone who's voting yet. But in some states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, we're talking about over two thirds of the votes being cast before Election Day. And what we like to do isn't just look at the overall number and say, oh, more Democrats are voting than Republicans. That's great, or something for Democrats, because that always happens. Election Day is always going to be more red. But what we really like to do is look at people who don't often vote in the past, people who it's a feat, an achievement to mobilize them, get them off the couch, and have

them cast a ballot. And overwhelmingly, when we're looking at people who didn't vote in 2022, maybe didn't even vote in 2024, but are coming out in the last few weeks, they are disproportionately Democratic, which is good for Democrats because it means you're reaching deeper into the base. And we especially see this with two groups. First, young voters. In 2024 in North Carolina, Gen Z turnout between registered Democrats and registered Republicans was similar. This year, it's five to one.

Republican youth turnout has fallen off of a cliff. Second, Hispanic voters, Hispanic turnout is very, very high, whether it's in Texas or even North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, places where you don't think there being as many Hispanics, Hispanic turnout is just very, very strong.

So what's interesting, and I saw this specifically in Florida and in North Carolina, how much, Zachary, can we extrapolate state by state data to nationwide? Or is that just a fool's attitude?

So what I was talking about is those four states, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and then also I'll toss a kind of Louisiana in there where we get really, really, really high quality early vote data. Or in a specific region of the U.S., kind of the southeast. But North Carolina and Texas aren't super similar states, right? Texas is kind of a sunbelt, heavy Hispanic state. North Carolina is kind of mixed white and black and almost closer to the mid-Atlantic region now.

And Florida, of course, is just its own thing.

But the reality is that consistently the last two election cycles, these states did have some red flags for them, for Democrats. And now they have red flags for Republicans. And even in other states where we don't feel we have as high quality data to work with, but it's still something. So that would be Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Kansas. It's still we're seeing the similar trends kind kind of come come out there as well, even if it's not what I'd lead a conversation with.

So, Zachary, if the two groups that are really turning up for Democrats in significant ways are young voters and Hispanic voters, where are the states, the sort of key battleground states where you would expect those groups to be most impactful?

Mm hmm.

So I think Texas leads the list in the sense it's a very Hispanic state. We'll expect about one in four voters on November 3rd in Texas to be Hispanic. And then the Democratic base in states like Texas, Arizona, Florida is more of kind of a young, diverse vote. On the other hand, states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, the base for Democrats is very highly educated, high engagement white voters and often in college towns like Madison or Columbus, basically.

So I.

Don't want to.

Overtly say that that just because, for instance, North Carolina, we're seeing a situation where the electorate just by registration. Again, we don't know who they're voting for. But these people, when you register to vote in North Carolina, you say, I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican and correlates heavily.

With vote choice.

We're seeing a situation where the electorate in North Carolina. could be up to 10 points more blue alone just on who's turning out. That would be Harris winning the people who turn out in 2026 in North Carolina by seven. And that is a North Carolina specific thing. We are not seeing this anywhere else so far. But when you're just seeing that type of environment in a state, obviously states will be different. But still, just the overall picture, states just range from Mediocre to horrific for Republicans so far in what we're seeing.

Wow.

OK.

Can we put C6 up on the screen?

This is interesting. This is from Signal. It's a GOP pollster.

And they say among those who have already voted, 6 percent of Republicans have voted for the Democratic candidate, while 0 percent Democrats have voted for Republicans. Among independents, Democrats are winning by 37 points. Almost all Republican crossover comes from voters who identify as mostly Republican voters.

Rather than strongly Republican.

So if that does hold, how would you see that and extrapolate.

It to some of the data that we've seen so far?

So the early voting stuff, a lot of what we just talked about is turnout, right? There are two ingredients in the recipe to win elections. One is good turnout. People who are more likely to vote for you than not, you want them to come out and vote. Second is persuasion, which is there are people who are pretty high engagement, but they switch cycle to cycle. And it might not be too many people. It might be 5% or 7% of the electorate. But that's the big swings we see from election to election. And so far, you know, it's Democrats.

Turnout looks quite good for them. We're seeing that in this early voting data. And persuasion looks quite good for Democrats. We're seeing these polls where Trump is 20 points underwater. I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise when we're looking at then these national generic ballot polls. And we see a lot of people who said they voted for Trump in 2024 are now supporting Democrats. But so let's slow down here.

All right.

Everything sounds great for Democrats, Zachary, right? Why is the Senate not a lock? Why would you also say the Senate's very competitive? The answer is because Democrats are fighting this battle on red turf. They have to win two states out of Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Alaska. Trump won all four of those states by double digits in 2024. Things are going very well for Democrats and better be going very well for Democrats if they want a chance to win Texas. chance to win Alaska. These are not states that Democrats normally contend in. A Tallarico one point loss in Texas would be the best performance for a Democrat in the state in 32 years.

And at this point, it would still be a big disappointment for Democrats.

All right, Zachary, you had to quick move locations because there was a meeting about to start there, although I kind of like this new background better. But you were saying 2022, tale of two candidates, pick up where you left off. Yes.

A tale of two candidates and two races in 2022. So first of all, let's go to New York three. This is a seat that Biden won by double digits on Long Island. And there were some negative things for Democrats going on. Kathy Hochul did not perform very well in that gubernatorial election. There was some general fatigue from New York voters in general against Democratic leadership. And Republicans flipped the seat, even though Biden won it by double digits.

We'll go to Washington three. Republicans nominated Joe Kent there. This is a seat that Trump won. And in a red year, you'd think this would be a lock for Republicans. Most forecasters, race raters had it as a seat that Republicans should win.

But Joe Kent, who had some ties to.

Fringe right groups, turned out to be a terrible candidate and ended up losing a district he should have won. And this is something we see happen more in midterm years, like 2022 was, 2026 is, because there's no national race that's tying everything together. Different states and different candidates are going to see bigger or smaller shifts usually toward or away from Democrats. And in the case of Susan Collins in Maine, even a shift toward Republicans in a blue year, just because She's such a strong candidate.

In the past.

Well, Zachary, we really appreciate your time, man. Thank you for all of this breakdown and for bearing with us as you had to change rooms. But excellent analysis. We'll have a link to your Twitter in our description. We recommend everybody go and follow him.

Thank you. Thank you, Zachary. Take care.

Turning now to polls. Well, what we have is some very interesting ones from The New York Times.

Absolute shocker. Let's put it up here on the screen.

D1.

Where we have the Senate race that is in the state of South Carolina, officially a toss-up, according to them. 48-48, Dr. Annie Andrews tied with Lindsey Graham's sister, Darlene Graham. In Florida, they find a much tighter race than originally expected, with Ashley Moody at some 50%, Angie Nixon at 44%. Another big headline out of this, which is a crazy, crazy finding.

is Flanagan at 54 and Tafoya only at 40. Previous polls out of the state of Minnesota had this to be a three- or a four-point race. Obviously, we had seen some tightening in the state of South Carolina, Crystal, and we knew also that South Carolina had been visited by Donald Trump, that they were putting $ 5 million in, that Darlene Graham's campaign significantly seemed in trouble. This Darlene Graham situation seems very emblematic of the whole Kemp-Paxton situation.

problem where if he was a normal John Cornyn Republican, I think they would probably win, maybe not by a lot, but, you know, maybe one or two points, which it shouldn't be that close in the first place. But you have a Democratic wave, an energized Democratic base, in addition to an absolute joke of a candidate here with a woman who who literally said something like foreign policy is not my expertise. I mean, that's completely insane, considering that's the, quote, legacy of your dead brother, who for some reason that makes you qualified to be in the United States Senate. Remember, not just appointed to full out the rest of his term.

but for a full six year term to the United States Senate to represent South Carolina in the Senate. And so regardless of whether Darlene Graham, you know, pulls this off and we'll see the humiliating display now so far is just enough of a problem for Republicans who don't need to be spending money and spending Donald Trump's time in the state if they want to try and hang on here. It's just it's humiliating for them. It absolutely is.

I mean, we'll give that we'll just give the caveat. It's the New York Times, one poll. It could be totally wrong, and we'll get to that in a second.

Of course.

Yeah.

Focusing on South Carolina first to begin with, even though the Minnesota poll is in some ways just as striking and more of an outlier, actually, from what the South Carolina poll shows, because other polls have shown very similar dynamic. One of the things that seems to be impacting some of these races in the South is extraordinary Black turnouts.

And some of the analysis I've seen is this has a lot to do with the Supreme Court ruling on majority Black districts, that that has really motivated people. You're seeing a particularly striking turnout in Louisiana, which is the state that was the focus of that Supreme Court ruling. So any of the states that have significant Black populations, that may end up being a very critical factor. South Carolina is one of those states that has a relatively significant Black population. Another issue is I don't really understand all of the intraparty beef here, but Darlene Graham's opponent in the primary comes from the western part of the state, Greenville-Spartanburg area. I know well because I went to Clemson

University for a while. And they apparently are not feeling Darlene Graham. And the polling reflects her really underperforming with Republicans in that part of the state. That being said, I've been watching a lot of Nate Silver podcasts lately, and he basically put it like, It's possible for Annie Andrews to win, but it's going to have to be like a parlay. Like, all of these things are going to have to hit. The Black turnout has to be crazy.

The underperformance in the western part of the state. Republicans stay home. Democrats come out. Like, that's the way it's going to have to be. White college educated voters in South Carolina are much more conservative than in a lot of other parts of the country. And there are much less of a sort of swing between the parties kind of demographic. So that makes the landscape very difficult. I think, you know, I do think Annie Andrews is in the hunt.

I think it is possible for her, but it's still just for me, it's still hard to imagine she's going to be able to fully pull it off. If she does, we are in really wild territory on the Minnesota piece. If we could talk about that for a minute. So this result to me is actually less crazy than it seems on its face, simply because Minnesota is a state.

that if the generic ballot nationwide truly is D plus 11, you would expect the Democratic candidate to win by double digits, whether it's 10 or 14, somewhere in there. Now, you might say, on the other hand, OK, well, Peggy Flanagan is associated. She's part of the Tim Walz government. It's unpopular.

They've had all these issues with fraud. That's dragging her down. True. On the other hand, Minnesota is also the focus of these, you know, Minnesota, Minneapolis, with all of this, you know, insane ICE activity that really inflamed Democratic voters and independents, by the way, in the state. So if you kind of take those as a wash and bring it back to just neutral terrain. It will not shock me at all if we end up with that race not being close at all. And the thing that Nate Cohn points out is that neither party is spending in that race like it's close.

Neither.

The Republicans are not acting like this is a battleground and like they're just a few points down and they can pull it over the line with a dump truck of money. They're not acting like that whatsoever. And so I think that's a really important tell, too, in terms of whether they think that race is actually in range or not.

And picking up on that, I do think that this interesting clip from Nate Silver about whether this is the end of the Trump era or not is very relevant.

Let's take a listen.

So what feels momentous?

If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era. I think he'll still be president for two more years. But the minute the 2028 election campaign begins and if Trump has a bad night as polls show, then. he's a super lame duck, right? You might draw an analogy to Bush after 2006.

I mean, I think that's undoubtedly correct. And I watched this whole podcast with Ezra. I've been, I've mentioned before, I've been listening to a lot of Nate Silver. He has a podcast now with some of the old FiveThirtyEight friends. And you have to give him credit for the fact that he has been pretty directionally correct basically every cycle.

You know, even going back to 2016, He was one of the few that was like, yeah, Trump could still win this thing. You know, yeah, I know what the polls look like, but there's still a chance that, you know, that he pulls this off.

Even Ryan got into a fight.

Do you remember that?

Yeah.

Ryan got into a fight with him.

Oh, really?

No, I don't.

But, you know, last cycle with Trump, he basically said, I remember this very well. It's kind of a jump ball. But if I had to go with my gut, I'd say Trump's going to win. And he was right. And now he is looking at the polling. He's looking at, I think, maybe even more significantly, those quote unquote fundamentals.

And he's saying it would be crazy to think that Democrats are not going to have a very good night and potentially like a really crazy night. And it is possible that the polls are actually underestimating Democrats. And the way that he explained it, which to me made a lot of intuitive sense, as he said, compare it to twenty eighteen. You know, it's another midterm with Trump where you've got tremendous Democratic energy and enthusiasm. And Democrats had a good night. They won the House. They didn't take the Senate because they had a similarly difficult landscape. But it was overall, you know, Democrats, I think, won the popular vote by like eight points. It was a good night for Democrats. But Trump was still popular on the

economy then. His approval rating was not nearly as low. We were not mired in a deeply unpopular war. Gas prices were not $ 4. 30 today. Diesel was not at record-breaking levels. So if you think of 2018, plus you layer on top of that deep disapproval of Trump, horrific economic numbers and pain, and a Republican Party that really has no response on the issues that are most critical to people right now, then it becomes not hard to imagine how the bottom really falls out for them.

Yeah, I agree.

I What people need to remember about 07-08 is that Bush really was a side character. And that sounds very strange to say, but that was at the time of the Barack Obama and the Hillary Clinton dramatic primary. To the extent Bush was relevant, it was about what he was doing in Iraq during the entire financial crisis. The story of the financial crisis was always more about Hank Paulson than about what Bush himself was going to do. Bush, remember, famously tried to even push TARP over the line and it didn't work at first because so many Republicans were like, yeah, I'm not going along with you. I mean, people really don't remember how much power he lost entirely in our system.

That's really when the Obama era began. So that's what's the interesting thing about the Trump era, because the Trump era has lasted longer than any politician in the United States since FDR. And that is because he did not serve in the middle of those of Joe Biden's term. And yet, even though Biden was president, he was a side character to all of the forces that were happening behind the scenes, really, since Trump came down the escalator and Trump's grip on the GOP never broke. So that's what the substantive question of this is, is if you lose multiple red states, which you love won by double digits, then your hold is dead, actually, entirely as a national political figure.

There really is no coming back from it.

And I think what the problem, though, and this is the one issue, which is different than Bush, is that Bush, he would still give Republicans permission to break with him because he was a political pragmatist. Trump will never do that. And there is still a MAGA faithful who love Donald Trump or who have a lot of trust in Donald Trump.

And he and his brittle and narcissistic ego will never allow a J.D. Vance to criticize him. I mean, Crystal, I mean, neither of us probably remember it, but I'm sure you've read a little bit about the 2000 election. You know, Bill Clinton was very personally hurt that Al Gore distanced himself from Bill Clinton. In retrospect, it's actually a bad idea. But, you know, at the time, Al thought he was making the right decision. But it's not like Clinton was demanding that Al Gore leave. you know, to take him on the campaign trail. He was hurt by it, but he didn't say anything. Trump doesn't have that in him. And so that is the last part of this, which is I'm reluctant to say that we can fully move on from where he's a main character.

And that's because of Trump himself.

Yeah. I mean, it's going to be a sort of death rattle where Republicans are going to be screwed because they they will pay a price. for breaking with him, and they will pay a price for not breaking with him. And you're getting a preview of that in a way with the midterm elections right now, because Trump has decided to put himself at the center of all of these races, you know, going to Michigan, where Mike Rogers has tried to be like, oh, I'm not really on board with this Iran war. Well, now there you are on stage hugging President Trump, and he is a deeply unpopular figure in the state of Michigan. And so his midterm convention down in Texas, Ken Paxton admitted on that leaked audio that that was a disaster for him numbers wise. And

the polling bore out that it was actually bad for all Republican candidates took a hit in the polls because of the way he wanted to put himself. at the center of the show and tell people, vote as if I'm on the ballot. Well, guess what? You're underwater in literally every single state in the entire nation. So if people are voting like you're the one on the ballot, you're getting wiped down. And so that is the dynamic that I think you're right is going to continue to play out where Republicans will kind of be damned if they do, damned if they don't. But in terms of his dominance of the entire political conversation and the level of sway that he's had, I do think we are coming to an end of an era here, especially if

the midterms go the way that they're sort of trending at this point.

Yeah. If it is an abject blowout. I mean, the real question is whether people have their permission to break from Trump. And I just I don't see that yet. I know you think you see that.

I still don't.

Here's what I he's never going to give them permission. But what you are going to see is people who some Republicans who calculate exactly what Nate Silver is saying here. This guy's old and he's on the way out. And the next part, what comes after, there's going to be a scramble and there's going to be people positioning themselves in different ways, making different bets about where the smart place to land is ultimately going to be. So there will be some who believe that the smart bet is to now find some principles that especially on something like the Iran war, which is deeply unpopular, right? Or on his incredible earth shattering level of corruption. They may find that, you know what, this is a place where perhaps I

should say something, perhaps I should take a stand. So there's going to be a lot of jockeying and you're going to have some people who make the bet that, no, I'm just going to continue to tie myself to Trump. But I do think if you have this massive shellacking, including in shocking red states, that you will have some who calculate You know what? Now's the time actually to position myself differently for the future.

You know, when we'll really find out is impeachment time is Trump is going to be impeached. We all know it is whether any Republicans will vote. That will be the actual test of whether this is actually going to happen.

I don't know.

I mean, I'm excited to find out. I certainly am.

All right.

Also wanted to keep our focus today on what is going on in the world of AI. Bill Gates sounding increasingly alarmed about the era that we are entering into, saying that he predicts it will be the most chaotic 20 years in human history. Let's take a listen.

My big concern is this 20-year transition period where you'll have winners and losers and a lot of disruption. And we have to get through that. in order to get to that period of abundance.

You think it's 20 years from now?

You know, I pick that as a reasonably safe number. There's a variety of milestones. For example, humanoid robots, you know, are those two or three years away, as some would say, or more like eight years away, as other people would say. There's not that many people saying that given the amount of capital and number of companies, particularly in China, that are working on that, There's no notion that it's unsolvable to have a hand and fingers and be able to deliver physical labor at very, very low cost. And so I could be wrong about that number. It could be slightly less or slightly more. But on that order of magnitude, yes.

If we don't choose to massively slow down or stop, then... We will have robots that can build houses, grow food, do surgery. And none of the things that human labor provides to the economy will be necessary.

None of the things human labor provide will be necessary. 20 chaotic years. I think it's worth noting about Bill Gates, however you feel about him. I've got a lot of thoughts about him myself. This is someone who's obviously not a Luddite, number one. Number two, he's also someone who was initially quite skeptical of the technology itself. The folks at OpenAI had brought him some early versions of ChatGPT, and he was like, eh, I'm not really that impressed.

He thought there would really be a limit to it. And then they got to a point where it thoroughly impressed him. And then he was excited about the technology. And now he's become quite fearful of where we're going, how quickly we're going there and how poorly prepared we are. So, you know, add it to the list of voices of people who know something about the space who are saying that we are about to enter into a period unlike any we have faced in human history. And, you know, you always make this point, Sarah, and I think it's such a good one, too. Even he's, he talks about the theoretical abundance once you, you know, if you can survive this gauntlet of the 20 years of chaos that we're, you know, being plunged into against all of our wills.

And what he describes also is a sort of dystopia that in their minds is is a utopian outcome. So even the good version sounds terrifying. Even the, okay, you survived the 20 years and you get to the other side and we have, quote unquote, abundance, also sounds very disturbing and I think will be uncomfortable for a lot of people.

I totally agree.

And I think this is where the whole probability of doom, this is what's important. Like, oh, AI will kill us. It may not kill your body, but it'll kill your spirit. It'll kill what makes being human even remotely important. You know, the robotics piece is actually the one where I was speaking with some people, very knowledgeable, kind of on the frontier.

They were telling me on the robotics front, we're about a year away from complex like household and or labor tasks. And specifically, the bottleneck is not software. The software exists. Remember, we've showed everybody that video of that robot, which was hooked up to the latest chat GPT model. But what it really exists is the production pipeline to be able to build this stuff, economy at scale, then be able to self-regulate. If you take a look at some household items, the leaps in technology are stunning. I'm talking about fridges.

There are now fridges that are on the market, which can scan the item of food as it goes into your fridge and tells you whenever it expires.

This is readily available. You can go and you can buy it at Home Depot.

Vacuums, a few other household appliances have new AI interfaces that are built in, which are dramatically better than anything you could buy even two or three years ago, not to mention television. But the actual humanoid type robots, which will immediately be put into place at manual labor, is actually not that far away. And right now we're talking about the white collar workforce reduction. And I don't want to minimize that. Let's put, for example, E3 guys, please, up on the screen. Microsoft, Bill Gates' former company, is now literally going to lay off some 60,000 employees, 60,000, in terms of letting them go and offering buyouts. Now, remember, what we're already watching, let's put E4, is Goldman Sachs'

latest estimate. Quote, we are starting to see clear signs that AI impact is spreading beyond the technology sector across non-manufacturing industries, the share of U.S. firms that have adopted AI and regular business now show statistically significant negative correlation with employment growth and statistically significant positive correlation with unemployment.

But I actually think there is a hidden jobs crisis, which is not even remotely measurable, and that is the reduction of of entry-level jobs. Entry-level jobs, we can measure a little bit through youth unemployment, but what we can't necessarily measure are all the jobs that would exist if they hadn't had all of this new technology. AI, work from home, a lot of these things are boons for people who are middle management and upper with some career experience.

But getting your foot in the door, a lot of that, even though the labor itself you were doing was quite menial, what you were really doing is you're learning how to be an adult in the world.

You're learning how to.

Socialize, you know, a lot of people meet their spouses at work, a lot of people, you know, do stuff like this, right? Or and so what the problem overall of what we're watching is that the reduction in that will create a genuine crisis.

Yeah.

I mean, what we're being sold from the ginseng huangs of the world and whatever is, number one, the story about employment that's like, well, every other technological revolution, humans have found other things to do. And number two, when you're asked, OK, well, what sort of things? He'll go to like, well, maybe you'll work at like a high end spa or you'll make artisanal cheese or something like that.

I don't think that's going to be enough. I know I'm not sure about that. If you look at the trends throughout the modern era of human labor, most humans worked as farmers. And then you have industrial revolution. Then you have most people going into manual labor. And then when you start to have technological automation there, then people go into knowledge work. And you've seen the decline, and this is globally, of manufacturing labor. There's obviously still a lot of people that do that. But by and large, the growth has all been in the knowledge sector. There is nowhere else to go. Right. The last bastion of things that humans do better than machines is to think that's it. That's the last frontier. And so once that's gone, no,

there isn't anywhere really to turn. Now, maybe and I have socialist friends who think this and communist friends who think this. Maybe it will be better. Maybe it is a better world that we can aspire to where you have fully automated luxury communism and people can focus on things that are deeper meaning, actually, than just being able having to, you know, go in and clock in. And most people hate their jobs and earn a paycheck in this sort of soul sucking way. There probably is a world that exists that would be superior to that and would have better and deeper meaning. But the way we're barreling towards it is with no brakes and no safety net is utterly terrifying because no one has any answers

for what people will do with their time. And Sagar, you rightly point out that on the current trajectory, the answers about what we're likely to do with our time are quite disturbing, are really quite disturbing indeed. And especially on the track that we're on, where all of the tech is owned in the hands of a handful of people, this is going to result not in some luxury communism.

It's going to result in digital feudalism. That is the trajectory that we are very, very clearly on right now. I also just wanted to highlight another troubling incident as we continue to stumble through what has been called Black October because of all of the mass cybersecurity incidents that we've had around the world and have been impacting people more and more. Put E2 up on the screen. Now, I want to be clear. It is not 100% clear whether or not this cybersecurity breach was AI-driven. However, experts in the field say you should just assume at this point that any hack you're seeing is being at least partially enabled by AI. So we have a cybersecurity issue that forced a major New Mexico hospital to divert patients

and close clinics. They had to race to fix a cybersecurity issue on Monday that forced it to send ambulances to other hospitals, left the state without an emergency department capable of treating the most serious injuries. The University of New Mexico health system told people not to show up at its main hospital in Albuquerque and canceled appointments at its more than 30 clinics. said it was working to resolve the issue, the extent and nature of which was not immediately clear. That network conducts about 900,000 outpatient visits, receives 100,000 emergency room visits each year. It operates the state's only level one trauma center. And this hack took them offline completely for some period of time where they

had to completely divert everyone to other systems. This is a glimpse of the world we live in now and what may be coming at us more and more frequently. And it's just a reminder of how vulnerable we are, whether it's the hospital system, whether it's the banking system, whether it's the electrical grid, whether it's public utilities. We just went, well, not us, but these oligarchs in combination with the Trump government decided just to barrel forward with these models, knowing to some extent the risk, understanding the cybersecurity risk, and basically put superhuman cyber hacking capabilities in the hands of anyone who cares to have them around the globe. So that is the world we're living in.

And we are playing with fire, I think is the best way you can say it.

I totally agree.

My last thought on this, what you were saying about, you know, to great respect to those socialists and communists, I think that reading history, the Industrial Revolution is easily a informing us about what's going to happen. You know, we just go, oh, well, the Industrial Revolution happened and it was all fine.

Yeah, there was about a.

40 or 50 year period of deaths and mass labor strikes and of social strife, of Great Depressions, of silver panics, of mass suicides.

And that's if you live in the developed world.

Yes, exactly.

If you live in the developing world, in a lot of ways, you're still living in that realm.

Yeah, you are still living in that realm. You're exactly right. And so let's think about that, what it was like for the people who lived through that 40 or 50 year transition. It was one of the most extraordinary transitions of their lifetime. Many of them saw it as some of the hardest and most difficult fights that they ever had.

And In our U.S. education system, we learn nothing about the labor movement or the fight for a, you know, for a four hour or for a 12.

Hour work day.

I mean, just to get lunch breaks was a titanic, titanic effort to make sure that there was unionization and worker protection was one of the greatest struggles of the age in which thousands of people died. Tens of thousands of people, if you count people who died from bad working conditions, disease, they lived I'm not saying that's going to happen to us, but I'm saying that is a very instructive path about how difficult it was to live through that.

It's even worse than that, because at least at that point in time, they needed our labor. So we had some leverage. We had some power. If you're talking about a technology that eliminates that need entirely. then what leverage and power do we have left in the system? And that, to me, that dynamic is what is truly terrifying.

That's right. All right.

Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. There'll be a Friday show for tomorrow. And don't forget, next week, it's the big one, Election Day.

We'll see you then.

10/29/26: Ealy Vote Doom For GOP, Shock Polls In SC & KS, Bill Gates Dire AI Warning

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