Is Trump Really Up 10?

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Speaker 17 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.

Speaker 18 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 17 Love It is off today, but we do have a great interview for you all a little later with our old friend and White House colleague, Cal Pent.

Speaker 18 Love It's atoning. Love It is atoning.
Did you get a call?

Speaker 17 What's that?

Speaker 18 Did you get a call?

Speaker 17 Repent?

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 18 He has a lot to repent. Yeah, voicemail, yeah.

Speaker 17 On today's show, we got a big week in politics, Tommy. Joe Biden will become the first president in a century to join a picket line when he visits Detroit in support of the UAW.

Speaker 17 On Wednesday, the second Republican debate is here in California. On Thursday, House Republicans will hold their first Biden impeachment hearing.

Speaker 17 And on Saturday, there's a high probability that they'll shut down the federal government. But first at the center of all these events, per usual, is Donald Trump.

Speaker 17 He'll be skipping the debate again and instead will also speak to auto workers in Detroit.

Speaker 17 He's pressuring House Republicans to impeach Biden and demanded again on Truth Social this weekend that they shut down the government unless they can somehow force the Justice Department to drop their cases against him, which they can't.

Speaker 17 Just a few other notable posts from Trump in the last 72 hours. He suggested that America's top general, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, deserves to be executed.

Speaker 17 He called on all Senate Democrats to resign because New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was indicted.

Speaker 17 He promised that if he wins, he'll order investigations into media outlets like NBC that have criticized him. And then he held a rally in South Carolina.
He was really on one.

Speaker 18 He's having a good time.

Speaker 17 Let's listen.

Speaker 19 The beauty was when I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win. And then they took a poll and they found out Trump was up by about 50 points.
Everyone said, what's going on right here?

Speaker 19 They thought Bush, because Bush supposedly was a military person, great. You know what? He was a military?

Speaker 19 He got us into the Middle East. How did that work out, right?

Speaker 19 But they all thought that Bush might win, Jeb. Remember, Jeb? But you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat.

Speaker 19 But on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. The windmills are driving them crazy.

Speaker 19 They're driving the whales, I think, a little batty.

Speaker 18 I didn't know that Jeb did a rock.

Speaker 17 Jeb did a rock. Yeah.
And the windmills are driving the whales a little baddie. Those are the headlines from the South Carolina rally.

Speaker 18 The whale thing,

Speaker 18 it's like a big right-wing lie now.

Speaker 17 Is it? I didn't even know there was a backstory to it.

Speaker 18 There's been an increased number of whale deaths over the last seven years, and

Speaker 18 a bunch of people are trying to say it's because of offshore wind farms, but there's no evidence of that. Most of the dead whales were hit by boats or caught in nets or something.

Speaker 18 But why not blame windmills if you're Donald Trump?

Speaker 17 The man is deteriorating, Tommy. He's really...

Speaker 17 The Jeb thing is now the set. Remember, we played a couple weeks ago, I think, the clip where he confused Obama and Biden and Hillary.
He had them all mixed up. Now he's got Jeb and George W.

Speaker 17 mixed up.

Speaker 18 It's sad to see him like this.

Speaker 17 It's sad to see him like this. So, you know, and then there's the, then there's his truths.
He's saying that Milley should have been executed.

Speaker 17 If the, you know, in another time, he would have been executed for treason.

Speaker 17 And he was saying this because Mark Milley called the Chinese government after January 6th to let them know that everything was okay. He was just trying to prevent a war.
Trying to prevent a war.

Speaker 17 Essentially. Right.
And then, of course, he said

Speaker 17 on the NBC thing, I say up front, openly, and proudly that when I win the presidency, they and others of the lamestream media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage.

Speaker 17 They are a true threat to democracy, and they should pay a big price for what they've done.

Speaker 18 You know, there have been many times in my life where I did want to punish Comcast.

Speaker 18 It was not often for MSNBC, though.

Speaker 17 I mean, somehow none of this is leading the news, and we are at a moment right now where Trump's political standing is arguably stronger than ever. What do you think is going on?

Speaker 17 Should Democrats and Biden be focusing more on Trump? What's the best way to respond to all this lunacy that I just mentioned? It's just like all our new problems are the old ones, right?

Speaker 18 I mean, obviously they're like unacceptable and scary and in normal times blockbuster news, but I think kind of par for the course in the modern Republican Party.

Speaker 18 You see, Paul Gosar said, quote, in a better society, Quizlings like the strange sodomy promoting General Milley would be hung. Members of Congress.

Speaker 17 He tweeting things like this. That was in his taxpayer-funded newsletter to constituents, Paul Gostar.
And of course, and that did come after, of course, Trump's truth.

Speaker 17 So just in case no one was sure if any lunatics would take their cues from Trump's post, that's happened.

Speaker 18 We got one. We got one dentist out in Arizona.

Speaker 18 I mean, I think if you're in the Biden campaign, it would be a good time to have your military surrogates talking to press about the disrespect to Billy and the military.

Speaker 18 The other thing in that Millie piece is General Millie talks about a event he did with Trump and wounded veterans where Trump said basically, no one wants to see people who are grievously wounded like that, you know, keep them away from me in the future.

Speaker 18 That came out at the time, but I think, but hearing it come from Millie is, again, shocking all over. But I do think we learned in 2016 and 2020 that chasing the Trump outrage of the day is

Speaker 18 not a message. It's not an effective message.
And I think that's even harder now for Biden as president. So he's got this.
dual track job, right? Like you got to do the things you have to do.

Speaker 18 You have to solve inflation,

Speaker 18 keep the government open, deal with climate change, whatever.

Speaker 18 But also, I think, fold what Trump is saying into a broader narrative about the extremism of the Republican Party that also includes our next topic, which is this government shutdown that will probably happen.

Speaker 17 I think that it is time for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to start painting a very clear vision of what a second Trump term could look like.

Speaker 17 And I think that has to include the threats of extremism and violence that Trump is once again voicing. You're totally right that like outrage of the day, Trump says something crazy, whatever.

Speaker 17 It's fun to, he's confusing Jeb and he's talking about fucking whales, right? That's all fun. But like New York Times had a story today, too, over the weekend.

Speaker 17 Trump supporters are threatening the lives and families of the judges overseeing the cases. The prosecutors are now requiring around-the-clock protection.

Speaker 17 The FBI has created a special unit just to deal with the increased threats. increased by 300% against FBI agents.
The Grand Jury in Atlanta, they were doxxed.

Speaker 17 We've talked about this like a couple months ago when it happened, but there was the guy charged with storming the Capitol who was then arrested with two guns and 400 rounds of ammo trying to get to Obama's house.

Speaker 17 Because Trump fucking re-truthed a post that supposedly had Obama's home address. So I do think that like...

Speaker 17 We've talked about this before. Biden has to walk this line.
He can't comment on the prosecutions, right, and all that kind of stuff. But I know

Speaker 17 he's supposed to give a speech, I think, in Arizona about democracy somewhat soon, Biden is. And I do think he has to paint a picture of what Trump wants to do in a second term, right?

Speaker 17 Which Which is clear out the federal bureaucracy, have all loyalists there, make the Justice Department not independent at all, order prosecutions of all his enemies.

Speaker 18 It's pretty scary. It is scary.
And, you know, yeah, when we say it like that,

Speaker 18 it's not good.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I just think we're not doing enough, you know, and I get...

Speaker 17 I get when you poll and it's like, we got to talk about the economy and people are worried about inflation. Like, I'm always on that.
That for sure.

Speaker 17 But there's a lot of scary shit that Trump wants to do, and he's basically promising retribution and revenge, and he's going to have nothing to lose if he wins again.

Speaker 18 I hear you. And I agree with you on some level.
The sort of political strategist part of my brain sometimes thinks everyone watched January 6th happen, and everyone has memory hold it.

Speaker 18 None of the things he's tweeting, or truthing, or posting, or saying at these speeches is going to impact people more than that. So I wonder how effective it will be as a political argument.

Speaker 18 But I do think there is, I mean, clearly clearly the White House has settled on the kind of ultra-maga extremism narrative as being the thing they're running against. I think that's good.

Speaker 18 And it certainly encompasses the actual overt threats to people's lives and security that you're referencing, but also the extreme policy views, shutting down the government, six-week abortion bans, all the things they're trying to do.

Speaker 18 And, you know,

Speaker 18 it's a little complicated, but it's

Speaker 18 important.

Speaker 17 The memory hole issue is a real problem.

Speaker 17 And I just go back to, you know, I was worried that the argument about democracy would work in 2022. And then the January 6th hearings happened.
They were prime time.

Speaker 17 And Joe Biden made a lot of speeches about democracy. And you know what?

Speaker 17 That did have an effect, not because it convinced people who weren't convinced before, but it reminded people of how scary it was.

Speaker 17 And I think reminding people about Trump and what he's going to do and what could happen.

Speaker 17 And not just that he's saying bad things, but that it will lead to actions that could tangibly impact our lives, I think, is going to be really important.

Speaker 17 So the rest of the Republican field will debate on Wednesday. They're all polling further behind Trump than ever before, both nationally and in the early states.

Speaker 17 Ron DeSantis has probably lost the most ground with candidates like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy nipping at his heels in some polls, but none of them are even close to Trump at this point.

Speaker 17 Tommy, you're heading up to the debate on Wednesday.

Speaker 18 I'm excited.

Speaker 17 What you going to be watching for there? What you going to be doing up there?

Speaker 18 I've always wanted to go to the Reagan Library. I've heard there's an exhibit.
There's an Oval Office up there. No, we're going to go see what kind of crowds they got.
Maybe talk to some supporters.

Speaker 18 I get to go into the spin room, I hope. Fun.
Maybe some of the candidates will be in there, get to talk to them.

Speaker 17 You're going to talk to your friend Jeff Rowe?

Speaker 18 That would be interesting.

Speaker 17 Maybe Jason Miller from the Trump campaign?

Speaker 18 Well, look, sometimes in the one-on-one general election debates, usually it's surrogates that go into the spin room. In the primary debates, sometimes the candidates go in.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 18 So, but who knows? I mean,

Speaker 18 Vivek is so thirsty. I'm sure that guy will go in.
But it will be fun to tell people unironically that I'm from the crooked media. I think that's something I'm looking forward to.

Speaker 18 I think, as anyone with eyeballs knows,

Speaker 18 my face screams Republican. And I want to see if I can infiltrate, you know,

Speaker 18 get them to tell me their secrets. I want to see what Gavin Newsom's up to.
He's apparently going to be up there.

Speaker 17 I hear he's got a debate set with Ron DeSantis for November 30th, live on Fox.

Speaker 18 In Georgia, right?

Speaker 17 I didn't know it was in Georgia, yeah, I guess. I think that's what they were talking about.
Yeah, ask him him about that.

Speaker 17 You're going to have to have a question ready for Vivek because you're right. He's thirsty and he'll talk to anyone and might think that you're a Republican.
So that's pretty good.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, odds are. But, you know, look, I think in terms of strategy,

Speaker 18 all these candidates who are debating, which is folks not named Trump, need to decide, are we trying to win or are we trying to get a job in Trump's cabinet?

Speaker 18 And it's not clear to me where everybody stands on this question. If you're trying to win, you're going to have to run against Donald Trump and make an argument against him that peels away voters.

Speaker 18 For a long time, I thought that was an electability argument.

Speaker 18 Some of the polls you referenced earlier that shows him doing better head-to-head against Biden is going to make that electability argument very hard. Maybe they missed their window, but I mean,

Speaker 18 these guys,

Speaker 18 these other candidates aren't really trying. They're running against each other, not against Trump.

Speaker 17 It is hard for me to...

Speaker 17 get myself to believe that this debate matters at all. It doesn't.

Speaker 17 Because I do think the window has, I mean, look, so if you're,

Speaker 17 take a couple of the candidates, right? If you're Nikki Haley, you can probably still make an electability case against Trump because she's got a bunch of polls.

Speaker 17 The NBC poll shows her doing better than any other candidate against Joe Biden. She has a couple of polls like that now.
So she could probably make that case.

Speaker 18 She's got some donor money coming up.

Speaker 17 She's got some donor money. She had a little momentum if I were her.
But again, if she doesn't spend the whole time making a case against Donald Trump,

Speaker 17 forget it, you know? Right.

Speaker 18 Well, then you ask yourself, is she going for VP or Secretary of State?

Speaker 17 Right. Because they're both great jobs.

Speaker 18 Yeah. And best of luck to you.

Speaker 17 But although, yeah, now I wonder if she's screwed herself on that because now she's criticized Trump just enough that she might have pissed him off.

Speaker 17 I don't know what you do if you're Ron DeSantis because he can't make the electability argument anymore. He's cratered in a lot of polls.
Like, I don't know what he does in this debate.

Speaker 18 He's at the point where you start to wonder if he's going to be told by people around him, advisors, donors, friends, that he's harming himself by staying in and that he might need to drop out and refocus on Florida and think about running some other time.

Speaker 17 Yeah, no, I think we could get pretty close to that. If I were Chris Christie, like, look, I don't think Chris Christie is going anywhere in this primary.
He's doing his thing.

Speaker 17 But I would turn every single answer into an opportunity to make the case why Donald Trump is, you know, horrible for the country, a threat to democracy.

Speaker 17 And not only that case, I'd go after the other people on that stage for not saying that. What else does he got to lose? He's not winning at this point.

Speaker 17 And he didn't take all those opportunities in the last debate. Yeah.
No. Did you see the Wall Street Journal editorial gave them all an argument to use about Donald Trump a couple days ago?

Speaker 17 They had an editorial that said, why is Mr. Trump afraid to confront other Republicans without the aid of a teleprompter? Is he worried he'd look his age at 77 next to younger candidates?

Speaker 18 Ooh, that's good. I like that.
Well, you know, Trump was so enthused about skipping the first and second debate that he's now going to skip the third.

Speaker 18 So I don't know that they're doing a good job baiting him into these things.

Speaker 17 Yeah. I mean, they just, the name of the game here is like, someone's got to get attention for themselves.

Speaker 17 If they go out there and they just talk about how bad Joe Biden is and how bad the Democrats are and take a glancing shot at Trump about like, you know, adding to the dead or this or that, like, it's just not, it's not going to work.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and they're all going to get drawn into the news of the day.

Speaker 18 They're going to get pulled into conversations about the government shutdown and things that might not necessarily create the headlines they want, so it'll be tough.

Speaker 18 It'll be fun to see how pissed Mike Pence gets at for.

Speaker 17 I thought about Mike Pence.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so did a lot of people.

Speaker 18 Yeah, who else is going to be up there?

Speaker 17 Tim Scott's telling people that it's important to start drawing contrasts with the other candidates. So maybe Tim Scott's learned that he's going to have to get a little feisty.

Speaker 18 Girlfriends in the spin room.

Speaker 17 Well, that's what I would do if I were him. He just

Speaker 17 pulls off us. He's like, ah, ta-da.

Speaker 18 Just to Zoom.

Speaker 17 All right. Well, have fun up there.
Thank you. I'm excited to go.
You can also join us live on the Discord. Sign up to be a friend of the pod.
You can sign up at crooked.com/slash friends.

Speaker 17 We'll be having a live reaction. And then right after the debate, Love It and Dan and I will be right here in the studio and we'll be recording the pod right after the debate.

Speaker 17 And then we'll talk to you and find out what you're seeing up at the debate.

Speaker 18 I'll call in from the Veix Tour bus or whatever.

Speaker 17 Love that. So Trump's opponents, as we said, have been trying to argue that they're more electable against Joe Biden.
But unfortunately for them and us, the polls are telling a different story.

Speaker 17 The averages show that a Trump and Biden rematch would basically be tied if the election were held today, though there is a new Washington Post ABC poll that has Trump leading Biden by 52 to 42.

Speaker 17 Now, even the Post's own story about the poll strongly suggests it's an outlier. I actually have never seen a major media outlet be that honest in their write-up that their own poll is an outlier.

Speaker 17 It's pretty unusual. But there's also a new NBC news poll that also came out the same day as the Post poll that shows the race tied at 46.46, which is still pretty close for comfort.

Speaker 17 I've seen a lot of good arguments that the Post poll is an outlier. I believe them.
But I've also heard from a lot of people who are pretty freaked out. I'm sure you have too.

Speaker 17 What are your thoughts on this poll in the NBC poll?

Speaker 18 I mean, the kind of obvious and condescending point is that no one should worry about any poll over a year from an election, right?

Speaker 18 But like, you know, we all do worry about the trajectory and what it means about political standing. And I do think that

Speaker 18 the outlier arguments that were... convincing to me were that I don't think any other poll has shown Trump winning by that wide of a margin and getting over 50%.

Speaker 17 Two elections have shown he hasn't gotten. Yeah, even the election he actually actually won in 2016,

Speaker 17 he didn't break 47%.

Speaker 18 And the other piece of it was the poll had Trump leading Biden with young voters by 20 points.

Speaker 18 And I'm certainly, you know, we've talked about it on the show. There's been great write-ups by Nate Cohn at the New York Times about challenges Biden is having with young voters.

Speaker 18 But I've never seen Trump winning by 20 points. Have you?

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 20 No. No.

Speaker 17 I think, look, it's clear it's an outlier. And I also think

Speaker 17 it is a good argument that polls a year from the the election, especially polls when there's a heated Republican primary going on and there's an incumbent president who's had

Speaker 17 middling approval ratings, to say the least, are not going to be very predictive, right?

Speaker 17 That said,

Speaker 17 we know this is going to be a close election. Like, Trump's not going to win by 10.
Biden's not going to win by 10. It's going to be close and

Speaker 17 it's going to be within the margin in a lot of these swing states right now. There's some arguments that I don't necessarily love when polls like this come out.

Speaker 17 One argument is, you know, people try to unskew them, right? Or they say that like it's the media trying to make a close race or something like that. And there's all this like conspiracy around it.

Speaker 17 I don't love that. I don't love the, oh, they all told us there were, all the polls were wrong in 2022 and it said they were a red wave coming.
The polls were not wrong, not that wrong in 2022.

Speaker 17 In fact, they were more accurate in 2022 than in any election since 1998. The punditry was off in 2022.
Got a little ahead of itself talking about the red wave, but the polls were pretty good.

Speaker 18 Well, ABC had a really bad Wisconsin poll.

Speaker 17 ABC had, yeah, which is, again, interesting.

Speaker 18 One huge outlier. One outlier, one outlet.
It's interesting that it's the same one. Yeah, I mean, look, we should also point out that a lot of Republicans don't seem to believe this poll.

Speaker 18 So it's not just a bunch of liberals unskewing the polls.

Speaker 18 Also, you know, look, there's margin of error on survey data, and it could be plus or minus four points for both the Biden number and the Trump margin. So that could result in an outcome like this.

Speaker 17 I wonder what you thought about this, though.

Speaker 18 Dan Pfeiffer was

Speaker 18 hard on ABC for releasing the poll and then criticizing it.

Speaker 17 And I didn't agree with that.

Speaker 18 Because imagine a scenario where ABC and the Post do a poll. It's really favorable for Trump.
They don't trust the data, so they don't release it and that somehow leaks.

Speaker 18 That to me leads to the kind of conspiracy theory mega fever dream stuff.

Speaker 17 Yeah, then they're getting subpoenaed by Jim Jordan and hauled before Congress like their fucking Twitter or something. For suppressing the votes.
No, I don't.

Speaker 17 Look, I mean, Dan's not here to defend himself, but I didn't.

Speaker 17 We'll see what he says on the Thursday pod.

Speaker 17 But I didn't quite agree with that either. Or he said, publish it, but then stand by it.
I think they're standing by it. They're just saying, like, here are our results.
We're standing by them.

Speaker 17 But by the way, they're not in line with most of the other polls and most of the other media outlets, which I think is a responsible thing to do. Yeah, I thought it was responsible, too.

Speaker 18 I think part of Dan's critique was they called it an outlier, but I think the last ABC Washington Post survey had Trump up six.

Speaker 18 So it was not that much of an outlier, which frankly is more cause for concern.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well,

Speaker 17 there could be something interesting in the methodology there, right?

Speaker 17 You pointed out, I guess that Wisconsin poll was not 2022, that was 2020, right? Yes. Because that was Biden up by like a million points in Wisconsin.

Speaker 17 So there is something a little goofy about the ABC Washington Post polls, even though they're rated an A-pollster, but the A-pollsters have problems, right? I do think it's interesting.

Speaker 17 I wonder what you think about

Speaker 17 so all these national polls are really tight.

Speaker 17 I think the Real Clear Politics average, which also isn't perfect, has like Trump up 1.8 on average. The state polls, especially like swing state polls, are...

Speaker 17 So far like better for Biden than the national polls, which is interesting. There was a CNN poll of New Hampshire last week that has Biden up 52.40 on Trump in New Hampshire.

Speaker 17 Biden won New Hampshire by seven points in 2020, so that would be a better result for Biden.

Speaker 17 And that's obviously a state where a lot of people pay close attention, especially because there's a primary going on. So I do wonder why the state polls are somewhat better.

Speaker 18 Yeah, that was very surprising. You'd expect New Hampshire to be hearing a lot of anti-Biden messages right now, and for that, maybe to do a number on its approval rating.

Speaker 18 I just think the last thing people need to understand is you don't do a poll, get the data back, and the results are the results.

Speaker 18 Every pollster weights it in certain ways based on what they think the actual electorate will look like at the time of the election. So that's how you see a large variance.

Speaker 17 The one thing I wonder about with New Hampshire and the electorate there is it is more college-educated than the nation as a whole. It's whiter than the nation as a whole.

Speaker 17 And we know that college-educated white voters are giving Democrats and Joe Biden much bigger margins than ever before. And they are turning out much more than ever before.

Speaker 17 That's why we're doing so well in a lot of these special elections, which just happen to be in areas where there are a lot of college-educated white voters disproportionately.

Speaker 17 And I noticed this from the NBC poll right up, which is it says, a greater share of Republican voters than Democratic voters have high high interest in the upcoming election, while key parts of the Democratic base, younger voters, black voters, and Latino voters, have lower interest than at this same point in past election cycles.

Speaker 17 So even if you have the Washington Post as an outlier and some of these other polls, you could start to see a pattern where

Speaker 17 sort of lower interest voters, people who aren't consuming the news as much, which tend to be younger, disproportionately black and Latino, are either not participating in polls, are less interested in the election, are less enthusiastic about Joe Biden.

Speaker 17 And either way, it does seem like this is a group of voters that you're really going to want to focus on if you're the Biden campaign to make sure that they are engaged in turnout. Absolutely.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 I also just wonder, why do a bunch of national polls this far out? Why not just do a bunch of state-based stuff?

Speaker 17 If I was

Speaker 17 running a media organization with enough money to do a really high-quality poll, I would absolutely start doing state polls.

Speaker 18 I would not waste my money on it. I need a bunch of data out of Texas and California.
I would love to.

Speaker 17 I was looking before we did this and I was like, there hasn't been a like high-quality Georgia poll in a long, long time. Arizona.

Speaker 17 There was a couple Pennsylvania and Michigan ones, again, where Biden was actually winning in those polls a couple weeks ago.

Speaker 17 So, you know, I'd love to see more state polls. In the NBC poll, 60% of Democrats said that they want someone else to run.

Speaker 17 Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota just said in an interview this week that he's still thinking about mounting a primary challenge against Joe Biden. What do you think?

Speaker 17 Good idea, bad idea? doesn't really matter.

Speaker 18 I pay a lot of attention to politics. I don't know who Dean Phillips is.

Speaker 17 Return Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota. Is he here?

Speaker 17 Couldn't pick a mud of a potato.

Speaker 18 That's why I'm less worried about this one. If it was some well-known governor or, you know, a senator or someone with like a name ID to primary Biden, that might make me worried.
Right.

Speaker 18 The example you always hear is about Ted Kennedy, his primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Speaker 18 The context there was, though, that the bottom had fallen out for Jimmy Carter. I think

Speaker 18 before Kennedy decided to run, he was beating Carter like two to one in polls. And then they went through this brutal primary.

Speaker 18 Carter beat Kennedy, and Kennedy didn't, he didn't really, it was acrimonious all the way to the convention. And Kennedy gave this famous speech and kind of ripped the party apart.

Speaker 18 And so I think a lot of Biden staff worked for Carter. They're very sensitive to this.
But

Speaker 18 Dean Phillips ain't Ted Kennedy.

Speaker 17 know, like

Speaker 17 I've thought about this a lot because I don't want it to appear that we think, like, oh, everyone get in line behind Joe Biden.

Speaker 17 It's going to be easy, and he's obviously the strongest candidate, and he's going to win, and blah, blah, blah. Like, we're all scared, right? We're pretty anxious about this.

Speaker 17 But, like, here's, here's the reality of the situation. Biden has had plenty of people tell him to step aside.

Speaker 17 You know, one of his favorite columnists, David Ignatius in the Washington Post, was doing it, right?

Speaker 18 That one probably cut deep.

Speaker 17 He has had no shortage of people telling him to step aside. He he has refused.
Plenty of Democrats could have launched a primary campaign against him over the last year. They have all refused.

Speaker 17 And if any of them decided to change their minds, right?

Speaker 17 Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, tomorrow, they just woke up and decided they wanted to challenge Biden, they'd have four months to put together a presidential campaign, raise money, hire staff, get on TV, get well known, and then somehow make an argument to anxious Democrats that actually they are the best candidate to beat Donald Trump instead of a sitting Democratic president who is the only person who beat him last time.

Speaker 17 Yeah. It's just like you can have your anxieties over the Biden situation, but then you have to go to, all right, what's the alternative?

Speaker 18 Yeah, and I think the alternative requires someone with a chance of winning, running against Biden in a primary, and no one has decided to do that.

Speaker 18 And listen, yeah, to your point, I am just as worried about some of the polling you talked about, sort of under the hood in this NBC poll and the ABC one, some of the concerns about age, some of the frustration about the economy, despite the fact that there's all these economic indicators that make us think that the economy is actually getting better, but people aren't feeling it.

Speaker 18 So there's a lot to be worried about.

Speaker 18 But Dean Phillips is not on my list.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and you just, like I said, you really have to play it out in your head.

Speaker 17 Like, it's either, you know, Joe Biden on his primary stage with Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock or whoever you have up there, and they're all debating and fighting over the next three months, four months before we get to South Carolina.

Speaker 17 Or Biden steps aside and now you're picturing Kamala Harris up on stage with Newsom and Shapiro and all of these same people that I just mentioned.

Speaker 17 And like, really think if that's going to make you sleep easier. And then also like, none of these people want to do it.
Someone's got to sit up and run, you know?

Speaker 18 Yeah, I'm very much in the camp of, I don't know, I worry, I don't think primaries are bad.

Speaker 18 I sometimes think a vigorous debate about policy and getting our message out all over the place can be a good thing.

Speaker 18 Sometimes it pulls a bunch of candidates to the far left or to the far right and hurts in the general election.

Speaker 18 Generally, I think you can deal with that and candidates all end up tacking back to the middle and whatever. It's a 50-50 country.
That's how these races end up.

Speaker 18 If there were some sort of democratic primary happening,

Speaker 18 maybe it would help Joe Biden emerge stronger if he defeated them.

Speaker 18 However, we still are at this point where whether or not pundits and donors and voters want an alternative, someone has to step up and run.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 And like,

Speaker 17 If it, if someone stepped up a year ago, it would be a different story. Again, it's really hard to do that four months out from the first primary.

Speaker 18 And your message would likely just be, I like almost everything that Biden has done substantively. I just think he's too old.
And maybe that's a potent message. Yeah.

Speaker 18 But someone, again, no one's done it

Speaker 17 except our boy Dean Phillips, who we don't, we could not recognize.

Speaker 18 Not sure that's a real person.

Speaker 2 Hey, weirdos. I'm Alina and I'm Ash.

Speaker 3 And we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 4 Each week we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 7 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 14 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 9 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 16 Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 12 Yay! Woo! Aye!

Speaker 21 Think advertising on TikTok isn't for your business? Think again.

Speaker 22 We've generated over 100,000 leads, which has converted into over 40,000 sales for our pet insurance policies. My name is Trey Farrow.
I am the CEO of Spot Pet Insurance.

Speaker 22 TikTok's Smart Plus AI-powered automation takes the guesswork out of targeting, bidding, and optimizing creative. If I can advertise on TikTok, you can too.

Speaker 21 Drive more leads and scale your business today only on TikTok. Head over to getstarted.tiktok.com slash tick tock ads.

Speaker 23 A Better Help Ad. This November, BetterHelp is encouraging people to reach out, grab lunch with an old friend, call your parents, or even find support in therapy.

Speaker 23 BetterHelp makes it easy with its therapist match commitment and over 12 years of online therapy experience, matching members with qualified professionals.

Speaker 23 And just like that lunch with an old friend, once you do reach out, you'll wonder, why didn't I do this sooner? Start now at betterhelp.com for 10% off your first month.

Speaker 17 Let's talk about the impending government shutdown since our last show. Here are some words used to describe Kevin McCarthy's leadership of the House Republicans.

Speaker 17 Chaos, a total shit show, dysfunctional, and can't count. Those were all quotes from different Republican members of Congress, and here's a few more.
This is not

Speaker 17 That last one was, of course, the pioneer of government shutdowns, Newt Gingrich. So the White House is

Speaker 17 Matt Gates. Matt Goetz, yeah, Congressman Goetz.
Matt Gets. That's so insane.
Deranged Matt Goetz. I like that.
So the White House is using some of this criticism in a new memo.

Speaker 17 They're starting to warn people about the real-world consequences of a shutdown, which, again, seems more and more likely with each passing day.

Speaker 17 How do you think Biden and the Democrats can win this fight, or at the very least, make sure that Republicans get the blame that they deserve?

Speaker 18 I mean, I think Republicans are doing a very good job of making sure they get the blame they deserve in terms of the shutdown.

Speaker 18 There's also just the other fact that Biden and McCarthy cut a spending deal around the debt ceiling, and then McCarthy's just completely violated it. And that's the reason we're in this problem.

Speaker 18 So I do think the White House is doing the right things. They're highlighting all the quotes from Republicans criticizing Republican handling in the House.

Speaker 18 They're highlighting programs that would get cut or get stopped if there was a government shutdown and the ways people would get harmed.

Speaker 18 I think the bigger risk for Biden, though, is less the short-term shutdown debate than just like the long-term harm to the economy.

Speaker 18 Because if there's a, you know, a long UAW strike, if there's a government shutdown, you got to people, these people in Congress, they're arsonists.

Speaker 18 You know, I mean, that gates, like they want to shut down the government and hurt the economy to hurt Joe Biden long term to help Donald Trump. Like, that's their plan.

Speaker 17 And that, what you just said is probably the best argument for Biden and the Democrats to make now explicitly, which I think they're doing.

Speaker 17 You know, the White House and a lot of Democratic surrogates today are out there talking about how 7 million women and children who rely on food assistance could be turned away at a grocery store pretty soon if the government shut down, because they depend on food assistance.

Speaker 17 People in the military could go without paychecks. There'd be a lot of air travel delays and cancellations.
There wouldn't be food inspections.

Speaker 17 Disaster relief would suffer.

Speaker 18 You were talking about border security last week, trying to cut that and some of the spending bills.

Speaker 17 Kevin McCarthy said that today because Donald Trump, again, is saying, if you don't get everything you want, they should shut it down.

Speaker 17 Kevin McCarthy is like, well, I think our military should get paid and that our border patrol agent should get paid because they wouldn't, Kevin.

Speaker 17 So you and I were talking about this last week, but did you you see Data for Progress did some polling on this? Like they tested the most effective messages around a shutdown.

Speaker 17 Sure enough, this is what the White House was using, but the most effective messages are messages about how this would hurt our economy, like you just said, all the things that I just mentioned that would be real-world effects on people, and also saying that this kind of extremism and petty politics is exactly why people hate Washington, because there's a bunch of fucking arsonists in the Congress, like you just said.

Speaker 17 And then the least effective are arguments about how they're holding the government hostage to defund the Trump prosecutions and impeach Joe Biden. People actually don't give a shit about that.

Speaker 18 That makes sense. I wouldn't give a shit about that either if I were just trying to live my life.
I also think you can tie it all back to Trump because he is the maestro here.

Speaker 18 He's like the offensive coordinator, like truthing out the next play to the base, to McCarthy, to everybody saying, you know, shut it down.

Speaker 17 Yeah. They care about themselves.
They care about their own political futures and they don't give a shit about you. And people are going to be hurt as a result just because they're playing games.

Speaker 17 All right. Finally, Joe Biden's weaponized justice department is at it again with yet another politicized indictment of the Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Speaker 17 New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has been accused of bribery and corruption, specifically abusing his power to influence arms sales to Egypt.

Speaker 17 The FBI searched the senator's home and found $100,000 worth of gold bars and $480,000 in cash that was stuffed in envelopes and jacket pockets.

Speaker 17 They also got text, phone calls, shell company payments, lots of evidence in this indictment.

Speaker 17 Multiple Democrats in New Jersey and elsewhere have called on Menendez to resign, but at a press conference Monday, he said he's not going anywhere. Let's listen.

Speaker 24 I recognize this will be the biggest fight yet, but as I have stated throughout this whole process, I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I still will be the New Jersey's senior senator.

Speaker 24 Now, this may seem old-fashioned, but these were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years.

Speaker 17 Tommy, is that what you do? Do you just take money every once in a while out of your savings account?

Speaker 17 It's just cash, stuff it in envelopes, stuff it in your jacket pockets, and then also buy some gold? You got some gold under your bed?

Speaker 18 The gold bars.

Speaker 18 It's really amazing.

Speaker 17 And then he googled price kilo gold.

Speaker 18 I should just say, I want to say at the top, full disclosure, I thought Bob Menendez was a terrible United States senator for a long time before this indictment, before the previous indictment.

Speaker 18 He was indicted in 2015 for similar things, for using his office to help out donors and friends.

Speaker 17 But I think he's hung jury, so he escaped that one.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and you know, frankly, that was a much harder case to prosecute, I think, because he had a pre-existing relationship. This one is going to be trouble for him.

Speaker 18 But, you know, look, Menendez thinks that, you know, another decade or four of sanctions on Cuba will change the government there. I think that's stupid.
He was opposed to the Iran deal.

Speaker 18 So he's just sort of hawkish, and I think he's bad on policy, but that I just want to get that out of the way and get off my chest. But yeah, I mean, he is in big trouble here, it seems.

Speaker 18 I highly recommend folks read the full indictment.

Speaker 17 Read the indictment. And if you don't want to read the 39-page indictment, the New York Times has some great stories about it.
The details are shocking. It's very blatant.
It's multiple parts.

Speaker 17 It's multiple parts. It's Menendez and his wife and a businessman that they knew that has a lot of business in Egypt.

Speaker 17 So it was like Menendez taking all these actions and pressuring all these people as part of his role on the Fort Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then just getting money.

Speaker 18 Yeah, so there's a couple of different parts. First of all, he used his position as U.S.
Senator and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help push for U.S. assistance to Egypt.

Speaker 18 This was at a time when there were a lot of real serious human rights considerations when it came to Egypt. Egypt is the second biggest recipient of military aid from the U.S.
after Israel.

Speaker 18 I think they get about a billion dollars a year in foreign military financing funds. And Menendez could put a hold on that funding if he wanted or help push it through if he did not.

Speaker 18 So the allegation is that he got money to help push that money through. He also allegedly did favors to help a business associated with one of the individuals who was bribing him.

Speaker 18 Basically, that guy had a monopoly on the export of halal meats to Egypt from the U.S. And he pushed Biden to nominate a U.S.

Speaker 18 attorney in New Jersey that Menendez felt he he could control to prevent some of his buddies from getting prosecuted. So there are...

Speaker 17 Really fucking mobster stuff.

Speaker 18 Real mob stuff, multiple strands,

Speaker 18 super brazen.

Speaker 18 And a lot of this seemingly was going through his girlfriend's now wife.

Speaker 17 Who was texting about it?

Speaker 18 She was sending a lot of texts that were not helpful.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 outside of New Jersey, so you get a lot of New Jersey Democrats have called on him to resign.

Speaker 17 Phil Murphy, the governor, a lot of the congressional delegation, a lot of like county chairs and stuff like that.

Speaker 17 Outside of New Jersey, we got John Fetterman was the first senator to call on him to resign. Sherrod Brown just called on him today.
Why haven't more Democrats, do you think, called on him to resign?

Speaker 17 And should they?

Speaker 18 I'm surprised by this, too. I mean, look, you are,

Speaker 18 we're all deserve the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but you don't deserve to be U.S. Senator.
You don't deserve to be the chair of a committee.

Speaker 18 And again, you know, Menendez, he ghost wrote a letter for the Egyptians that was then sent to his colleagues about the need to push for a military aid.

Speaker 18 Menendez had a private meeting with some Egyptian official, and then one of these businessmen that was allegedly bribing him bought 22 one-ounce gold bars. They had serial numbers on them.

Speaker 18 One was then found at his house. These guys were renting cars or purchasing cars for Menendez's wife.
And, you know, after the feds approached Menendez, he wrote his wife a check for $23,000.

Speaker 18 She then wrote a check back to one of the guys who allegedly has been bribing him all this time. And the memo section said personal loans.
So it seems like they got him dead to rights.

Speaker 18 There's all these evidence that Menendez knows he was busted and is trying to sort of clean up after himself.

Speaker 18 And so I guess my question is whether they're just worried that Menendez is vindictive enough to basically screw over the whole Democratic Party to do something that might take away the Democratic majority.

Speaker 18 Like I'm not sure what they think he's threatening that would, you know, lead them to treat him with kid gloves here.

Speaker 17 Look,

Speaker 17 I get that if someone is indicted who you serve with, right, that if the indictment is vague, right, you want you like let the legal process, you don't want to set a rule that every indictment automatically disqualifies you, right?

Speaker 17 Because prosecutors can get things wrong, people can be innocent. Like, like you said, there's a presumption of innocence.

Speaker 17 You read this indictment, you read the stories, you read what they already have as evidence. Again,

Speaker 17 you know, let the legal process go forward, but like he doesn't have to be fucking a Democratic senator from New Jersey anymore. No.

Speaker 17 Andy Kim, who's one of the Democratic members of Congress, has already announced that he's going to run against Menendez in the primary. Menendez is up, by the way, in 2024.

Speaker 17 That's important context. There may be other Democratic members of Congress who run in that race as well.
We'll see what happens.

Speaker 18 I bet it gets pretty crowded.

Speaker 17 For sure.

Speaker 17 And look, I guess from the Biden administration's perspective, I sort of get it because if Joe Biden's standard for both the Trump prosecution and now the prosecution of his own son is going to be like, it's my Justice Department.

Speaker 17 I'm going to let the process play out. I'm not going to say anything.
Like, I get that, right? Now, obviously, Joe Biden should not endorse Bob Menendez for real re-election.

Speaker 17 But for the other senators, like, come on.

Speaker 18 I know. I don't get it.
I don't know if it's.

Speaker 17 A lot of people called on Al Franken to resign just based on some news stories. Right.
I don't know. There's no indictment.

Speaker 18 I don't know if it's a collegial thing. I don't know if they're friends.
I don't know if these are, you know, a bunch of people who are too used to being in these jobs. It's weird.

Speaker 18 But again, you know, Menendez

Speaker 18 did a favor for someone, tried to interfere in the prosecution of one of these guys who was bribing him.

Speaker 18 Menendez then called the guy from his Senate office who he just helped out, and then they had a celebratory dinner a few days later in a champagne toast, and they took photos of it.

Speaker 18 Like, this is how brazen it was. And the other element of this is, you know, this isn't just like Bob Menendez helping out a corrupt businessman in New Jersey.

Speaker 18 He's providing information to the government of Egypt about foreign military sales from the United States.

Speaker 18 He passed along to his girlfriend information about the number of American employees and locally based Egyptian employees at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
I don't know why you would do that.

Speaker 18 That's a very,

Speaker 18 it's weird information to want.

Speaker 17 I was wondering if it was like to get them to get so that they could lobby them directly.

Speaker 18 I don't know if it's lobbying them. I don't know if it's looking for people to extract intelligence from.

Speaker 18 It's very strange. It was a shocking piece of this puzzle to me.

Speaker 17 And of course, it goes without saying that the Republican likely nominee has been charged with 91 felony counts. And part of our argument against him is like, hey, no one is above the fucking law.

Speaker 17 And this guy's got a bunch of criminal charges. And again, Donald Trump enjoys the presumption of innocence as well.

Speaker 17 But Donald Trump should absolutely not be serving as as president again and should not hold any public office again. And what I would like to see is

Speaker 17 I'd love for Dana Perino, who is moderating the debate on Wednesday, to ask these Republican candidates what they think about Bob Menendez. Yeah, I'm sure everybody's

Speaker 17 saying that answer.

Speaker 17 They're all going to say that, yeah, of course, Bob Menendez should resign, but Donald Trump, he's okay.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and look, what Menendez will say is, look, I was just doing what any U.S. senator does.
You lobby for businesses in your state, you help out constituents, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 18 But normally constituents don't lease your wife a Mercedes for 60 grand.

Speaker 17 No, that's like you do some constituent services, you get some gold bars.

Speaker 17 That's always what happens.

Speaker 18 It's just, you know, the guy's in a privileged position. He has access to a lot of information.
He will no longer be chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Speaker 18 He's already stepped down from that role. But I don't, look, I don't get why some Democrat didn't primary him a long time ago.

Speaker 17 You know who's defending him? Who? George Santos. Okay, good.
George Santos said he shouldn't resent. He should.
We should tell you everything he needs to know.

Speaker 17 Okay, before we go to break, quick housekeeping note. This week is apparently Banned Book Week, because that's where we are as a country right now.

Speaker 17 It's a good reminder to go to votesaveamerica.com where you can find all kinds of ways to help fight book bans across the country. And we also have some fun merch in the Crooked Store.

Speaker 17 There's Free the Books merch. There's Are You Afraid of the Books t-shirts that are well-timed for Halloween.
And there are kids' tees and onesies that say, read me a banned book.

Speaker 17 Check it all out at crooked.com slash store.

Speaker 17 When we come back, Tommy talks to our friend and and former White House colleague, Cal Penn, about the tentative deal to end the writer's strike, youth outreach in the 2024 campaign, and much more.

Speaker 3 Hey, weirdos, I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the host of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 4 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 7 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 14 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 9 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 16 Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 12 Yay! Woo!

Speaker 21 Think advertising on TikTok isn't for your business?

Speaker 22 Think again. We've generated over 100,000 leads, which has converted into over 40,000 sales for our pet insurance policies.
My name is Trey Farrow. I am the CEO of Spot Pet Insurance.

Speaker 22 TikTok's Smart Plus AI-powered automation takes the guesswork out of targeting, bidding, and optimizing creative. If I can advertise on TikTok, you can too.

Speaker 21 Drive more leads and scale your business today only on TikTok. Head over to getstarted.tiktok.com/slash TikTok ads.

Speaker 23 A BetterHelp ad. This November, BetterHelp is encouraging people to reach out, grab lunch with an old friend, call your parents, or even find support in therapy.

Speaker 23 BetterHelp makes it easy with its therapist match commitment and over 12 years of online therapy experience, matching members with qualified professionals.

Speaker 23 And just like that lunch with an old friend, once you do reach out, you'll wonder, why didn't I do this sooner? Start now at betterhelp.com for 10% off your first month.

Speaker 18 Our guest today is an actor. He's a former White House staffer during the Obama administration.
And most importantly, he's my good friend, Cal Penn. It's great to see you.

Speaker 20 Good to see you, man.

Speaker 17 How are you?

Speaker 18 I am great.

Speaker 18 I saw a bunch of Iowa folks over the weekend, which made me think of you because you weren't based in Iowa, but you might as well have been given the number of times the Obama campaign asked you to go there to turn out the vote, to travel around the state, to talk about climate.

Speaker 18 What else were you doing?

Speaker 18 A million things.

Speaker 20 Yeah, mostly youth outreach with

Speaker 20 Team Iowa and then a little bit of arts policy committee work. But that was,

Speaker 20 man, it feels like so long ago, but also 50 years into the future, just in terms of the wholesomeness and the lack of vitriol.

Speaker 18 I know.

Speaker 18 It's a different time.

Speaker 20 But you know what? By far the best part.

Speaker 20 I was able to come out there because that was the last time the screenwriters went on strike. So I wasn't able to shoot the TV show House, which is why I was able to join the campaign.

Speaker 17 Oh, that's right.

Speaker 18 Well, we're going to talk about strikes in a minute.

Speaker 18 Let's talk about it right now because we booked this interview a few weeks ago because we were thinking it would be important to check in on the ongoing strikes in Hollywood.

Speaker 18 On Sunday night, there was some good news about a potential breakthrough in the negotiations between the Writers Guild and the studios. I've not seen all the details.

Speaker 18 I'm not sure that a lot of folks have outside of the bargaining committee, but it sounds like the writers got more compensation for streaming content, some rules around a baseline for the number of writers in a room, some sort of protections when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Speaker 18 So that's great. And in the coming days, the writers will vote on whether or not to accept that deal.
But the WGA leadership is excited about it, which is telling. So fingers crossed there.

Speaker 18 But there is another, actually considerably larger union representing actors and TV and radio artists that is still on strike.

Speaker 18 I don't believe those negotiations have been happening recently, but I want to check in with you on that. So this is the SAG AFTRA union.

Speaker 18 What are they hoping to get out of the strike?

Speaker 18 What are the demands they're looking for?

Speaker 20 So in some senses, full disclosure, I'm a member of both unions, but I've been a SAG AFTRA member for two decades.

Speaker 20 I think both unions wanted

Speaker 20 things that are pretty common in labor disputes, wanting to make sure that wages for workers reflect everything from inflation to a fair reflection of profits if the industry was particularly profitable.

Speaker 20 But then one of the sort of newer pieces is related to AI in both unions.

Speaker 20 And, you know, I know your listeners probably know a lot about this, but the kind of thing that I would underscore, you hear this happening a lot with discussions about labor in general. But

Speaker 20 the...

Speaker 20 It's kind of a decision point and a point of reflection within the industry, predominantly in television, because what you used to have was, you know, you would have things called residuals.

Speaker 20 So for writers and actors, it's money that you would get every time something airs on television, for example.

Speaker 20 And a lot of that structure is really archaic because it was set up when everything was on these big four networks, right?

Speaker 20 And so if your show, the Nielsen rating, said 24 million people watched it last night, the ad space, you know, Ford would spend a ton on your show.

Speaker 20 And so essentially, that's how they could track what was fair in terms of compensation.

Speaker 20 Since almost everything is streaming now, those algorithms are proprietary, understandably, right, by these platforms. But because they're hiding who's watching how much,

Speaker 20 and even though ads are part of, you know, you can get Hulu, for example, with ads,

Speaker 20 there isn't a good way for labor to kind of track what's fairly owed to us. So that's a big point of contention that I think you're hearing a lot about.

Speaker 20 And then AI is, you know, kind of the other piece of it.

Speaker 18 You know, this morning we were texting back and forth and you were telling me how you just you checked in on some of your old residuals.

Speaker 18 You were looking up the very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas check, which

Speaker 18 how much was that again?

Speaker 20 It was, I shit you nuts,

Speaker 20 $4.20.

Speaker 18 Come on, how is that possible?

Speaker 17 It's, you know,

Speaker 20 those movies, and, you know, that's actually

Speaker 20 a good segue. First of all, it seemed like a joke, right?

Speaker 20 You and I had spoken and I just logged onto the app to make sure that my memory was correct and I wasn't somehow making a ton of money off of residuals from that movie. But that movie, man,

Speaker 20 we signed on to it in 2004, right? It was obviously very competitive, really long audition process. But I had done a movie called Van Wilder with Ryan Reynolds.

Speaker 20 That was the only real big thing that I had done. John Cho, who plays Harold, had done American Pie and I think a couple other things.

Speaker 20 Basically, they offer us this deal, and they're like, look, take it or leave it. You know, it's X amount of money.

Speaker 20 What I would tell you is it was a decent sort of middle class salary was what that reflection was, which is wonderful when you're just starting out.

Speaker 20 And it was a three-picture option, which is also very common. And so, you know, nobody was making tons of money.

Speaker 20 And there also weren't things in the contract that are common called box office bumps or bumps. So meaning if your movie makes, you know, $20 million, you get a check for however much you get it.

Speaker 20 So we didn't have any of that stuff. So the movie comes out and actually it tanked at the box office.
Everybody forgets this. It tanked initially.
And then it did really bonkers' numbers on DVD

Speaker 20 and, I guess, now streaming.

Speaker 20 But we didn't get a share of that, right? We didn't get a proportional share of that because we had sort of signed this three-picture option. And that was the fair contract that we'd signed, right?

Speaker 20 I knew exactly what I was signing. The hope there, which turned out to be true, was if your movie does well, it'll hopefully launch your career and you're fairly compensated down the line.

Speaker 20 But what's kind of crazy when I talk to friends about this is you see that, okay, on DVD, that first movie initially made $50 million.

Speaker 20 And everyone's like, dude, so you got a sweet check, right? I'm like, no, not really.

Speaker 20 You know, my salary for that movie lasted me a couple of months after agent manager commissions and taxes, which, just to be clear, is fantastic for an actor.

Speaker 20 You know, I just want to make clear that I'm not whining about this. That's the dream.
The dream is to put a roof over your head, pay your rent from your acting.

Speaker 20 But I think when, you know, obviously in Jess sent you the 420 screenshot, although it's accurate.

Speaker 20 But

Speaker 20 one of the real things that I think when you see an industry like this get restructured in this way, you know, for Screen Actors Guild, as an actor, you have to make $26,500 a year minimum to qualify for your health insurance.

Speaker 20 And more than 80% of our union members don't make that money acting.

Speaker 17 Wow.

Speaker 20 And so they're, you know, they either don't have health insurance or they have to get it through other means.

Speaker 20 So when you're, when you're hearing about things, I totally understand why celebrities and people like myself

Speaker 20 are kind of becoming the face of this on TV. But the reality is the vast majority of our union brothers and sisters are working class folks working their hearts out for a dream that they have.

Speaker 20 They're working very, very hard.

Speaker 20 And they don't often, you know, the difference between a $4 and 20 cent residuals check could literally be the difference between whether they hit that cap for their health insurance or not.

Speaker 18 No, I think that's such an important point because look, even when I met you back in 2007, I remember remember all of us being like, whoa, that guy's a movie star. There's another one on the way.

Speaker 18 There's a third one. Like, he must be loaded.
I wonder if he came out here on a private jet and you're like, I have a one bedroom.

Speaker 17 Yeah, yeah. Kind of, that I can kind of afford.

Speaker 20 You guys came out to LA and you saw me driving my mom's car and you're like, oh, okay.

Speaker 18 But like, you know, I think the title of actor gets flattened, right?

Speaker 18 And you think of Tom Cruise and you think of Penelope Cruz, all the cruises, and you think that everyone with the title of actor is rich, but I think it's important to understand that you can be wildly successful in the industry.

Speaker 18 You can be a part of a three-part franchise that made, what, a quarter of a billion dollars, but a lot of the actors don't receive anything near what they deserve for that work.

Speaker 20 Yeah, that's a good point too, man. I think, you know, the focus of these disputes should obviously be on the majority of members who are

Speaker 20 working and middle-class folks.

Speaker 20 But the point you raise is a good one. Like, if you made somebody that kind of money, there's nothing wrong with wanting what you're fairly entitled to.

Speaker 17 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
So, Cal,

Speaker 18 the AI part of these negotiations is so fascinating and complicated. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what the technology is new.
It's also evolving so quickly.

Speaker 18 But what are the general principles that you think we could say artists writ large, I mean, writers, actors, whomever you want to fold into this, should ask for to be protected from what we know about AI?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so I think,

Speaker 20 like you said, the Writers Guild hasn't released the fine print yet because I think they're still mulling it over.

Speaker 20 But my presumption is that they got some guarantees that AI wouldn't be used, meaning, you know, no inputs of work that was written by

Speaker 20 human writers can go into this algorithm to spit out something that would make us obsolete.

Speaker 20 I think from the acting perspective, we already have, you know, you do a TV show, a movie, a commercial with special effects, and you're already your face, your body, your voice is being scanned.

Speaker 20 And in some of the early Netflix language, you know, there was stuff in there that allowed them to use modifications of your voice without your consent, without additional compensation.

Speaker 20 So the fear there, which is not far-fetched at all, especially if the president of these companies means anything, is that you don't want to participate in these scans and then find out that someone's making a movie with your name, likeness, voice.

Speaker 20 all of that stuff that they have and that they own without your say and without any additional compensation.

Speaker 20 and it's really not far-fetched it happens you know it happens already um and it's it's in these it's in these contracts already so i think having those protections in there is is really critical for both the actors and the writers yeah i know someone like i think sarah silverman for example is suing some of these companies and saying basically hey somebody uploaded a bunch of my books, a bunch of my jokes.

Speaker 18 They scraped my identity essentially. And now they're plagiarizing that to recreate stuff in my own voice.
Like, of course, that doesn't seem fair.

Speaker 20 No, it's not fair. And also, you know, let's just be clear.

Speaker 20 Like, I know there's a lot of bad blood right now because there's a double strike, but, you know, the executives and the folks who run these companies as

Speaker 20 much as I look forward to working with them again, you know, they're not writers. They're not creative talent, right? And so to basically underscore, like, you need that human element.

Speaker 20 or at least you want to have that human element. Audiences have sort of said time and again, they like the idea of the human element remaining.

Speaker 20 Remember, you know, if you look back to okay, when TV started, people said radio is going to die. When DVD came out, like, oh, people aren't going to go to the theater.

Speaker 20 People still love being together. They love seeing plays.
They like going for those big blockbuster movies.

Speaker 20 So I think hanging on to that culturally is something that's relevant, but really pushing those companies on, making sure that they do the right thing is important.

Speaker 20 The other thing that I think makes sense to bring up is, you know, these are unique challenges right now for actors and writers,

Speaker 20 but they're things that are going to affect other labor unions and other industries. You're already seeing it come up in conversations about lawyers, for example.

Speaker 20 Obviously, they're not unionized, so their power is not sort of what it is in a singular union.

Speaker 20 I can't believe that Andrew Yang was the only dude talking about UBI a couple of years ago, but the idea that the technology has changed that quickly and that people's jobs are at risk in a very real way is like, look, we're going to have to start talking about what that means down the line because not all of these professions have unions that are strong enough and concentrated enough.

Speaker 20 So it begs the larger question of what kind of world do we want to live in.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and that's an important point as part of these negotiations generally. I mean, I'm sure you can put in near-term language to, I think, sort of mitigate some of the risk from AI.

Speaker 18 But I think what you'll hear from people on the executive side, people who, you know, friends of mine who are writers, friends who are showrunners, is that a lot of people believe that it's impossible to stop technological progress, that these new tools will get incorporated into the writing process, the show creation process in some way, and that fighting it is to some extent a losing battle.

Speaker 18 And the question becomes just like, how much can you mitigate that risk, right?

Speaker 20 Yeah, there was an older New York Times article from May, sort of when the Writer Strike started out about AI, and it mentioned in there, you know, their

Speaker 20 unions generally had not been successful in fighting technological changes.

Speaker 20 So if what we assume is in the Writers Guild contract is in fact in there, it's obviously a huge win for writers and talent, but also arguably a huge win for any working professional whose job is impacted by any technological change.

Speaker 20 And that's kind of the generational question to ask ourselves. I also would argue

Speaker 20 that asking for fair regulation, compensation, and a framework doesn't mean that you're against the technology, right?

Speaker 20 There are obviously uses for all of these technologies that could benefit humankind. Just the idea that it's a zero-sum game to me is very silly.

Speaker 20 And that quite going to go back to that question of like, what does it mean for the sake of humanity that we actually put checks and balances on these things?

Speaker 20 I don't think it's impossible. I think it's impossible if you have a bunch of 63-year-olds running the Senate who don't understand how, you know, how they're

Speaker 20 in life. Isn't that the idea?

Speaker 17 Young people. Yeah, I know, exactly.
I don't know.

Speaker 20 But, you know, like in the in

Speaker 20 the House, for example, Don Beyer is doing a master's in AI. So like we need more people like that who are willing to kind of go in and study up on the stuff.

Speaker 18 Yes, I'm intellectually curious. Also, I'm look,

Speaker 18 I don't think people are good at making predictions. I've been reading the Walter Isaacs and Elon Musk book, which is hagiography in a lot of ways.

Speaker 18 But I was reading about how one of the mistakes he made at Tesla is they automated as many things as they could in their assembly line, built it, and then realized that a lot of the automation they had created actually was slowing things down and that people were faster and better at it and more cost efficient.

Speaker 18 So they de-automated, ripped out a bunch of machines and threw them out of the back and hired people. So, you know, I think even guys like Elon get this stuff wrong.

Speaker 18 So, Cal, you know, in addition to being an actor and a writer, you worked in politics for a long time.

Speaker 18 And as we were saying at the top, you've done a ton of work reaching out to young voters, trying to get them fired up to care, to realize, you know, that this matters.

Speaker 18 When you're talking to, say, 18 to 30-year-olds about things that are on their minds, what they want to see in a leader, what are you hearing these days?

Speaker 20 I'm hearing that I'm old. I'm like the old guy.

Speaker 20 There was a,

Speaker 20 I can't remember who it was, but there was a

Speaker 20 college student at one of the guest lectures I did who was like, you know, on the walk back to the car or whatever, he was like, hey, you know, I noticed you were saying, you were saying, you know, my generation needs to have.

Speaker 20 a lot more patience. I'm like, yeah, you know, we live in a vibrant democracy.
There are checks and balances.

Speaker 20 The shit doesn't happen as quickly as sending like a nasty tweet, which obviously feels very good, but doesn't necessarily accomplish anything.

Speaker 20 So I just think like, you know, your generation needs to understand analog a little bit. And he goes,

Speaker 20 so just out of curiosity, like, so I get it, right? You grew up in an analog world and you're young enough to know how digital stuff works. I grew up in this, and he pulls out his phone.

Speaker 20 He's like, this is my whole reality, right? Like ever since I was born, I could get all the information I wanted immediately. on my phone.
And it's always going to be like that.

Speaker 20 So why am I the one who should have patience instead of the other way around? I was like, okay, fuck, fine, fine. I feel old, right? I feel old that you're right.

Speaker 20 But I think to answer your question, Tommy, that like that interaction then kind of made me feel like, yeah, the system should adapt a little more.

Speaker 20 I'm still obviously still three branches of government, fiber democracy.

Speaker 20 We need to hang on to that. But the idea that change should happen a lot quicker is something that I find myself talking about a lot, especially with something like, so for example, the IRA, right?

Speaker 20 Inflation Reduction Act has this insane, insane climate stuff in there that we would have killed for in the Obama administration.

Speaker 20 And I remember having youth climate meetings and young people who would protest outside the gates of the White House while we were having fucking meetings on climate because they just wanted to push the president that much harder to do that much more.

Speaker 20 And, you know, it's now, what, 12 years later after some of those meetings, and now they're getting it and they're getting more than what they had asked for in the ira under biden but those people who were 18 at the time are no longer considered part of the youth vote block right and the kids who are young are for obvious reasons not feeling any sense of reward for work that they're putting in to climate so this idea that like you know, a lot of this stuff, we realize it works because we're feeling good about the work that we put in and seeing the results of that work.

Speaker 20 And my worry is that you've got this bold climate action and people aren't celebrating it the way that they should. Like this stuff really is happening because of all the...

Speaker 20 I interviewed the president when I was guest hosting the Daily Show a couple of months ago and I asked him that question. You know, what led to all this aggressive climate stuff?

Speaker 20 And he said, it's young people. It was two decades of youth advocacy on climate that created the political space for him to act on that.

Speaker 20 And so I just think like, you know, I get that we live in sort of a cynical world, but to

Speaker 20 not focus on the things that we've won is such a mistake. And I think it lets the other side win a lot.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, climate's the hardest one because I think that

Speaker 18 the younger you are, the more of a stake you have in the future of the planet. Personally, I mean, look, I now have a 10-month-old daughter, so I feel an enormous sense of responsibility to her.

Speaker 18 But also, the things that have happened, as you note, in the IRA are monumental. But the implementation of that law is taking some time, probably longer than we all want.

Speaker 18 And the impact is really about mitigating the effects of climate change rather than stopping it or reversing it yet.

Speaker 18 So I both, I hear you and that people should be proud of how much their work in blood, sweat, and tears and fighting for climate policy have moved the needle. But also I get why people are frustrated

Speaker 18 about the lack of additional progress.

Speaker 18 I mean, is that the number one thing you're hearing though when you're talking to young voters about what they want out of a president or what they want to see Biden do?

Speaker 20 I mean, I think, look,

Speaker 20 I think I'm hearing the same thing that everybody else is hearing, which is like, I think people think generally, maybe an audience like yours, the president's doing a good job.

Speaker 20 They wish he would do more, which is pretty standard for a left-leaning block. I think the stuff that I'm hearing that they care a lot about, understandably, is

Speaker 20 how we're treating migrants. A lot of that is on the state level and places like, or even city level, places like New York City, where I live.

Speaker 20 But I think they're hoping that... there's a little more federal action on things like that.
Climate's a big one.

Speaker 20 A lot of it's the same stuff that keeps coming up. Jobs, cost of education,

Speaker 20 you know, those are those are all things that I'm still hearing. So none of it is from the, like, I'm washing my hands of it.

Speaker 20 I will say the part that's a little harder to push back on, and I'll bring this back to the strike because this has come up so much, especially with young writers and younger actors, people have taken notice of the fact that most of these studio heads and people who have forced the labor unions into a strike are big democratic donors themselves.

Speaker 20 right? These are people who love to use social media to talk about equity, but when it comes time to actually paying their their teams and their artists and their labor, they don't want to do it.

Speaker 20 They went and hired that the AMPTP hired this woman named Molly Levinson in DC, who's this

Speaker 20 PR powerhouse who the U.S. women's national team hired for pay equity.
And she did a wonderful job,

Speaker 20 right? Yeah.

Speaker 20 And it was really shocking that she and her team would then go and take a client that wanted to break labor unions.

Speaker 20 And I think a lot of young people are recognizing that even on the supposed left, you have this hierarchy that's more based on money and power than it is on the equity that these people supposedly talk about or tweet about.

Speaker 20 And that it seems like at the root cause, it's just, well, with enough money and greed at stake, we'll say or do anything to keep people down.

Speaker 20 And you're talking about a generation that is increasingly in more debt.

Speaker 20 you know uh the housing market right now at least isn't isn't perfect for them you have a lot of people living at home not that there's anything wrong with that but the idea that it's less of a choice to live at home home to save money and more of a necessity.

Speaker 20 So I think the thing that does worry me is not that we're somehow outraged that, oh, look at these Republicans doing this shit. Like, of course, you expect that.

Speaker 20 But the idea that people in your own party are doing it is something that is really unsettling, I think, to me and to a lot of young people I talk to.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and I'm sure

Speaker 18 Biden tried to take this massive step to

Speaker 18 wipe away student debt and it was blocked by the courts.

Speaker 18 And I think that just must be unbelievably frustrating for someone who maybe counted on that check as going towards rent in the future or paying down some other credit card bill or whatever else.

Speaker 18 Another piece of this that I hear about that I worry about is kind of cultural. Like in the, let's say, the 60s through fairly recently, being liberal, being progressive felt counter-cultural.

Speaker 18 It was anti-war, you know, anti-establishment.

Speaker 18 And I think that was that manifested in activism, voting patterns, music, movies, right? Art. And today, there seems to be this strand of young conservatives or young men mostly who feel

Speaker 18 put upon by progressives. They feel where they talk about being canceled.

Speaker 18 They're really focused on that all the time or told, you know, feel like they're being told what they can think or say.

Speaker 18 And that somehow Trump has become countercultural or anti-establishment, despite the fact that he was the president of the United States, because he's the one kind of raging about that.

Speaker 18 piece of the status quo. Have you encountered that kind of young voter at your events?

Speaker 18 Are there arguments that have worked for you to kind of reach them, kind of like the Barstool sports kind of Republican generation?

Speaker 20 I got to say, I just got to give a shout out to where it's due. The Barstool bros love the Harold and Kamar movies.
So

Speaker 20 we do need some commonality.

Speaker 17 They're great movies.

Speaker 20 Thank you. Thank you.
I'm confused by this, to be honest. Like, you know, I don't know.
To me, I see that. I'm like, oh, what are you aggrieved about?

Speaker 20 To me, the conversation comes up a lot with me in the realm of comedy. So I'll hear from

Speaker 20 people, you know, you just,

Speaker 20 I can't make jokes the way I used to. You know, do you think you could make another Harold and Kamar movie today? You probably couldn't.
You'd probably get canceled. This sucks.

Speaker 20 You know, I was going to go into this career, but I can't do it because you just can't say the thing you used to be able to say.

Speaker 20 And I'm sort of like, well, bro, what's the word that you wanted to say that you couldn't say? Go ahead, say it. Say the word.
Go ahead.

Speaker 17 Go ahead.

Speaker 20 What are you worried about? Say the word.

Speaker 20 Are you worried that

Speaker 20 you're going to get supposedly quote unquote canceled? Or are you recognizing that the free market is going to take care of something that they no longer like?

Speaker 20 And I think there's a big difference there, right?

Speaker 20 Like if we're pretending that the only reason that you used to be able to say and do anything you wanted and people would tolerate it is because it was the right thing and that was freedom.

Speaker 20 I think we're confusing that with the fact that especially in the comedy space, my job is to make people laugh. I don't want to make jokes that I made 20 years ago.
That shit's boring to me.

Speaker 20 I want to continue to build on an audience and a marketplace that's demanding us to be better and better and more dynamic so that's always been my approach to this and it confuses me a little bit when i'm when i'm when i hear what what you sort of outlined but then i kind of get it right if if you've always um had this immense privilege and have never felt what it feels like to have to kind of account for what equity actually is, meaning that everybody has to work really hard to get a seat at the table.

Speaker 20 Nothing is promised or owed to you. I think that if a shift like that is happening culturally, you know, I'm a little empathetic to what that might be like for somebody.

Speaker 18 Yeah,

Speaker 18 it is weird. You know, in the comedy space, it is often the most successful, rich,

Speaker 18 famous comedians who are complaining about being canceled all the time. And you're just like, you seem to be doing fine, Joe Rogan or Dave Chappelle or whoever it is.

Speaker 20 Yeah. Also, it's like, you know, make the jokes you want to make.

Speaker 20 Like, I'll defend till the day I die the right of somebody to say and do whatever they want to do but the consequence of that is that we live in 2023 and the audience might be demanding more and might have loved your old shit and might not like that you're making jokes about something that they don't feel the need to litigate even through comedy because it's just a dumb joke to them goes back to feeling like we're getting older right it's like i'm the old man now sometimes so i just need to account for that

Speaker 18 yeah Well, just stay funny, comedians. That's all you need to do.
Well, listen, Cal, thanks so much for helping us understand what's going on with these strikes in Hollywood.

Speaker 18 Hopefully, the SAG strike will be resolved soon in a favorable way. And the WGA leadership will like this plan and they'll vote on it.
And folks will get to go back to work.

Speaker 18 Because I know you're all eager to go back to work.

Speaker 18 And it's, you know, been really hard on the people who have been picketing every day and not getting paid. And so, but listen, buddy, great to talk to you.

Speaker 20 Let's talk to you.

Speaker 17 And we'll talk soon. Yeah.

Speaker 17 All

Speaker 17 thanks again to Cal for joining us today and we will talk to you guys after the debate on the Thursday morning pod.

Speaker 17 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.
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