Poll Vaulting

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode: Poll Vaulting
Date: August 12, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz
Panelists: Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, Eliana Johnson

Episode Overview

This lively episode examines the volatile landscape of political polling in the 2026 primaries, focusing on recent upsets and surprises within the Democratic and Republican parties. The hosts dissect how polling errors, prediction markets, and media narratives interact, sometimes driving events as much as reflecting them. They also discuss the consequences of misreading the electorate, the shifting power of endorsements (especially Trump’s), and the deep effects of “gamification” in election prediction and coverage. The discussion winds through specific primary races, the problem of poll-driven narratives, and even a dramatic Secret Service story about protecting the president.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Democratic Primaries, Polling Misses, and the "DSA Surge"

• Francesca Hong’s Loss in Wisconsin Gubernatorial Primary

  • Eliana Johnson reflects on her reporting about candidate Hong, whom she describes (quoting a previous article) as so far-left that even Sanders and Warren wouldn't endorse her [03:45].
  • The panel observes a pattern of polling significantly overestimating far-left candidates’ momentum, with David Crowley (a moderate, Black Democrat) dramatically beating expectations:

    “Polls were showing [Crowley] like in the single digits or teens and he captured over 40% of the vote.” – Eliana Johnson [02:56]

• Pollster Incentives and Push Polling

  • John Podhoretz rails against unreliable pollsters (specifically PPP) and the perverse incentives they face—fear of angering political clients and audience subscribers leads to hyped, inaccurate polling:

    "We’re all being played for suckers by people whose incentive structure has changed." – John Podhoretz [08:46]

  • The panel discusses “push polling,” where polls become propaganda tools, driving narratives about candidate surges and potentially altering campaign strategy and media coverage [18:02].

• Parallels to Past Polling Errors and “Surprise” Victories

  • The group recalls similar polling overreaches in the cases of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and the infamous errors in 2010 and 2012, noting that surprises—like Trump or the Tea Party—have forged a nervous tendency to “bend over backwards” in polling for insurgent energy [10:52].

2. The Mechanics and Consequences of Faulty Polling

• Why Polls Go Wrong

  • Sampling biases (age, race, turnout modeling) are unpacked as reasons for wild polling errors, often with the pollsters themselves publicly disputing their own results:

    "[The] campaign wrote a memo disagreeing with its own internal poll, explaining it under sampled older voters, that it had over sampled… So they didn’t get enough African Americans… All turned out to be true.” – John Podhoretz [05:10]

  • Panelists blame media, party activists, and a changed business model (subscriber-driven instead of ad-driven) for incentivizing more sensational and less accurate polling [09:24].

• Polling as Political Tool

  • The proliferation of misleading polling changes both voter and candidate behavior:

    “These polls… are having a measurable effect on how the race itself is run… The polling becomes a political tool, and there’s a term for that, and we call it push polling.” – John Podhoretz [18:02]

3. Gamification: Prediction Markets and Their Impact

• Prediction Markets (Kalshi, Polymarket)
  • Seth Mandel introduces the topic of online election betting markets, where odds are influenced more by social media speculation than by professional insight:

    “It is creating this herd-like behavior… These elections are turning into… fantasy football or something.” – Abe Greenwald [22:38]

  • John Podhoretz argues that these are closed, self-selected systems, not “the wisdom of crowds”—unlike true markets (e.g., financial):

    “There is a false idea abroad… that Kalshee says Hong has an 80% chance of winning… it’s not a piece of anything. It’s like an aggregation of Twitter people…” – John Podhoretz [26:27]

4. Breakdown of Key Primary Races

• Minnesota (DSA Victory) and State-Specific Factors

  • Eliana Johnson points to Minnesota’s DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor) roots and unusual radicalization, noting Peggy Flanagan’s win was helped by the local ICE enforcement controversy [29:51].
  • Amy Klobuchar’s gubernatorial strength and distinct Minnesota political culture are cited as differentiators [29:51].

• Connecticut: Not All Leftward Movements are Ideological

  • The upset of John Larson is attributed more to generational and health-related concerns than pure DSA momentum:

    “Watching a person whose brain seizes up in real time on television is chilling… I don’t know how people voted for Larson if they saw that footage.” – John Podhoretz [31:26]

• South Carolina Republican Runoff

  • Darlene Graham (sister of Lindsey Graham) faces Ralph Norman in a runoff; Trump’s endorsement didn’t carry as much weight as expected, spotlighting the waning power of his endorsements [34:36].
  • Debate arises on how closely GOP candidates can or should tie themselves to Trump as his approval numbers soften:

    “If Trump is so toxic that you can run away from him without worrying about his anger…you’ve already lost by 20 points.” – Seth Mandel [41:01]

• Mike Lindell and GOP Candidate Quality

  • Noting the defeat of “My Pillow guy” Mike Lindell by mainstream Republican Lisa Damas, the panel discusses how the power of extreme or celebrity-backed candidates is ebbing [38:31].

5. The Limits and Dangers of Polling

• Overreliance on Polls
  • The group reflects on their own need to use polling—despite flaws—because it’s the only “index of public opinion” available [47:40].
  • Concerns are raised about how easily pollsters and media can shape expectations and political narratives—covering everything from public sentiment on Israel to trans issues [52:39].

    “Polling is even more creative or has room for more creativity because you can ask the same question or version…to elicit so many different shadings… you can get what you want.” – Seth Mandel [52:39]

6. Secret Service, Decoy Planes, and Air Force One

• Trump’s Ankara Escape
  • The panel addresses reports that Trump was evacuated from Air Force One due to assassination threats, while other passengers—including Marco Rubio—remained on the “decoy” plane [54:45].
  • After some dark humor and skepticism, the consensus is that while the optics are odd (“if Marco Rubio is on the plane, then Marco Rubio’s on the plane” [58:02]), there’s little evidence of disregard for human life, and historical precedent exists for such maneuvers.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Eliana Johnson on press hype vs. reality:

  “Every single time…I am not gonna believe the hype around these far left Democratic candidates…I am bowing my head in shame. On this podcast today, the credit I…” [02:56]

• John Podhoretz on the current incentive structure:

  “We’re all being played for suckers by people whose incentive structure has changed. Pollsters want to be accurate…But polling firms often end up going out of business because they're inaccurate…because they are polling in places and ways that…affect their own ideological convictions.” [08:46]

• Seth Mandel on betting markets:

  “It is creating this herd-like behavior…These elections are turning into, I don't know, fantasy football or something. That to me seems like a more dangerous development…” [22:38]

• Abe Greenwald cautioning against poll “unskewing”:

  “I feel like we’re gonna get into, like, Unskew 2.0 now. Yeah, like people are gonna be like, ‘Alright, this poll says so-and-so is up by 10. So I say they’re really up by 7 and go with that.’” [44:29]

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Timestamps of Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:44 | Introduction: Mailbag upcoming, primary chatter preview | | 01:37 | Francesca Hong’s loss in Wisconsin; polling errors exposed | | 03:33 | Reporting on Hong’s controversial stances | | 05:10 | Detailed polling failures and campaign memo dynamics | | 08:46 | Monologue on pollster incentives and the changing media business model | | 10:52 | Seth Mandel’s theory on “culture wide bias” in overrating insurgent movements | | 15:14 | Breakdown of Madison vs. statewide results for Hong and value of establishment pushback | | 16:40 | Comparison to Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota primaries | | 18:02 | Push polling as a partisan tool; impact of polling on campaign strategy and media narrative | | 20:41 | Prediction markets—Polymarket example, flaws in odds-based coverage | | 23:55 | The “closed system” of betting markets vs. actual representative marketplaces | | 29:51 | Minnesota’s unique DFL/DSA context & influence of ICE enforcement | | 31:26 | Connecticut: generational, not purely ideological, turnover in House primary | | 34:36 | South Carolina GOP: Darlene Graham vs. Ralph Norman; Trump’s endorsement power waning | | 38:31 | Mike Lindell (My Pillow) defeat and the GOP’s candidate quality issues | | 41:00 | Debate: can Republicans ever run “away” from Trump? | | 44:43 | Past “poll unskewing” mistakes and limitations of polling under uncertainty | | 47:40 | Why polling is nonetheless necessary for media and coverage | | 52:39 | How question design in polling can shape or confect public opinion | | 54:45 | Secret Service, decoy planes, and Trump’s Ankara escape—questions, history, analysis | | 61:04 | Book recommendation: James Ellroy’s “Red Sheet” and reflections on paranoid American fiction | | 64:43 | Conclusion and sign off |

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Tone and Style Notes

• Conversational, sharp, often self-deprecating.
• Panelists mix policy analysis with pointed asides and in-jokes, calling out both left and right, especially over institutional flaws.
• At times, deeply skeptical, even cynical, about polling, political consultants, and the media’s tendencies.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode serves as a cautionary deep-dive into the ways public perception around primaries and party politics can be viciously distorted by polling errors, media incentives, and new digital-era “prediction” fads. Listeners are urged to be critical of polling narratives, aware of the business incentives driving both polling and political coverage, and to resist the temptation to treat politics like a betting market or fantasy sport. Against the backdrop of volatile primaries and a splintered Democratic Party, the message is clear: “Don’t believe the hype—or the polls—too quickly.”

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

Foreign.

[John Podhoretz]

Expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die at first no way of

[Advertisement/Promo Voice]

knowing which way it's going Hope for

[John Podhoretz]

the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, August 12, 2026. I'm John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary, with me as Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.

[Eliana Johnson]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, reminding you that we are gonna have a mailbag episode soon. So send those very short, very clipped, very Precise questions to podcastometary.org and we'll see if we can get to yours. And presumably somebody is going to ask what we make of the mixed results in the war inside the Democratic Party between the Democratic socialists attempting their takeover and the so called party regulars, or party moderates, if you want to call them that, who are facing them in these primaries. So, Eliana Johnson, I believe that you have the right to claim part of the scalp, if you will, of Francesca Hong, who lost the gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin last night.

[Eliana Johnson]

John, that's nice of you to say.

[John Podhoretz]

And Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota would be very upset to hear me say that. Yes, yes, you earned a scalp because she is an indigenous. Native. Indigenous with indigeneity.

[Eliana Johnson]

Yeah. But I have to say this does go to show that you, you can't say you hate Thanksgiving and have it stand among too many Americans. That is, that is a bridge too far, even among, even in the Democratic party. But John, I just have to say, every single time, and as recently as last week, I tell myself, I, I am not gonna believe what I read in the press. I am not gonna believe the hype around these far left Democratic candidates. I am not gonna believe the polls after the El Sayed, you know, even though he won, he really performed more poorly than we were told, which was all the momentum is with him. Double digit victory. Well, same thing with Francesca Hong, who the polls did capture her, her performance around 40%, her share of the vote, but they really did not capture the level of support of Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who way overperformed and took out Hong because his performance, I mean polls were showing him like in the single digits or teens and he captured over 40% of the vote. But every time I fall for their BS about the momentum and this and that. So, you know, instead of credit, I am bowing my head in shame. On this podcast today, the credit I

[John Podhoretz]

was giving you is that you broke some of these stories about Frances.

[Eliana Johnson]

Yes, our story yesterday was about her feast of, you know, her menstruation themed feast.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes. So basically Francesca Hong is a lunatic. So lunatic that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders did not endorse her. Thus showing that apparently there are limits even to their ability to cover their eyes about the demented views of people that they are supporting in their insurgent effort to change the nature of the Democratic Party. But I think it's more interesting than. So David Crowley, who won, not only did he win, but he had dropped out of the race six to eight weeks. He had dropped out of the race because he was seeing bad polling numbers himself or something, dropped out of the race and then there was a crisis and then involving the lieutenant governor, I can't quite recall. And then he, Mandela Barnes, who was also in the race, dropped out of the race. And so he got back into the race now. And so he ended up winning because Hong was clearly unacceptable. That said, the polling in Minnesota, including polling taken by Crowley's own campaign, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, excuse me, by an extremely disreputable polling firm called Public Policy Polling, or ppp, which was, I thought had been driven out of business after its unbelievable misreading and misreporting of the facts on the ground in the 2012 election where it got all kinds of things wrong in 2010, in 2012, I thought that it was done. Democrats and liberals were publishing articles about how terrible PPP was. So apparently they're back. Crowley hired them, they showed that he was losing by 22, a poll that they themselves took. And then the campaign wrote a memo disagreeing with its own internal poll, explaining that it under sampled older voters, that it had over sampled its own. So they didn't go, didn't get enough African Americans into the polling mix and all of that, all of which turned out to be true. So you're blaming yourself and we should all blame ourselves because of course, yeah, Abdul Al Said was up by 15, won by less than half a percent. That's what the polls told us. All these races, with the exception of the Flanagan Senate race, which really was a blowout, that was a 20 point victory against a more regular Democratic candidate.

[Eliana Johnson]

Yeah. Angie Craig.

[John Podhoretz]

Angie Craig. So the thing is that pollsters are supposed to provide accurate information with neither fear nor favor. But our politics have changed in the United States and people who deliver bad news to politicians often become the subject of vituperative attacks from the politicians that they are delivering bad news to. This is obviously true of Trump and the people around Trump, John Bolton and others who simply did not whisper the Sweet nothings in Trump's ear that he wanted to hear. But it's also true in the Democratic Party. David Shore, a very brilliant young political analyst, was fired from his job for telling Democrats that his data showed that what they should probably do was support popular things and avoid supporting unpopular things like the trans movement and others if they wanted to win elections. And him just saying this had him cashiered from his job at some Democratic consultancy. I think the pollsters believe that if they don't say there's a surge, if they don't say the left is on the march, they're afraid of being come after, of being the subject of vituperative attack and controversy that will harm their businesses. And so it's better to report out results in a poll that can't possibly be true like that she's up by 20 points than it is to try to model the electorate more properly and get a more rational result the way the Crowley campaign memo said that its own polling firm had not done

[Seth Mandel]

so.

[John Podhoretz]

I don't think that. I think we're all being played for suckers by people whose incentive structure has changed. Pollsters want to be accurate, that's what we're always told. But polling firms often end up going out of business because they're inaccurate. And they're often inaccurate because they are polling in places and ways that, that affect their own ideological convictions. Like the pollster John Zoghbi, who also driven out of business by overestimating politicians who were more skeptical of the American Israel relationship and having his hat handed to him enough on that. But that's what he wanted to see and he reported it that way. So that's, I think one thing that's going on that people should take note of, that we're not getting the proper information because the partisans are scaring the normies. And the way that the news business now works is a subscription model. So if you don't want to, you don't want to tell your audience, if you're Midas Touch or if you're the New York Times or whoever, you don't want to tell them that things aren't going their way, rather than saying, oh, things aren't going their way, we better figure out how to make it better, they get mad at you and they cancel their subscriptions. Whereas in prior models advertisers were what mattered. And advertisers didn't want things outside the 40 yard lines, they wanted things relatively normal so that they wouldn't come under attack from either side. So the incentive structure with an advertising model was to be more moderate and prudent and careful. And that's no longer the case. And it also brings up after this monologue, the question of Maine. But go ahead, Abe. I'm sorry, I was going to say,

[Seth Mandel]

I also think that there is a larger bias, almost a sort of culture wide bias, bias by which everyone is scared to not give the crazy super big changey thing its proper due. It's the possibility of it happening because there had been such an effort, we have been so blind to it before that now there's a general effort to sort of bend over backwards to say, if you think this crazy thing can't happen, well, look, I've got some data that suggests you may want to think again. And that gets weighted much more than it used to. I think.

[John Podhoretz]

I think that's a very good point. Trump, you know, Trump's rise. Although Trump's rise was measured, like, there's no question that the polling was measuring Trump's rise accurately. It was that people simply couldn't conceive of the fact that this was happening when it was happening. But obviously Bernie Sanders strength at the polls both in 2016 and 2020 came as a surprise. And yeah, the Tea Party came as a surprise. David Brat's victory over Eric Cantor came as a surprise. There were all these surprises. So you're like, ah, there's an insurgent force that seems to be gaining steam. That steam itself is worth five points, or something like that.

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[John Podhoretz]

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[Eliana Johnson]

One thing I think is important to note about the specifics of the result in Wisconsin is that in Madison, which we talked about yesterday, which is where Hong is from, she's a state representative. Crowley did lose, but it was close. It was 44 to 36.5 or so. So he only lost by seven points in the most radical part of the state. So there was a real divide in the university town that is the home of the insurgent left in Wisconsin. So these people were not going for Hong Kong by a wide margin. And it's noteworthy one that AOC and Bernie Sanders were not out campaigning with her. The far left did not coalesce around her, which suggests, I think, that that's a factor. And the state's democratic establishment did not coalesce around her in the way that they have done around El Sayed. Alyssa Slotkin stayed quiet. She did not endorse against him in that race and he did have the support of all these other far left candidates. And I think it demonstrates it can make a difference.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, I mean, that was a close race, just as Francesca's loss was a close loss. I mean, it's very easy. Without oversimplifying it, it's very easy to picture Michigan going exactly the way that Wisconsin's gubernatorial Democratic primary went. Right? I mean, a point swing in the other direction is really two points. And so you could very easily see that El Sayed was vulnerable. Maybe people were put off by the polls and stuff like that. But, I mean, after that race, we all sat here and said the same thing, which is that the establishment totally buckled. They were cowards. And instead of fighting the insurgent who was talking about putting their heads on a spike, they. They sued for peace and got in line. In Wisconsin, they didn't do that. But in Maine, it's interesting because they also did that in Maine, and it was a. It was a disaster.

[John Podhoretz]

So you have to have the right mate. I want to talk about me. Platner. Janet Mills got out of the race. Probably internal polling as well as external polling showing her losing to Graham Platner. If Janet Mills had. Well, she did lose to Graham Platner. Excuse me. I mean, you know, in. In the primary, although she had largely suspended her campaign.

[Eliana Johnson]

She did suspend her campaign.

[John Podhoretz]

She suspended her campaign. She lost. Imagine that. You know, the two rape stories had come out. One of them had, but, I mean, the later rape story had come out. Imagine that. Imagine that the world hadn't thought that Platner had somehow completely taken her down. Imagine that she, living inside the Democratic bubble, hadn't thought that he had taken her down and she had just stayed patient or declared a third party candidacy or something. However you want to slice it, she'd be the nominee today. That Chuck Schumer's getting her to agree to go into the race as the strongest candidate was, in fact, a right call, because Platner was not the strongest candidate. Platner was obviously a bomb waiting to go off. Nobody did due diligence, including the Mills campaign, that could have sort of uncovered the truth about Platner. Maybe they would never have let it out because they would be too afraid again of blowback from these radicals who will attack anybody on anything. But we're in a universe in which these polls that suggest unbelievable strength for these DSA candidates, those polls are having a measurable effect on how the race itself is run and how it's covered and how things happen in it. And therefore, the polling becomes a political tool, and there's a term for that, and we call it push polling. And push polling is a disreputable form of political action because it is taking partisan propaganda and framing it as though it is hard social science and thereby providing cover for a narrative which is that there is a surge and the surge is happening. The surge is real and there's no stopping it. And it's happening everywhere. And all of that. And I just don't know. I don't know what to make of this in terms of the remarkable polling numbers in places like Texas and Iowa and others where Democrats look poised maybe to win seats that they haven't won in decades. Clearly.

[Seth Mandel]

John, I just want to mention we don't have to go too far down this tributary, but when you talk about polling that changes the landscape or softens the ground or whatever, if it's push polling or otherwise. This is before you even get now to the prediction market problem, which is sort of an additional factor here. If you saw that there was a polymark had put out last night, that it was all but a lock for Hong before. Before the lines completely reversed themselves at the last second. So a lot of screwy incentives now playing into these races that make it really difficult for us to suss out what's happening until it's all over.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, it was illegal to vote on elections in the United States with good reason. And we now know why. Again, because that stuff, Kalshi and Polymark and all of that also become part of the news story. And there's.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. And in the opposite direction, Kalshi and Polymarket. Like, I'm watching, you know, Decision Desk on my computer last night, and I'm watching Twitter and I'm watching the number. You know, Decision Desk will have, you know, odds and all that stuff. And it'll also have, you know, one of the. I don't know whether it's polymarket or Kalshi up there. And you can see that the betting markets are just reacting to the same thing we're all reacting to, which is like the Twitter hive mind speculation. Oh, look at that. It's actually going to be a close race. The polls were wrong, whatever. And then Polymarket just flips upside down. The odds just go. I mean, they're just watching the same thing. Everybody's watching. And it is creating this herd, like, behavior that's not even. It's expanding out from voting and polling into like, well, let's all just manipulate the betting markets together and get rich together. And it's like, what what was, what were we doing in the first place? Oh yeah, voting. In a democracy, like you almost the activity almost doesn't matter. It's like you could, you could have it be vote. It's the game, the gamification of everything, as they say. Although originally that term really meant the way that social media and phone apps were. Would have you get rewards, some kind of reward for each thing you did. Even if it weren't, you know, for, for putting money in or whatever. It was some, some kind of way to sort of train you to be getting a reward for certain behavior. But now it's really expanded into the betting market and now it's like these elections are turning into, I don't know, fantasy football or something. That to me seems like a board. A more dangerous development even than the sports betting, which is really dangerous for its own reasons. As we've discussed previously on the show,

[John Podhoretz]

the theory of markets is that everyone participates, that the market is everyone in the world. And so when we talk about market behavior or things that move markets, financial markets, we are talking and the wisdom of crowds and how you can't deny that the free market in some sense exists because people just behave as they behave. And when they behave in aggregate, the invisible hand theory says that they behave in rational fashion. Not everybody is participating in Kalshi and Polymarket. Only people who choose to are participating. They are therefore a self selected group. They are therefore betting against each other. They are therefore not constituting a marketplace, they are constituting a closed system that is like craps table in which you have to play, you have to pay to play and you have to be present in it. And therefore there's no wisdom to be gained. Unless you believe that the people in Polymarket or the people in Kalshi are a complete and perfect reflection of the American people writ large, which obviously they're not, because most people aren't betting on politics. And if you're gonna bet on politics, by the way, you are gonna use whatever the closest information is to hand. Cause there's nothing else to go on. There's only one result in politics and that's election day. And the result is the result. Whereas say pricing is a thing that happens every second. The price of goods changes every second everywhere. And therefore everyone is participating in this. And so there is a false idea abroad in our world, in our bubble. Cause again, I don't think this affects Americans that when you're on Twitter or something and something says, well, Kalshee says that Hong has an 80% chance of winning. You should not say, well that's really a piece of evidence in her favor because it's not, it's not a piece of anything. It's like an aggregation of Twitter people who in this case are part of betting Twitter or odds Twitter as opposed to, you know, movie Twitter or TV Twitter or House of the Dragon Twitter or whatever you might want to. Whatever you might want to call it. Today's executives are more threatened, more exposed, and more vulnerable than ever before. Corporations spend billions on workplace security. But what happens when a threat finds your executives outside the office? Here's why that matters. 70% of attacks on executives happen at home or away from the office. An iron wall attack understands a terrifying reality. If someone has a grievance against your company, the first place they turn to is Google. It takes about five minutes to find one of your executives home addresses online. And if their personal information is sitting on the open web, they're far too easy to find. You're leaving them unprotected. The team at Ironwall knows this better than anyone. They protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a white glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools and emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwall ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwall.com commentary, fill in the quick form and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com/complyment. Stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes. August is the perfect time to hit reset before the autumn rush begins. And honestly, I can't think of a better place to start than my closet. That's why I love shopping at Quints. If you're still hanging on to the same worn out basics, Quints makes it easy to upgrade. For example, I just bought a bunch of linen shorts because frankly I've been losing a little weight and I need some shorts that fit. And these are fantastic, comfortable, breathe and very, very good looking. Everything at quints is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middleman. So you're paying for high quality, not brand markup. Everyday staples that work harder like their ultra soft organic cotton tees and premium Mongolian cashmere sweaters which I've been telling you about for years. And it's not just clothing. Quince has become my go to for everything from hotel quality bedding and bath essentials to premium cookware and travel must haves. I also just got a new Quince Wallet just to give you a sense of how this goes. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quints app for App Exclusive offers or go to quince.com commentary get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q U-I-N-C-E.com commentary. Okay with this mixed result. So Minnesota goes DSA and Wisconsin doesn't go DSA and there's a DSA victory in Connecticut. But that's a weird story and I

[Eliana Johnson]

think there are two pieces in the mix in Minnesota that aren't present elsewhere. The first is something we talked about yesterday, which is the longstanding DFL roots in Minnesota. The fact that Minnesota has been the lone holdout states in the Midwest that that haven't gone for Trump and that haven't gotten redder as Iowa and Ohio have gone increasingly red as Wisconsin and Michigan have become purple and have gone back and forth between Trump and the Democratic presidential nominee. The other is the ICE enforcement that I think radicalized even moderate Democrats. And again, that played a big role in this Senate primary. Also Amy Klobuchar's strength as the gubernatorial nominee. I mean Democrats are gonna win that gubernatorial race. It's not even close. Whereas immigration and Immigration enforcement just played a huge role with Peggy Flanagan, Tim Walz's Lieutenant governor, hanging around the neck of Ang Craig, the moderate. Her vote for the Lake and Riley act, which we discussed yesterday, empowering the Department of Homeland Security to detain non citizens who commit crimes. But that just played a big race, a big role in the Minnesota race, which it didn't in any of these other states.

[John Podhoretz]

I just want to mention the Connecticut race because people are going to use this as a data point on the, you know, on the leftward move of the Democratic Party, which is clearly unquestionable. But this race between Luke Bronin and the 28 year incumbent John Larson, I don't think has a political root to it. Larson, you may or may not remember, basically had a TIA on the floor of the House. He had like a mini stroke on the floor of the House. He was speaking and then he froze for a minute as though he were in suspended animation. This happened once to Mitch McConnell during a press conference. And if you see the video of these things, they are among the more frightening things you can see in life outside of a horror movie, watching a person whose brain seizes up in real time on television is chilling, and it raises. I mean, I don't know how people actually voted for Larson if they saw that footage. And so, though the guy who won Bronin is a progressive mayor of Hartford, he's not. You know, this may have been just a sort of. It's a generational victory in the sense that Larson was like, you got to get out of there, man. You're 78, and you had a mini stroke on the floor of the house. It's time to retire. And the fact that he even ran again is a mark of mania. Okay, should we go to. Should we go to the weirdness of South Carolina? So, okay, so Darlene Graham, sister of Lindsey Graham, who runs various.

[Abe Greenwald]

Just want to start by. You're supposed to start by saying something nice. I just want to say South Carolina's flag is really nice. Now we can go into the weirdness of South Africa.

[John Podhoretz]

Is it. What does it look like? I never. State flags. I never. I never. I never got right, by the way. By the way, I will mention just to just, you know, people may or may not know this, and I don't really talk about it that much, but I was on Jeopardy. 40 years ago, and. And did well.

[Seth Mandel]

And.

[John Podhoretz]

But my first game, the. The. The final Jeopardy. Question involved state flags, and I was like, oh, my God, I'm done. I'm toast. That's it. And it had to do with what flat. What state has another flag inside its flag? That was the. That was the, you know, issue. And fortunately, nobody got it. And. And I bet, right. And I won the game. So. Stayed flat. I don't know.

[Seth Mandel]

Wait, but what's the answer?

[John Podhoretz]

I can't even remember. I think it was Georgia. It may be Georgia. I don't know.

[Abe Greenwald]

You.

[John Podhoretz]

We could look it up right now.

[Abe Greenwald]

Anyway, anyway, South Carolina is like a nice blue. It's got a. It's a palmetto. It's. It's a nice blue flag with a

[John Podhoretz]

palmetto and a moon. Okay, good. Okay, so it's got a good, safe flag. And it now has a Republican runoff between Darlene Graham, sister of Lindsey Graham, and basically a kind of social services executive in the state. She's done work with the blind and the handicapped and has run various commissions and stuff like that. So it's not like she's somebody who was, you know, sitting, you know, like, running a gas station or the family bar where Lindsey Graham grew up or anything like that. She has a record of public service. But Congressman Ralph Norman out distanced another congressman, and she got 32%, he got 25%, and now there will be a runoff. And the question is how much Trump wants to go in on this. Since he picked her, we think he picked her. I mean, it's possible that Governor McMaster picked her and said to Trump, she's great, let's just put her in. But Trump picked her. Trump endorsed her. Clearly, every vote she got, she got because Trump endorsed her. And the question is that she got 32% of the vote with Trump's endorsement. Shouldn't she have gotten more? Maybe she should have gotten more. I don't know. Is Trump's endorsement going to be enough to make her prevail in the runoff against an actual experienced politician, although one that is sort of intellectually unimpressive like Ralph Norman?

[Eliana Johnson]

Yeah, I'm not sure we know. I think it's going to be a real race, obviously. And I do think Trump is going to stick behind Graham. He, I think, feels some loyalty to Lindsey Graham. He didn't have to get into this race, and he chose to get into it. The interesting X factor here is that Ralph Norman endorsed Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. And Trump doesn't forget things like that. And I think it played a role in his endorsement of Darlene Graham. But Nikki Haley, of course, is a South Carolinian, and I wonder whether she will become involved in this race at all. I kind of doubt it, but it is a test of her popularity to some extent in the state and what that will look like. Norman is a Freedom Caucus member and a budget hawk. But it will be quite interesting to see how this plays out. And we'll test her mettle on the campaign trail, which Darlene Graham, she didn't sit for a lot of interviews and she was focused on advertising becoming known in the state, but I think it's something she's gonna have to start talking publicly as this goes on.

[John Podhoretz]

Right, okay. But there are questions now being raised about Donald Trump's endorsement powers because several Trump endorsed candidates have now lost Republican primaries. Last night, my pillow guy, Mike Lindell, lost to Damith. I can't remember her first name.

[Eliana Johnson]

Her name's Lisa. Damn. Damas.

[John Podhoretz]

Damas, right. Yeah. And. And she's a regular Republican, longtime Republican state politician. And Mike Lindell is a deranged psychotic.

[Eliana Johnson]

Yeah. She's the House speaker in Minnesota.

[John Podhoretz]

House speaker in Minnesota. And he is a deranged pitch man lunatic who is now claiming, of course, that the election was stolen from him because he never saw an election that wasn't stolen. But he lost. And there were a couple of other, there was a primary a couple weeks ago. Andy Ogles lost his primary as a Trump endorsed candidate to another Republican. And it's an interesting question about whether that the power of Trump's endorsements in the Republican Party clearly now seems to be a little more degraded. I mean, there isn't really going to be much more of it. There aren't many more primaries. And his effect on the general election will obviously be neutralized because Republicans will do well in Trump states and they'll do badly in non Trump states. And that's just a given. But what do we think? What does it mean? Because in 2022, Mike Lindell would have won with Trump's endorsement would be my guess, because Trump endorsed lunatics in 2022. And those Senate races, all wonderful.

[Eliana Johnson]

I also think whether these candidates run on, whether Darlene Graham runs on her association with Trump is something to watch as his approval ratings decline. I mean, his approval ratings among general voters, general election voters in South Carolina are not that great. And they're declining among, even among Republican primary voters. I believe they're in the 80s, which is, you know, typically they've been as high as 95%. I think that's something to watch here.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

But it would take a whole lot more of a drop to make it anywhere near safe to run against Trump or away from Trump, though. You got to thread the needle.

[Eliana Johnson]

I think the question is, does she, does she use the Trump endorsement or does she just talk about other things?

[John Podhoretz]

Right, right. I mean.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. I actually think that you're. The problem for Republicans on what Abe said is that if Trump is so toxic that you can run away from him without worrying about his anger affecting your race, you've already lost by 20 point. Right. If Trump, if Trump is like so far underwater that you could insult him, it means Republicans are that far underwater for the most part in a wavier. So it's kind of, I think she's, I don't think that you can detach yourself from your, your Trump situation, ship, whatever it might be. If, if you're, if you're, if you're, pro Trump, if you're with Trump, if Trump has your back. You know, I think politicians, candidates for the most part feel that they have to stay in that situation. If they're Trump critics, they try to play it, you know, somewhat moderate or down the middle, but I don't think that you can really move away from where you stand on Trump in any meaningful sense.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, look, Trump. So Norman endorsed Haley, which is a local girl, makes good endorsement, normal politics. You would give that guy a pass for doing that because of a long standing in state relationship with somebody. And you would say, well, okay, he did that. But I mean, it's not as though Norman has been an unreliable vote for Trump. And he is very governor.

[Abe Greenwald]

Not even like he was her neighbor in South Governor of the state.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, she was the governor of the state. And I don't know what their relationship was, but he was also one of the people who bedeviled Kevin McCarthy was one of the, whatever the number was, the 12 or 14 members of this rump group that kept denying Then Speaker Kevin McCarthy the return to the speakership. And so I don't know whether that Trump looks at that and thinks that was a friendly thing or an unfriendly thing. I don't know. But I mean, it's not as though he hasn't already shown his very right wing bona fides by acting as though Kevin McCarthy were somehow a rhino who should be voted out. Which we know was largely driven by Matt Gaetz, because Matt Gaetz was mad at Kevin McCarthy for knowing about his ephebophilic tendencies and therefore used the he's not fighting hard enough cover to take revenge against Kevin McCarthy as he is now taking revenge against the Jewish people in his repugnant anti Semitism that has now become one of his leading characteristics out of office. Anyway.

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I don't know.

[John Podhoretz]

What do I know? So presumably whoever wins that runoff is

[Eliana Johnson]

whatever it is, don't believe the polls.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. Except if the polls say that the Republican is gonna win in South Carolina, you should probably believe those polls because that is really not a swing state. And I don't even know who's the Democratic who the Democratic.

[Abe Greenwald]

I feel like we're gonna get into like a, like Unskew 2.0 now. Yeah, like people are gonna be like, all right, this point says so and so is up by 10. So I say they're really up by 7 and go with that.

[John Podhoretz]

Listen, as a shamed participant in Poland skewing back in 2012, that was an interesting test case because poll on skewing was you took a poll, you didn't like the result of the poll. You were suspicious of the result of the poll. And then you looked at the composition of the electorate in the poll and you said, well, it says that they polled there were 37% of the poll, those polled were Democrats and 31% were Republicans and the party nationally. The parties nationally are at parity. So this poll is naturally skewing toward Democrats, and therefore we can discount it. And whatever was the case, the polling, at least to the presidential level, if anything, understated Obama's support and overstated Romney's support. And so those of us who played that game for a while gave it up and apologized for our nariskite. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know how you unskew these polls, though, because the problem with polling is that you have to. You have. If we had. If we had mandatory voting in America, polling could be very accurate because every single person that you asked would be a voter. Right. Turnout is a major variable, and we don't know what. We have no idea what turnout will be. We have no idea what the composition of the electorate will be like. You can model it based on previous elections, but Trump's behavior in the last 18 months has been so. So out of range of ordinary presidential behavior, from ice to Iran to the ballroom to the reflecting pool to whatever, that you don't know what effect it's having on people, whether it's depressing Republicans or encouraging Republicans or whether all that is just driving Democrats so insane that anybody who doesn't like Trump is gonna go to the polls to express their dislike by voting against whoever supposedly is on his side. And so you just can't know what. You don't know what the electorate is until afterwards. And even then, you don't know because. Because people don't tell pollsters the truth. So if we could break our. The problem is, I don't know how to write about or think about politics without some empirical evidence. Like when we say the American people don't like this or the American people like that. Effectively, we're going on polling survey data.

[Eliana Johnson]

No, it's a problem for us because we don't swim among people who are representative of the broader American public. And when I was at Fox News, I learned, I think, something important, which was we did polls all the time because people like to have a sense of where things are and of certainty. And so the guidance I got was, you know, use polls. People like numbers, they remember it. They like to have a sense of something tangible. And so that's why polls are used on television and in news reports. And they will continue to be used regardless of the quality of the pollsters, because they rate

[John Podhoretz]

right.

[Eliana Johnson]

They're an anchor. They anchor you into some reality. Except for right there. Not doing that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, because we trust polls on other things. Like, we trust opinion polls. But why, you know, if you poll, if you poll people, and I'm just saying that people, people are used to that sort of thing. If you, you know, you watch and you say, like, data centers are polling at negative 12% or something like that. Yeah, people, you know, we, once you see it, you, once you realize that everywhere, it's not just candidacies, but we, we, we don't really have a different marker of public opinion. And so we take people, you know, do you like new Coke? Do you like the new can of, of, you know, of Coke Zero, whatever? Like this is just aside from setting up your own sort of, you know, mini, you know, test groups and of 12 people watching a commercial or whatever, polls are really the only thing that we have. And so we use it.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, so polls of everything except politics are measuring things that never end or are ongoing, like a commercial product or whatever, or an economic trend or something like that. They don't come to a decisive date on which it is decided whether or not data centers will exist or not exist, or everybody has to buy milk. So if you ask them, is milk too expensive? They can answer the question. And you can trust that information because again, that's a circumstance in which every single person who might be polled is in fact in the ambit of the poll. You're trying to describe what the American people think, and there's no. And they'll just say, I don't know. So I don't know features prominently in a lot of polling because they don't have an opinion of X, Y or Z or data centers or something like that. Elections are the only thing in which there, there are, like, there's a primary date and then there is an election date. And once they're over, they're in the past. And nothing that happened that day, nothing that happened that day has any meaning. When the people who win actually have to start governing. I mean, it helps them. They can say, look, I have a mandate. I got this number of votes. I'm here as a Republican, so I should vote Republican. Whereas if the Democrat had won, he would vote Democrat. But it has no but, you know, the polling itself is a measurement. The polling and the election results are a measurement of a moment in time. You know, it's the decisive moment in time, but it ends. And so we're addicted to these numbers and we also know that they're ginned up. We've had a lot of studies of the ways in which social science data sets are manipulated and fabricated 65 to 70% of social science experiments are either unduplicable or have proven to be never. No one ever ran the second go to see whether or not that data existed. People were operating on ideas about trans, trans kids, the dangers to trans kids, the psychological deformity of trans kids, and why surgery was necessary. And all of those numbers were invented. So, you know, so there was a reason why Democrats, not just ideologically, but practically they were able to then go back and say, well, you know, according to the American Psychological association, you are 25% more likely to attempt suicide if you're misgendered. And so we need to help people do that. And those numbers were just invented since, of course, there aren't enough trans kids to form a data set.

[Seth Mandel]

And polling is even more creative or has room for more creativity because you can ask the same question or version of the same question in so many different ways to elicit so many different shadings of an answer that you can get what you want. See this certainly on the Israel polling all the time. You know, if you just suppose in the question that Israel is doing something terrible. So do you support this? And the answer is no, right?

[Abe Greenwald]

And fee. And feed people, like, from the media narrative, too, right? Like, oh, polls show that Americans agree that Israel is committing genocide. Like, gee, I wonder how that happened. It might be because, you know, reporters are writing 12 stories a day saying that, you know, so. And so some un. Some UN Agency finds that Israel is committing genocide and genocide this and genocide that. And you hear the word and you say, okay, fine, and whatever. But they're not having discussions about the definition. Definition of it. But you shape the narrative that way because the word does have a meaning. And now everybody claims to believe it. They did. They did the same thing. You know, they do the same thing with any. Any term. I mean, not to get off track, but, you know, we had this discussion over Zionism, too. It's like, oh, you just say Zionism is settlers, you know, throwing rocks at a Palestinian village. And you can. You can make Jews stop saying that they're Zionist, but you can't actually make Jews stop believing that Israel has a right to exist. 92% of Jews will, or whatever will still say what we originally understood as the definition of that sort of thing. It happens in politics, too. You feed people for three months and then you pull them on the things that you were feeding them on, and it's a closed circle.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, let me finish on this question. This whole story about Donald Trump in Ankara escaping Air Force One on a food cart, going to another plane, flying out on that plane for his own safety because of a credible threat of an assassination. And this has now become a big story. It has two aspects, one of which is making fun of Trump with images of him, like, on the food cart, hiding under the food cart, which we've actually seen in various movies about terrorists on planes, where the heroic Secret Service agent hides himself on the food cart and then shoots the terrorist or something like that. And so this is sort of making fun of him.

[Abe Greenwald]

Or if you're Harrison Ford, you open the hatch and you go, get off my plane.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. Well, Trump didn't do anything that, you know that. So he snuck off the plane, went on the other plane, flew. The question now is, if the threat were as credible as made it necessary for him to switch planes, why did they let everybody who was on Air Force One then fly on Air Force One if they had enough concern that Trump would, you know, a missile would hit that plane, that they had to have the President jump off it? And while I am, I always want to make fun of the media, even though I've been a working member of the media for 45 years, even though I love to make fun of the media's self obsession and concern with its access and particularly presidential access and all of that. What do we make of this question of whether or not the Secret Service seemed to be perfectly willing to put to use people on a decoy plane that they believed was a potential target?

[Seth Mandel]

I can't believe that it was as reckless as that sort of portrayal of it, because, among other reasons, Marco Rubio was left on the decoy plane. This isn't a move. He's hardly disposable in those terms.

[John Podhoretz]

So apparently this has been done before. Clinton took a decoy plane out of Islamabad when he went there, and I don't quite understand the logistics of it, but his press secretary said, we went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields. They didn't even think about it. And to me, that's the big difference. Now, this was 26 years ago. Joe Lockhart is remembering an event from 26 years ago. Maybe he's telling the truth, maybe he's not. Maybe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, what were those? What were the actions they took to maximize?

[John Podhoretz]

I don't know. That's not spelled out in the story that I'm reading here, and I've never heard of this before. But Bush took two planes when he went to Iraq, and all of that and so it's not like this hasn't been done before in some fashion or other. And as Abe says, if Marco Rubio is on the plane, then Marco Rubio's on the plane. I think the idea here is that if there's a 1% chance that Trump is going to be killed by a missile from Iran, you just make sure that 1% doesn't become possible. But you don't have the same safety concerns about everybody else on the plane. As a matter of odds logic, that if you have a 1 in 100 chance of the plane being hit by a missile, the President can't be exposed to that kind of danger, but maybe everybody else can in the law of numbers. I don't know. Do we care? Should we care? Are we, you know, do we have friends who would have been blown up on that plane if the plane had been blown up?

[Seth Mandel]

I don't care because I just don't think it's. I don't think it's a story of recklessness about human life. I really, really doubt that.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'm sure there are.

[Seth Mandel]

You incur risks if you ground the decoy plane. I mean, you have to think about every contingency here. And this is not. It's not an easy. It's not a game, and it's not an easy situation. I mean, if there's some record of there being genuinely reckless, disgusting disregard for human life except for Trump's, then yes, I care. I'm not. I don't. I've yet to see that I'm with Abe.

[Eliana Johnson]

Okay, I had the same thought. Look, the Secret Service has not displayed extraordinary competence over the time that we've, you know, followed this closely at the same time. I had exactly the same thought as Abe. And when I see journalists screaming and squealing and asking for meetings with the White House because their lives were endangered. Yeah. You know, it is a risk every time you fly on Air Force One because the. Precisely because the President's a target and they're the ones always talking about how dangerous their jobs are and how they're putting their lives on the line. So, you know, sometimes it is true

[Abe Greenwald]

for exactly the reason I learned from Eliana's point.

[Eliana Johnson]

Didn't we hear that Scott Pelley was on the front lines? Well, you know, sometimes it's true.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think Eliana's point is that you should worry if you are on the decoy plane with the Secret Service.

[John Podhoretz]

Ah, okay. There you go. I like that. Okay, I'm gonna make a quick recommendation and then we're gonna go. And it's a book that I'm recommending only because of its extreme peculiarity and its codedness for issues that are of great concern to me. And that is the new novel by the very mannered hard boiled novelist James Ellroy, author, most famously, I guess, of LA Confidential. He has a new book out called Red Sheet and It's set in LA in 1962 and it is bananas. It's basically the story of a police task force that is looking into communist infiltration in Los Angeles and brings in Nixon psychiatrist Hugh Hefner, Darrell Gates, whom we learned, the guy who 30 years after the setting of this novel was the police chief during the LA riots. All kinds of real people. And then this whole plot involving communists infiltrating African American organizations and the. Our narrator, who is chasing down drug addicts also himself being a crazy drug addict and incredibly violent and beats people up on every third page while he's snorting cocaine. And it is nuts. But it is very, very, very anti communist. It is extremely anti communist. So I haven't read an anti communist novel like this maybe ever. And so I am therefore, for those of us in the audience who remain interested in the question of American communism and its role in the 20th, you might be amused by James Ellroy's Red Sheet, a book that I can otherwise not entirely recommend. I'm only halfway through it and I can't even follow the plot practically because it's so mannered that you don't even know half the time what he's talking about. But people have loved James Elroy forever. And so this is his latest hard boiled alternate history of the United States.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, I mean, I haven't read it yet, but I actually love Elroy. But I just want to add that this really should be like his moment. I mean, because he's laid out a paranoid history of the United States and the deep state and commies and foreign influence. And if you read beginning with American tabloid, which is very electrifying, it's a giant book you can. You'll read in one sitting. I'm almost hesitant to recommend it because it has the potential to do great damage to your worldview, to your worldview and your view of this country because it is fiction, but it's fiction of a paranoid sort that Americans seem particularly susceptible to buying into today.

[John Podhoretz]

Interesting. Okay, so we'll leave it there. Back tomorrow. For Eliana, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pod Horiz. Keep the candle burning.

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Foreign.

[Eric Gertler]

From the State House to the courthouse in the emergency room and in the classroom. Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak. Yay. Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Joss Gad, and Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows, Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Matt Ebert]

I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes, and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth. Plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.

[John Podhoretz]

When you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah blah, blah. I looked up.

[Eric Gertler]

Let me tell you something.

[John Podhoretz]

There's kids in my neighborhood putting in Sheetrock that are smarter than you.

[Abe Greenwald]

AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical

[John Podhoretz]

blue collar trade skill.

[Abe Greenwald]

And the guy just looked at me

[John Podhoretz]

and he said, it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question.

[Eric Gertler]

I said, it's impossible.

[Matt Ebert]

Unless that's Pod Crash with me. Matt ebert. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.