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- [00:00]
A
How concerned are you with his talk of federalizing the elections that there will be some kind of interference with the midterms?
- [00:11]
B
We should be very concerned. I mean, it's not academic. The guy tried to steal an election in 2020. In 2016, he was ready to claim it was a fraud if he hadn't won it. There's never been an example of him accepting the outcomes of an election result that's not to his benefit. So I think we have to assume he's going to try to steal it.
- [00:29]
A
I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podc. Very fired up to bring you today's conversation with a man who I guess the best description for him is he's an insurgent moderate Democrat and he's got opinions on everything, like when is RFK Jr going to be fired? Who is the next cabinet minister that should go? He's also, as a Marine, got strong opinions on what on earth America is doing in Iran and why has nobody explained it? He went to Harvard, he was a Marine and he got his MBA from mit. So his credentials are impeccable as a member of the Democratic elite. His only problem is he's so young. He's literally half the age of the two senators representing Massachusetts. I'm talking about Congressman Jake Auchincloss and well, no time to waste. Let's get get stuck in. Congressman Auchincloss, thank you very much for joining us. At 38, is it not true that you are too young to be a Democrat?
- [01:43]
B
No, I don't think I'm too young to be a Democrat. And take that from somebody who started as a Republican. I worked for Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts in 2014, and believed in him, as I still do as a strong leader of Massachusetts. But I have seen the Republican Party become a party of blood and soil, populism and crony capitalism that is just not meeting the moment for the American public. And as challenging as the Democratic Party can be, I do think that we are I think the health of the Democratic Party is critical for us to restore the rule of law and to really put forward an economic agenda that's working for the middle class. And that's the project for 28.
- [02:30]
A
But you're literally speaking from a state where both senators are in their late 70s. And in fact, I think Ed Markey will be 80 when he goes into the Senate for his next term, Maine, just above New Hampshire. So continuing on that corridor is going to put in or the Democrats have backed Janet Mills, who's been an Utterly competent governor. I'm not saying she hasn't, but they're backing her to go into the Senate when she would be 80.
- [03:00]
B
Yes, and I do think Americans are hungry for a new generation of leadership, but let me put an asterisk on that, which is that too often I see in our national political conversation that age becomes sort of a lazy stand in for new and fresh ideas. I see young politicians trotting out very old and demonstrably bad ideas, and I see older politicians arguing for fresh approaches. So I don't want to take the complacent path of just ascribing the age of your ideas to the age of the individual. I do think it's incumbent upon those of us who are the rising generation of Democratic leaders to not just be younger, but to actually have fresh ideas. And that's really been a big part of my approach with my, with my substack. Simple but not easy is trying to say, hey, I know you're mad about what the President did this week. Here's what Democrats could do differently and better.
- [03:52]
A
Okay, well, let's come onto the Democrats in a moment. But before that, I wanted to ask you about the most pressing issue at the moment, which is obviously the bombing strikes on Iran. Do you understand why America is doing this?
- [04:11]
B
No. I would say that there is an area of clarity and there's an area of confusion. The area of clarity is the Constitution. The President does not have the authority to start this war. That is crystal clear from the pen of James Madison, through all of the interpretations of the War Powers Act. There was no imminent threat to the US Homeland, and he cannot launch these hostilities without Congressional authorization. Where there is confusion is on the strategic endgame here. And before the bomb started dropping, I laid forward two core strategic interests I thought the United States had. One was air supremacy in the Middle East. I do think that's within our security interest as a country to retain air supremacy. Iran can't rain down terror with ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons or proxy rocket fire. And the second is a broad policy of mutual non interference, which is to say to Iran, hey, you can rejoin the community of nations. We're not asking you to be a warm friend to the United States. We're asking you to stop funding terrorists in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza and to just pursue the best interests of the Iranian people. And neither of those aims really seem to be the actual strategy put forward by this President. And indeed, so far, after week one of this war, we've ended up with a 56 year old terrorist dictator to replace the 86 year old terrorist dictator that we were dealing with before.
- [05:40]
A
So Congressman, you're a Marine. You led men in Helmand province in Afghanistan. You also spent time in South America. How confident are you in Pete Hegseth's leadership of the biggest military in the world?
- [06:02]
B
I'm not confident. I think just this morning, Joanna, I was listening to a, a series of administration officials talk about this war. First it was the President himself saying that Americans would be foolish to complain about high gas prices because it was a small price to pay for his strategy, which as we discussed, he still hasn't explained what that is.
- [06:23]
A
Right.
- [06:23]
B
Then we heard Pete Hegseth say that the commander in chief doesn't owe the American people an explanation for whether he's going to put boots on the ground and how long this war is going to last. Actually, he does. And then I heard a close administration ally and former NATO ambassador say that the president should, quote, slap his allies around. I think the American public listens to that arrogance and they think back to recent memory, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Venezuela or Syria, and they sort of say, what have you done to earn that arrogance? I mean, your history of interventions and foreign policy are unimpressive. You as a group of people are unimpressive. And yeah, actually we are going to ask questions about high gas prices and
- [07:07]
A
about the Constitution, well and surely about putting boots on the ground and America's young men and women putting themselves in grave danger.
- [07:16]
B
This, my generation can remember the promises of a Republican president to restore democracy through the interventions of the United States military in the Middle East. And I literally can't find a single human being who wants to do that again. And that is not to say, by the way, that I don't think the Persian people should have self determination, should be able to achieve the core human freedoms of speech and assembly and the franchise. And I've laid forward ways that I think this president, or any president can support that. That is not, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if you're going to do coercive diplomacy with the Iranian regime, you have to have an element of carrots as well as sticks.
- [08:03]
A
So you've mentioned that the current people running this war don't seem competent and also they in fact seem arrogant. What are your former military colleagues and indeed your colleagues still in the military? What are they saying about being run by Pete Hegseth and just reminding of one of the phrases he said yesterday or not yesterday, he said at his press conference at the end of last week. We're punching them when they're down, which seems a very un American thing to say.
- [08:39]
B
There's a growing divergence that worries me, which is the United States military itself is actually ever more competent and professional than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. And I don't mean to say that it previously wasn't. What I mean to say is that our ability to integrate across services and to put effects on target is just unrivaled. And the Venezuela operation against Maduro is a good example of that. That integrated FBI, hostage rescue teams, naval assets, cyber attacks, special forces, both fixed wing and rotary wing air assets. It was one of the most impressive military operations of the 21st century, regardless of whether you agreed or disagreed with it. And I think similarly in Iran, you're seeing the United States military achieve air dominance within a matter of days. And what concerns me is when you have this growing divide between kind of a clown show of politicians and an increasingly professional and competent military. I worry about morale and esprit de corps within the military. I worry about good order and discipline. And ultimately, what I worry about is the American public's trust in the military as a nonpartisan institution. And it's one of the great gifts of American history, ever since George Washington handed over his sword to the Continental Congress, that our military is run by civilians and is in. Is an apolitical institution. And this president is trying to launder his reputation through the military's trust with the American public. And it's ultimately going to degrade the military. And that pains me.
- [10:15]
A
You, as we mentioned, led men in Afghanistan. You also watched when America pulled out of Afghanistan only to give the country over to the Taliban. Do you think it was an entire waste of time, you being there?
- [10:31]
B
No, I don't think. I don't think 20 years of American foreign policy can be condensed into a binary. Three quarters of that country was electrified under American infrastructure investment and security. The literacy rate for young women surged again under American suzerainty in Afghanistan. Those are real wins. Those are real wins for the potential for human flourishing in that country. Obviously, handing the country over to the Taliban is a massive strategic black eye. And they're now continuing to brutalize and immiserate their population, particularly women and girls. So it's certainly not a victory, but I think it's too simplistic to say all 20 years was a failure. There was. There was progress there, but at the core of it, there was just a fundamental misunderstanding of what that country was. And that country is not a nation state run out of Kabul. That that country is a patchwork of different ethnic tribes, the Pashtun, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks. And we never could grok it and never were going to be able to grok it. And it's just an example of what happens when you try to. You try to shoot your way towards the political end game. You can't do it. You need, as Clausewitz said, all war is an extension of politics by other means. You gotta do the politics. And, boy, this country is bad at doing the politics.
- [11:50]
A
And Joe Biden, president at the time, took the flak for that. I know it was Donald Trump's plan to pull out of Afghanistan. Do you think that one of the problems with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is what's also led to Trump determined to show off and drop as many bombs as he can over Iran? Because America needs a victory in foreign affairs, in foreign policy.
- [12:20]
B
I'm not sure I can map out the psychodrama inside Trump's brain. I think the more direct line is probably from Venezuela to Iran. I think that Maduro operation, again, a military success, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue otherwise. I mean, a really an impressive achievement to capture Maduro in that manner. And I think Donald Trump basically was like, we decapitated one regime, why not decapitate another? And the problem there is Iran's a country of 90 million people with a restive Kurdish population and a significant apparatus of repression. And it just, you can't drag and drop one approach to the other.
- [13:02]
A
So if you were a betting man, what would you think the outcome is going to be in Iran?
- [13:10]
B
I'm a member of Congress. I don't want to be a betting man. I want to be involved in the deliberations and strategy setting for what happens in Iran. And that's, I think, what the American people are owed is I do town halls across my district and I get questions and I am responsible for my voice and vote to my constituents, and they deserve to have me involved in setting forward a strategy for Iran. And it's not just because of the constitutional imperative. It's also because we make better strategy that way. Republicans and Democrats both. You see this with Taiwan, you see this with NATO. You see this with Ireland, for example, when Congress has put forward some bipartisan ballast in the ship of state, where, you know, for example, we got behind the Taiwan Relations act in the 1970s, we got behind the Good Friday Agreement in the 1990s. We've always been behind NATO funding in a bipartisan way. When we do that, you create some certainty and some guardrails around presidential action. That just creates better strategy. We've never had that for Iran. And by the way, that's both parties fault. Both presidents of both parties have done a bad job of this, Jimmy Carter onwards. And we've never had a bipartisan approach to Iran. And we could. We could. And now would be a super great time to do that.
- [14:19]
A
Okay, so if you're involved in it, and I totally take your point, of course Congress should be involved in it. And constitutionally, it should be involved in it, what do you think would be an end game for Iran now, given that they've just put in the son of the former Khamenei, who's by all accounts just as brutal as his father?
- [14:41]
B
Oh, worse, worse. He's personally implicated in the murder and torture of tens of thousands of Iranians and is even more beholden to the militia and IRGC extremists and has even less popular legitimacy. He's likely to race for nuclear capacity. So what it would start with for me is doing what I was trained to do as an infantry officer, which is you turn around the map, it's easy to think about what Washington wants. What's more interesting, what's more fruitful, is to put yourself in Tehran and imagine that you're a moderate senior politician who is trying to navigate your way to be the successor to the Ayatollah, either the last Ayatollah or this one when he gets killed, which, frankly, is more likely than not at this point, what do you need to be able to convince the various factions of Iranian political life that the moderate path can bear fruit? And I think you need a couple of things. You need to be able to point to Washington and say there actually is bipartisan support for us to rejoin the community of nations. That means dropping the sanctions. That means dropping the economic punishment. If we do a couple of reasonable things. One, we have got to agree to some kind of inspections on a nuclear program. Maybe we can even still have a civilian element of it, but we got to have inspections. Two, we've got to dial back and fully and fully cease funding of proxy terror groups. And if we do those two things, we can. Our water. Our water shortages in Tehran will stop and the inflation can be handled. And I can point to that roadmap and I can try to make the case, because right now what's happening is there's no case to be made. And so the IRGC has just grabbed control of all political levers because they were able to say within their political system, you see, we told you, you can't deal with these people. You got to just double down on terrorism.
- [16:33]
A
And do you think the continued bombing raids are going to lead to that place where moderate Iranian politicians could be
- [16:44]
B
thinking that that's the bet the administration is taking, that they can bomb their way to a moderate path forward? I don't, I don't see it. I mean, the fundamental strategic reality right now is that America is dominant in the sky. That is true. And the IRGC is dominant on the ground. They have a million militiamen. They have complete control over the bureaucracy, the economy, the media, of Iranian public life. And there's no, I mean, point me to this groundswell of individuals who are cohering into an actual opposition faction that doesn't exist. You've got the Kurds, you've got, you've got some sort of monarchists, you've got some civil society reformers, you've got the trade unionists. They're all arguing with one another. The work was not done. The spade work was not done ahead of time to actually create an opposition that could take the reins of power. At this point, the best opportunity we have is to try to get some moderate installed there who at the very least can work with Washington.
- [17:50]
A
Right. And who can work with that Gulf economy, too, so that they're incentivized to raise money for their people and get back into a sort of functioning economy. I would have thought, yeah, it would
- [18:02]
B
help if they would stop bombing the Gulf states to do that. Right.
- [18:05]
A
Right.
- [18:06]
B
After the Iranian president said they wouldn't, and then they continue to do so. That was a very strong demonstration of the fact that the IRGC is firmly in control of this government right now.
- [18:16]
A
Right. And do you, I mean, were people, do you think, particularly Donald Trump, do you think they were fooled by the rising up of the Iranian population earlier this year? Obviously, it was very savagely put down. Thousands of people shot by their own government. But do you think that led the west to believe that the Iranian people somehow had more power than they actually do?
- [18:46]
B
I think that's a possibility. And this is the, this is the frustration is there were tens of thousands of Iranians on the streets and this president said, I have your back, and he didn't. And then they were massacred. This president had the authorization and the appropriations to surge Starlink 2.0 technology to the streets of Tehran. And just for our listeners, Starlink 1.0 basically is you have a ground transmitter and you're able to get cell service through the ground transmitter. The problem is, is that the IRGC is very good at jamming those transmitters. Starlink 2.0 is direct from your phone to the satellite, much harder to jam. And we have that technology. And the President failed to get it in sufficient quantity at the right places to really support the Internet freedom that those protests needed. And by the way, if the President had come to Congress and said, hey, the, the protesters are out in the streets, here's what I'm doing to empower them. Here is a plan for how we're going to create a focal point for their opposition, either on the Shah's son, either on some moderate politician. And I'm asking for authorization to go strike and take out the senior IRGC command and the Ayatollah. That's a conversation I could have had. I'm not shedding any tears for the Ayatollah. The guy's a terrorist. And if we had had line of sight to kill him in support of the protesters, fair ask of Congress not. That is not what has happened here.
- [20:11]
A
Right, right. So we saw the defenestration of Kristi Noem at Homeland Security. Who in the Cabinet do you think should be gotten rid of next if
- [20:22]
B
the President's in a firing kind of mood? I got a list for him. And number one on that list is definitely RFK Jr. Who's bringing back measles and whooping cough in this country. Tens of thousands of cases forecast for 20, 26 and 27. Who is grifting to an unprecedented degree, both himself and his senior staff, and whose incompetence and cronyism is driving the Food and Drug Administration into the ground right now? That's hemorrhaging competence and credibility there.
- [20:51]
A
When you say grifting, do you mean he's got conflicts of interest with some of the companies that he's working with within the Department of Health? And can you be specific?
- [21:00]
B
Yes, two examples. One, so RFK himself, as we know, is an anti vax zealot, and he has anti vax litigation that would reward him basically for an expanded lawsuits against vaccine makers. Now he is methodically going through the vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is how the federal government handles vaccine litigation, to make it easier to sue the vaccine makers on spurious grounds. And he will be rewarded for those lawsuits. He put the lawsuits in a sort of a separate shell entity, but he still gets the benefit of them.
- [21:32]
A
When you say he gets the benefit of them, do you mean that he gets a commission off the top of any kind of, you know, legal win there.
- [21:40]
B
Yeah, he still has equity stakes in that litigation. The second example is his top aide, really kind of the go between between HHS and the White House, a gentleman named Callie Means. Callie Means runs a company, founded a company called Trumed, who. Which is basically a mill to generate what are called letters of medical necessity. Letters of medical necessity are when doctors write you a note that says I'm allowed to buy something and charge it to my health savings account, which is basically tax exempt dollars. And Truman is out there hawking saunas, bidets specialized like kitty litters, just like things basically that rich people want to buy and use it with tax preference dollars. And he has been changing the rules around health savings accounts at the Health and Human Services Department to when you know it make it easier to do that. The valuation of his company has tripled in the last year since he's been there. And he's refusing to disclose any of his financial conflicts of interest forms as the law requires him to do.
- [22:42]
A
So are you able or are the Democrats able to bring pressure on him to expose his financials? What are the tools available to you?
- [22:53]
B
I've been doing it. We've had some success, so I won't go through all the different letters and etc. But we've had some success in at least forcing him to explain his new status as a special government employee. And. But the short answer is it's hard in the minority without subpoena power to fully put on display the grift and the self dealing. Now, if we take back the gavels after November, that will happen and both RFK Jr. And Callie means will be front and center. There's some others too within HHS who, who have been doing well off the public purse.
- [23:32]
A
So the President himself seems concerned about the midterms. He said he thinks he's going to be impeached if the Democrats win the midterms. How concerned are you with his talk of federalizing the elections that there will be some kind of interference with the midterms?
- [23:55]
B
We should be very concerned. I mean, it's not academic. The guy tried to steal an election in 2020. In 2016, he was ready to claim it was a fraud if he hadn't won it. Right. I mean, there's never been an example of him accepting the outcomes of an election result that's not to his benefit. So I think we have to assume he's going to try to steal it. And there's two Things in particular that Democrats need to do to get ahead of this one. We should push for passage of the Bevins act, which is basically a law that would allow federal officials to be held liable in state courts for violating the United States Constitution. That would really help prevent some of his henchmen under the color of law from going to the states which administer our elections and bullying them, you know, for those infamous find me 11,000 votes kind of thing. Now, we allow state officials to be held liable for violating the Constitution and federal courts, but we don't do the opposite. And that's a loophole that should be closed. Number two, and I would actually argue more important and more viable even too, is we need to pre. But his gaslighting. We know he's gonna lie, right? About the election results. And so what Democrats need to do is hold a bunch of election war games this summer. And by the way, this is in the works to show, here's the phone calls he's gonna make, here's the county clerks he's gonna bully, here's the votes he's gonna try to find. Here's why he's lying. And then through both new and traditional media, inoculate the American public against those lies. This works. We've seen this work against other autocrats, right? When Joe Biden did this against Vladimir Putin in 22, before he invaded Ukraine, when he declassified intelligence to show that Putin was lying, it actually really helped shape global public opinion. We're sort of up against the same thing. We're up against this guy who's gonna lie about what's right in front of people's eyes. And we just have to say it over and over and over again. He is lying. And do it before he starts lying.
- [25:50]
A
And how do you bring Democrats together to do that? I know that you're the chair of a sort of hybrid PAC and super pac, majority Democrats, which is. I think you've got a whole group of moderate Democrats, younger, more around your age than the age of, say, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey or almost octogenarian senators in Massachusetts. How do you have those conversations? Are you all getting together physically? Are you doing it on zoom? How does it sort of take place? And what is the urgency in those conversations
- [26:28]
B
regarding the pre budding of the election lines that'll happen under the auspices of the House Administration Committee? The Democrats on the House Administration Committee are the best position to do that. They've got jurisdiction over elections and the machinery of elections. And so they have already put together about 180 different, sort of call them like 180 rows on a spreadsheet tracking bad stuff that he's going to try to do. They are working through the law and through public opinion to address those issues. But then this summer, early this fall, we have to do sort of a public setting of the war game as well. That's the next iteration. Now, my group, majority Democrats in 26. Our primary goal is to win the midterms. I mean, that's our goal. House Admin is going to protect the integrity of the midterms, majority of Democrats. We want to win those things.
- [27:16]
A
So how do you win them? I understand that Donald Trump is very low in the polls right now, but there is a clear message for the Republicans. Make America great again. America first. I mean, I've talked to many people about this. Why is there no simple idea around which the Democrats can coalesce? It feels like there's a civil war going on in the Democratic Party right now between the moderates and the progressives. Why should people vote Democrat? And the really interesting thing, I think, is that people knew when Donald Trump was running again, they knew that he was a bad guy. They knew they didn't like him from before, and yet they would still rather vote for him than vote for the Democrats.
- [28:09]
B
Yeah. So I am not an individual who thinks that the Democrats should meet MAGA populism with a Diet Coke version of that populism. If we're as coarse as they are, if we fall back on slogans like they do that, somehow we're gonna outcompete them and we're gonna have a tug of war to see who can get to 50% plus one every two years. I don't think that's a viable path forward for the Democratic Party. I think instead we have to start by recognizing what is the core argument that MAGA is making to the American public. And the individual who has articulated that core argument is J.D. vance. J.D. vance, to the Republican convention in 2024, said, in describing his own family cemetery in Eastern Kentucky, that Americans like those, they won't die for an idea, but they will die for their homeland. And what he's doing is he's pointing to his blood in his soil, and he is making a blood and soil argument to the American public. And he's implicitly saying, those Democrats, they don't have roots in this soil. And because they don't have roots, they bend and they break in the winds of political change. They're too weak. And I think what Democrats have to recognize is if, as we are going up against this blood and soil populism, our argument is different. Our argument is actually, Mr. Vice President, Americans do fight and die for ideas. From Bunker Hill to Shiloh to Normandy to Selma. In fact, we have demonstrated that America is the greatest nation in the history of the world because we have been built upon the greatest idea in the history of the world. That the circumstances of your birthday should not determine the condition of your life. And that is what the Democratic Party offers. Freedom, equality, equality of opportunity, equality under the law. Because that is what is fitting a free people who believe in that core idea.
- [30:03]
A
Do you think you can get the progressives on side for that? Because the progressives economic message seems to be simply tax the rich. And it feels like, well, we know the Democrats have lost the stars and stripes, they've lost the idea of patriotism. They seem very keen on just criticizing what it is to be an American.
- [30:26]
B
If Democrats allow MAGA to be the party of patriotism in 2028, we'll lose. Americans are not going to vote for leaders who don't love this country. And absolutely we need to reclaim not just the flag, but faith and family as well. And there are ways that we can do that. I think, though that we shouldn't. I understand the approach of saying, oh, moderates and progressives in the Democratic Party, they're fighting. I think the actual opportunity to us is not to sort of have a fight between those two factions. The actual opportunity and the way the real leverage in American politics is, is who can define what the new center of American politics is. And in defining that new center, you've got to take ideas from various factions of American political life. So when the progressives say they want to tax the rich at a national level, you know, for example, if we're going to raise. If we're. Let me give an example here. Right now, Jeff Bezos qualifies for the child tax credit and he's going to be able to give all of his wealth to his children, basically tax free. We should 100% close those loopholes. We should tax inheritance the same way you tax income. And we should say to people, if you have success in life and you get rich, that's part of the American dream, but you got to pay it forward for the next generation of kids so they have an opportunity to thrive as well. And we can take the approach of libertarians, traditionally a conservative bloc who have been hostile to executive power and overreach by Washington and say, you know what, you're right and we're going to adopt that as part of conception of the new center as well. So we got to do some ideological work rather than just having a political. Political tussle.
- [32:04]
A
Well, I don't think anyone's going to disagree that Jeff Bezos should be taxed as fairly as possible. But how also, I mean, if we accept that somehow the Democrats have lost the sense of patriotism around America, it also feels, and I know you've done a lot of work on this, which is why I'm interested to talk to you about it, that they've also lost the message that America is an economic engine. I mean, the American economy is one of the great wonders of the modern world, and yet it feels like Democrats think it's a bad thing and that the only way to build revenue is to tax people who are making over a certain amount of money.
- [32:49]
B
Yeah, two things there. First of all, I actually don't think everyone would agree that Jeff Bezos should pay more. And the people who don't agree are called Republicans. Look at their tax code that they forced through in 2025. No, they don't. They. It was a $5 trillion giveaway from the working class to the wealthiest in this country. So I.
- [33:08]
A
Totally. Fair point. Totally take your point. The big beautiful bill. Yeah.
- [33:13]
B
You know, there is. There is an argument for a Fresh Start tax code. And that Fresh Start tax code, Joanna, can actually, it can hit exactly the argument that you are making, which is we don't believe in inherited wealth in this country as an engine of prosperity. We. We believe that every individual, when they're born, should be able to make their own way based on talent and hard work and playing by the rules. And that means that, yes, when you die and you're extremely wealthy, you should pay it forward. And it also means that we're going to invest in, particularly in kids, whether it's health care, education, to give them the best possible start. We're also not going to be hostile to or punish success. We want a strong floor, but we want no ceiling. Go out there and start the next companies. Free enterprise needs to be central to who we are because it was pioneers and builders who created this economy. I think you're going to see this tension, by the way, in the next couple of years over AI, where there's a faction of the party who may just be inveterately hostile to. I think that's a mistake. I think whether it's in health care or education or, you know, financial services and insurance, AI is going to be a huge productivity boon. And we shouldn't kind of catastrophize it and say, oh, it's going to wipe out all these jobs and we should hate it. We should get behind, you know, preparing the workforce to be able to be more productive and use it. But we should also recognize that these big tech companies don't get to just control all the decisions, particularly around the use of AI bots on social media platforms that have really been attention fracking our kids and manipulating their reward systems, much to their detriment. We can do both. We can say, say to parents, we're on your side. We're not going to let Mark Zuckerberg build AI friends that your kids hang out with in the metaverse. And we're going to make sure that your health care premiums only go up by 2%, not 15%, because we're going to surge AI into the health care system and take out a lot of cost.
- [35:04]
A
Well, hopefully, if you take out a lot of cost in the health care system, premiums should actually go down, not rise by 2%. They should drop by 20%.
- [35:14]
B
Yes. I think when you look at the, at the secular growth trends in health care over the last 15 or 20 years, getting health care to inflate at just overall inflation rate in the US Economy would be a massive win. Getting it to deflate, even better. But I think we want to, I think we want to promise Americans in health care where they trust Democrats. I think we want to promise something that we can deliver in the first two to four years.
- [35:38]
A
Okay, all right. Well, that's a whole other separate conversation that I hope we have another time. But let me take you back to social media, because I know that you've been a big advocate for the banning of TikTok, which it looked at one point as if Congress was entirely on board for. And in fact, Donald Trump, who also wanted it to be banned at one point, has finagled a sale to largely his supporters and his friends, with Oracle and Larry Ellison taking a big chunk of it. And I should confess, I have a slight conflict of interest here because I'm actually on the board of Snapchat. But I do want to talk to you about TikTok and the extent to which you think it's a national security risk or continues to be a national risk. Security risk. Now it's got American ownership, because I know that was a concern when you first voted against it. And do you think it's going to be a factor in the midterms?
- [36:33]
B
I don't think it's going to be A factor in the midterms. I do think it's a national security risk. I think having our pacing adversary dominate the most important ideological platform in the world is a problem. Not to mention their access to American social graphs through the iPhone, contacts that they can, that they can take. And yet as urgent and critical as that is, it's actually not the biggest reason I was a co lead on the TikTok bill. My central premise is that right now as a country, the three most influential gatekeepers of news, media entertainment for our young children are the Chinese Communist party because of TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg whose documentation at Meta said it was appropriate for his AI bots to have quote, sensual conversations with 12 year olds. And Elon Musk whose GROK bot recently was producing one child sex abuse deepfake every 40 seconds for 11 straight days. Those are the three individuals who are in charge of what our children see and how their sense of self in society is formed. That is a problem. That's not even a national security issue. That's just about who we are as a country and we have to take back control from these digital empires.
- [37:49]
A
And do you think that's, I mean how do you think we go about doing that? Because that is a very complicated idea. When people are worried about paying their gas prices and worried about paying their rent and have not bothered to sign up for Obamacare this year because the premiums have gone up too much.
- [38:09]
B
So it's actually the most resonant idea I talk about. There is no question that affordability is front and center for Americans conception of whether their kids are going to do better than they are. But when I'm in living rooms across my district and I'm talking about housing and healthcare and energy, people are, people are listening. When I talk about social media and the effect of social media on our young people, they're not listening. They take over the conversation. Jake, let me tell you about my daughter. Jake, let me tell you about my son and why I'm concerned about it. Let me tell you about what I think we should be doing. The dynamic in the living room totally changes. You are right that if we did a public opinion research right now, it's hard to surface and crystallize this issue because people don't necessarily have the words for it. But this is going to be a voting issue in 2028 and you're going to see examples like the Australia model that try to keep kids off these platforms until they're 16 gain real currency in debate.
- [39:01]
A
Okay, well that's Incredibly sort of heartening to hear that people are engaged by it because sometimes I worry that these ideas are too abstract to become election issues. And clearly the dominance of Elon Musk is really a remarkable development in American politics and seems very underexplored, I actually think so.
- [39:26]
B
I was actually just talking to the Australian minister of communications about what has happened with the 16 year old age limit. And I would argue that it's actually not abstract at all. This is your kid's screen time. This is actually every night. Right. And the dynamic right now is parents feel like they have to be the bad cop. Give me your phone. No, you have 30 minutes on the iPad and no more. And let me look at your settings and let me look at your text messages to see who you're texting. I talk to parents about this all the time. They're worried about who's contacting their kids, particularly their daughters with the straight with the ability for strangers to message them. And parents are basically in this arms race with a group of tech companies that have quite literally trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of software engineers who are hiring addiction specialists to help advise them on user design. Okay. Of course, these parents are outmatched and exasperated and demoralized. And when they hear politicians say, you know what, I have kids too, and I feel your sense of powerless. But when I stand behind that committee gavel, I don't feel powerless anymore. I feel angry and I feel like we're going to take action to make your life a little easier. I think that. I think that lands.
- [40:32]
A
Yeah. I remember trying to prise the phone out of my younger son's hand as he would go to bed at night and he would literally go into some sort of weird, almost physical addiction, kind of like panic that he was going to lose connectivity with his friends. It's a really complicated and incredibly interesting conversation that parents across the globe, I'm sure are having. So one story that does keep coming back to haunt the President and it certainly touched two of the big elite institutions in Massachusetts, MIT and Harvard is Jeffrey Epstein. Were you. I mean, how much more mileage do you think the Epstein story has in it? And given this dump of files and the almost impenetrable nature of them, what should Congress be doing to really cut through the noise and find if there is any. The real stories in the Epstein files?
- [41:33]
B
The redactions. The redactions right now are in service to powerful, well connected individuals and at times have been such that they're actually revealing victims names but not revealing perpetrators. Names. We have got to get these redactions cleaned up so the American public get what they. What Congress voted for, which was transparency. And then number two is the Attorney General, Pam Bondi. She, after Christy Noem and rfk, is probably the most pernicious member of the Cabinet. And I think she would, should we take back the gavels, be the target for the Democratic Party in the House.
- [42:13]
A
And you were at both Harvard and you got your MBA from mit, both of whom were affected. Larry Summers, obviously, Harvard, and Joey Ito, head of Media Lab at mit. Do you think the institutions took too long to get them to leave? I mean, Larry Summers has only just agreed to resign.
- [42:36]
B
You know, to me, the biggest takeaway is it's not about any one institution. What I think has been made plain by the release of these papers is just there was this entire web of individuals, mostly men, but not entirely, who understood who he was, or at least should have known who he was, and yet were perfectly comfortable engaging with him, joking with him, doing mutual favors with him. And it's a very gross X ray on the American elite that I think needs to be a reckoning and that this type of behavior just is not something that should be. Should be acceptable. And I think what the British monarchy has done regarding the former Prince Andrew is an important demonstration of saying that, you know, nobody just like, nobody's above the law, nobody is above basic standards of public morality. And America hasn't fully done that yet. Certainly not with Donald Trump himself.
- [43:34]
A
All right, so I have a final question for you. I know that you come from a very posh, deep rooted family in Massachusetts, and you have faint connections to both the family of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Andassis and also Gore Vidal. And I thought you must have a favorite Gore Vidal quote, don't you? I have several favorite Gore Vidal quotes, but I was wondering if you had one.
- [44:03]
B
My favorite is actually his description of Auchincloss men in sort of high society New York. And it's a great description. Cause what he says is, I don't have the exact quote, but to paraphrase, he said, you know, the hawking class men never had any of their own money and they never were particularly successful themselves, but they always were good at marrying up. And my brother and dad and I have always agreed that our greatest asset has been the fact that we can marry someone better than us.
- [44:32]
A
Okay. Congressman Auchincloss, thank you so much for your time.
- [44:35]
B
No, I appreciate you having me on.
- [44:41]
A
I love that conversation. I think it's so interesting to talk to the younger members of the Democratic Party who are coming up and have got to wrestle the party to the ground to win. I mean, never mind all these conversations the Democrats are having. What about the one conversation that really matters, which is how does the party win? Tell us what you think. Send us your comments on YouTube. Join and become a BeeBeast member of the YouTube community. You get lots of of extra content. Don't forget to subscribe to my new substack, please. It's so interesting having conversations directly on email with readers. It's Beast Pub Scream. That's Beast Pub Scream. And of course, I'll be back tomorrow with Michael Wolff inside Trump's head. Until then, don't forget, as our first lady would insist were she in the room with us, and I long one day to interview her bebeast. So the good news is we have so many Bee Beast tier members now there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team. Devon Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, Neil Rosenhaus.