Lately, AI data centers are public enemy No. 1. The concerns are legion: how much water and electricity they consume, the noise they generate, the sprawling buildings they bring to communities, and the technology they’re powering that may or may not take all of our jobs and usher in the robot apocalypse.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans oppose building data centers that support AI in their communities. And the backlash is bipartisan: Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents opposed local construction.

Even in Texas, where data center development has been booming, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has hit the brakes. In September, he directed state regulators to halt permits for data centers pending audits examining their effects on the power grid and water resources.

But while many data center projects have run aground, others are still getting built — and the companies behind them are employing experts like Nicole Thomas to smooth the way.

Thomas is the senior vice president of media and community engagement at JSA, a marketing and public relations firm that represents data center companies. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about how the industry is responding to public opposition — and why she argues that these facilities can still be good neighbors.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You’ve been at this for 21 years. Obviously, 21 years ago, data centers were not the hot-button issue they are today. When did you notice the shift?

I’d say about two years ago. I came into this industry myself about four and a half years ago. I come from a state transportation background where community engagement is just paramount. When you’re putting a new traffic intersection up, they expect you to interact with the public. 

When I got to this industry, I said, “Oh, what’s your community engagement like?” And they said, “We don’t even have any community engagements in this industry.” And they weren’t wrong. Because 21 years ago, [data centers] were just like infrastructure. It was like building a warehouse for your computers. And so it was very similar to the way that you would build a Costco.

You would just go in, request a zoning permit, the zoning board would say, “Yeah, that works. Stamp, boom.” And you build your data center. And as a matter of fact, it was very secretive before, because data, and having that data in the wrong hands, has a lot of [cybersecurity] implications. About two years ago is when we started noticing the mainstream journalists coming around asking questions about data centers. And that’s, to me, when it started.

It still feels secretive, I think, to a lot of people, and that’s why people are mad. If you read about this data center that was proposed in Utah by Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary, it caught a lot of people off guard. Seventy percent of Americans, at the moment, do not want them in their backyards. How do you go about trying to change that 70 percent’s minds? 

First and foremost, I think education is really important. And so one of the things that we did notice very early on because of the previously secretive nature of data centers, there wasn’t a lot of education out there about what they even are. And so that’s something we need to change. We need to make the connection between [phones] and data centers so that people understand what a data center means to their life on a daily basis.

Every app on your cellphone requires a data center to save your information in there. When you put your password into anything, you are interacting with a data center, which will verify your password and then let you into that app. Not to mention all of the information about you that you store in that app is then stored in a data center so that it can be recalled at any time. 

We could not be having this call without digital infrastructure. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t have email without digital infrastructure. And that stat about 70 percent of people not wanting the data center in their backyard — I’d be interested in seeing the stat of how many people actually live near a data center and don’t realize it. 

Because there are nondescript data centers doing work quietly in your neighborhood that have been there for decades and you don’t even know it. And so in some ways I feel, and I think the industry does as a whole, but I won’t speak for them, that the pushback on data centers is somewhat related to the pushback on AI, because people can’t control AI.

You even have Sam Altman telling us that AI will destroy society. So you have this concern about AI and you don’t know how to control it, but you can push back on data centers. And so it becomes the physical manifestation of AI are these data centers that people are trying to get overturned or get to not be in their neighborhoods. 

It’s understandable. I’m a citizen too. You’re a citizen, and if things come into my neighborhood, I want to know about them. I have questions. There’s a big data center that just came to my community not long ago and their community engagement was horrible, absolutely horrible. 

Can I ask where you are?

I’m in Indiana and I won’t say which hyperscaler it is, but a hyperscaler came into — I would say, not my neighborhood, into my city. They’re definitely not in my backyard, but they’re in my city. And so we took them to task because their community engagement was basically non-existent.

Wait, you work in data center PR, but you took a data center in your community to task for not being transparent enough?

Yeah, absolutely. 

Which side are you on?

I’m on the side of responsible development.

We’ve all kind of accepted that we need a cloud for X, Y, and Z. And that it’s worth it so I can take lots of photos. I think everyone’s cool with that.

But the issue here is that people aren’t necessarily cool with AI, but we’re barreling forward anyway. How do you separate this essential need we have from AI, which people don’t necessarily feel is essential to their lives?

I think it goes back to education. Educating consumers on the difference between data centers: a small data center, a medium data center, a large data center. Educating them on why data centers exist and how they interact with data centers on a daily basis multiple times.

I hear you. But again, I feel like the issue here is not the data centers my cellphone needs, but instead is the data centers these AI companies need and these AI companies who the public doesn’t necessarily trust because they keep telling us that they’re going to kill us, and who the public is wary of because they don’t want their jobs being replaced by AI. 

There’s all sorts of reasons that people are skeptical of new technology. So how do you specifically respond to that fear and to those people?

I think it’s, again, understanding the actual data center that’s being built in your community. Is it a 5-megawatt data center? That’s never going to house AI. That’s not enough power to house AI. Is it a one-gigawatt data center like Mr. Wonderful in Utah? That’s different.

But I think that AI is probably going to be something that is a lightning rod in the American public for a very long time. There are going to be people who are going to be anti-AI and pro-AI, and there’s going to be some people in the middle. I think it’s just, again, for us, it’s education, educating the community.

Have you ever been part of a project that a community rejected and you guys just packed up and said, “Okay, we’ll go find another community?”

Yeah. We have some clients who have had pushback from residents and they have said, “Let’s do a one-on-one community meeting where people can come in and ask us questions.”

And after the questions were answered, the community leaves and says, “Okay, this isn’t as bad as I thought it was.” Or we have a community that says, “No, we now have a moratorium and we’re pushing all data centers away.“ 

Sometimes they’ll wait for their client — my client is a developer and they’ve got clients that they’re developing for. If that client will wait, then maybe it is something that we’ll try to work out with the community. But oftentimes, they’ll just say, there’s communities who are literally raising their hand saying, “We’ll take a data center. We’ll take one. We’ll take two. Bring it here.” 

So there are communities who recognize the benefits of data centers. And there are going to be other communities who say, “No, we don’t want this.” And then in five, six, eight years, they’re going to be like, “Wow, that county has a lot of tax dollars. They have a lot of really cool stuff. Why don’t we have that?” And the answer will be data centers. 

I don’t think this ends anytime soon though, right? I counsel my clients that we could still be here in three to five years, really trying to help the American public understand the benefit of data centers. But it’s going to take a lot of education across the industry, and once we get those seeds planted, I’m a firm believer that they grow into educated community members who make educated decisions to bring community-minded data centers to their community.

Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month. Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House. Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma. 

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.  

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising. And I was wondering if you could tell us said story.

[Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader. And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach. And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies. More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. 

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment. I think a lot of Democratic partisans wish he would be more angry. But the way he told me the story, he was legitimately pissed off. And he realized that he needed to respond in some way. And he didn’t think that a tweet would be sufficient. 

He wanted to do an Instagram post, and he looked into his aide’s iPhone, and he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” And as soon as he was done recording the video, I think he started to have second thoughts. And they sent the video up to Washington for a social media team to edit, and he told them, “Let’s bleep out the word fuck.” And for him, it was a smashing social media success.

I was in his office in the Capitol six days later, and he was telling me this story and basking in some of the reflected glory and talking about all the social media love and talking about the real-world love. But then he kind of paused, and he said something like, “You know, but I still haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m a little worried about that.” Which I thought captured him pretty well.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before.”

Why did you want to start your profile of him with that story? What does it tell us about who this individual is?

I thought it captured the dilemma he faces in some ways, just in the sense that he is this very deliberate, calculated political figure, very conventional. And he is operating in a political space these days that doesn’t really reward or appreciate that approach. 

Oftentimes that approach is not successful. I think he’s trying to adapt to the new rules of the road, and he’s kind of doing it in fits and starts, and sometimes he’s more successful than others. But I still think, even when he is successful, he has some qualms about it. 

How long has Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be speaker of the House?

When he got to Congress, in 2012, he definitely wanted to become a player. He wanted to be in leadership, chair a committee, whatever. He was someone who had his eye on that. 

But at the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus had started to think a little bit differently about what they could achieve in Congress. For a long time, they wanted their members to get chairmanships and things like that, or maybe be majority whip. But by the time Jeffries got there, they started to think that we could actually get a speaker. And his arrival kind of coincided with this realization on the part of the CBC. And I think a lot of CBC members viewed Jeffries as a potential future speaker, and they started to groom him for that. 

Pretty soon after that, Nancy Pelosi started to think of him as someone who would be a good member of her leadership team. And I think by 2018, that’s when it really became apparent that he was going to be someone who could potentially be speaker. 

What does he actually stand for as the most powerful Democrat in the House?

I think, quite intentionally, he doesn’t stand for anything. I think that in some ways has been key to his success. He has managed for the most part to avoid being kind of pigeonholed or put anywhere on the ideological spectrum. He is very critical of the far left of the party, especially the DSA. He views the DSA as college-educated young white people who are coming to Brooklyn and displacing older Black working-class people. 

I was talking to this former Democratic congressional aide and basically asking this person the question you’re asking me: What does he stand for? And this person was trying to explain it and finally just was sort of exasperated, and he said he’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything. He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is, and it’s satisfactory.

We don’t have a lot of case studies for how he manages his caucus because they haven’t been in power. But I think maybe one of the most telling examples was the shutdown, because Democrats were, in a way, the power brokers there. Tell us how Hakeem Jeffries managed that.

That was probably his greatest success as minority leader.  When Trump took office for the second time, especially for those first few months, I think all of the congressional Democrats, and Jeffries especially, were really on their heels. They could not figure out how to deal with this guy and what they were going to do to stop him. Jeffries was even complaining that he didn’t have any leverage. But then he eventually realized that a shutdown would be at least a little bit of leverage. 

The real question was, what was the shutdown going to be about? And there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who wanted it to be about authoritarianism or corruption. They wanted it to be at all these different issues. And Jeffries was really insistent that we need to make this about one issue, and we need to make it about healthcare. 

The Democrats were the ones who caused the shutdown. And normally, the way shutdowns have worked in the past, it’s the party that causes the shutdown that gets the heat from the public. But this time around, I think because Democrats were so consistent in saying that this is about healthcare, and Republicans were so scattered in their own messaging and their own explanations of what was going on, Democrats’ polling numbers went up, Trump’s and Republicans’ went down, and that was a real victory for Jeffries.

Did that whole incident put Jeffries on the president’s radar in a way that he wasn’t? 

It comes, and it goes. For a long time, he wouldn’t mention Jeffries at all. 

I guess the way to tell if Trump is thinking about you is if he posts about you on Truth Social, and he started to post about Jeffries a lot — all the usual kind of insults he lobs, especially at Black politicians, that Jeffries was low IQ and a thug. But yeah, he does seem to be paying a little bit more to Jeffries now than he was before.

And do we think Jeffries is ready to go toe to toe with the president of the United States if that’s what voters decide he’s to do this November?

In his mind, he’s ready. And I think in his own stilted, rehearsed, steady fashion, he will go toe to toe with Donald Trump. He will talk about affordability, and he’ll talk about corruption, and he’ll talk about the “so-called president.” 

I don’t think it will necessarily be satisfying for a lot of Democratic voters out there and Democratic partisans, but I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before. But I think it’s going to take him a little while to figure out how to do the job.

They have fun names like Feel Free, Smurphs, and Hazy Tabz. They come in colorful packages and in gummy form. They’re widely available at gas stations, corner stores, and smoke shops across the country.

They’re also highly addictive, largely unregulated, and in the news after they were found near the bodies of two dead University of Mississippi students.

The drugs are called Kratom and 7-OH. The first, kratom, is derived from the leaves of a coffee-like plant in Southeast Asia. When taken in small doses, kratom causes a low-key buzz. In higher doses, the high is described as euphoric. It operates like an opioid — a chemical in kratom called mitragynine binds to opioid receptors in the brain, which leads to that euphoric high. It also can lead to addiction and overdose. 

Social media is full of videos of people trying to kick the drug, with harrowing stories of dependence and withdrawal. 

7-OH is a highly concentrated compound derived from kratom, which dials up both the high and the danger. The drug has caught the attention of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned in a press conference last year that 7-OH was “marketed for children.” 

“They’re gummy bears, they’re bright colors, they’re candy-flavored,” Kennedy said. “This is really a sinister, sinister industry.” In August, federal agencies announced they were taking steps to effectively ban 7-OH nationwide. 

To break down the increasing prevalence of both kratom and 7-OH, what the drugs do, and what to do about them, Today, Explained spoke with Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist who covers drugs and drug policy and who wrote about kratom earlier this year. 

As Busby explains, kratom and 7-OH are “definitely in the zeitgeist. It’s in the news and for good reason. To have these 7-OH gummies just in gas stations is a really potentially problematic thing. Without the drug education alongside it, this drug has just popped up out of nowhere.”

Busby also talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the business interests behind the drugs, why they’re a complicated topic for the Make America Healthy Again movement, and how industry lobbyists have teamed up with several Trump administration officials to try to sway the results of regulatory decisions. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there an important distinction between kratom and 7-OH? Is 7-OH found in kratom?

7-OH is found in relatively small quantities within kratom, but this businessman, Vince Saunders, who is the self-styled American shaman out of Kansas City, basically figured out how to extract the 7-OH and blow it up into entire pills.

I’ve never tried 7-OH and I’m not interested, just for the record, since I’ve been talking about how I don’t mind kratom, but these 7-OH tablets are uber, uber strong. I think the large number of people that are taking it are using it instead of opioids. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. 

Is 7-OH something you can also easily find at your neighborhood gas station?

Yeah. It’s much the same as the kratom formulations, so you’re talking gummies, little shots, capsules, and the brand names for the 7-OH companies are perhaps even more kind of out there — 7-OHeaven is one. 

It’s certainly not heaven when you’re going into withdrawals.

And do we know that people are? Are people becoming addicted to 7-OH?

People are becoming addicted to kratom and 7-OH. I think the whole thing, the concern originally sprung up with the Feel Free tonics that are like a mix of kava and kratom. And people just got habituated into drinking several of them per day and realized that it’s very unpleasant if they don’t continue to do that on a daily basis.

We have a federal government that loves to police drugs of all sorts. What are they doing about 7-OH? 

It’s this MAHA dilemma, right? Because their ethos is very “natural medicines and freedom.” The idea that this Feel Free tonic, whose owner JW Ross recently gave, or a company related to him recently gave, like $500,000 to the MAHA PAC, and he’s been photographed next to RFK Jr. — he’s perhaps predictably come out on the side of the kratom industry, which is lobbying for a ban of 7-OH. 

RFK Jr. called it sinister and said that it targets children, which it appears to do in some cases with the gummies. There’s kratom gummies too and clearly gummies are an easier way, especially for older people, to ingest the medicine or substance, so we shouldn’t just blame the gummies here. 

But clearly, when you’ve just got packets of these gummies that are called like 7-OHeaven just on the shelf or indeed behind the counter at the gas station, there’s going to be concern about that. 

There are other MAGA figures like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who’s got a million-dollar investment in the parent company of Feel Free. There’s definitely this nexus of figures in the government that have got some interest, potentially, or relationships with the kratom industry. And indeed the department when I was writing my Wired story reminded us and readers that everything he’s done is ethical and I’m sure it has been.

We usually think of liberal drug policies as a lefty thing. Markwayne Mullin’s about as right as they come. Are kratom and 7-OH making friends across the political spectrum because there’s a big business opportunity here?

You look at Trump’s executive order on psychedelics and then rescheduling cannabis, and it seems that the right has really seized the mantle and is looking at it from a more libertarian perspective of, “Hey, what happens in a man’s head is his own business.” 

They’re also being probably more business friendly than people on the left would be, so it’s a really interesting moment, especially with RFK Jr. as health secretary.

Trump has spoken at length about the opioid crisis in the United States and how it’s tearing our communities apart and whatnot. Here we have readily accessible opioids at our gas stations. 

Yes, they’re not killing nearly as many people as prescription drugs are. However, they’re a lot easier to get than prescription drugs. Help me understand this administration’s position in relation to what could be a real terror for some people.

They are in the process of banning 7-OH. Last month, the Department of Justice set out an emergency scheduling, so that’s open for comments at the moment. When they ban something, it doesn’t just happen overnight. 

I think by the beginning of next year, it’s quite possible that these 7-OH products won’t be in gas stations and indeed some states have already taken action.

And just to get ahead of any confusion here, 7-OH may be banned from gas stations and probably other convenience stores, but not kratom?

Exactly.

Why one and not the other? Obviously 7-OH is stronger, but you could take a lot of kratom and it might feel like taking a little 7-OH, no?

Absolutely. You just need to take a lot and it’s in powder form. So you need to consume a prodigious quantity of it or drink a bunch of these seltzers. 

I think that they’re not going to ban kratom because there’s an obvious recognition of the good it does for people that are recovering from opiate addictions and that they do have a kind of natural off-ramp, [which] is very unlikely to kill you even though you might take a huge amount. Whereas, if you’re taking like 26 different medications, including a bunch of opioids for your chronic pain, you might die. 

Who do you think wins the argument at the end of the day? We have some strong lobbying forces involved here. You’ve got a lot of people who have come to enjoy or depend on these substances that are, as we’ve established many times now, readily available all over the country. 

Do you think we see fewer or more kratom products in our gas stations and convenience stores in the years to come?

The kratom advocates are a lot more eloquent and suited and booted than the 7-OH folks. What I see is that 7-OH will be forced underground and that kratom will continue its long and illustrious ascent in American culture. 

We do really have a gas station culture in this country, and I wonder if these substances being so available in them is a particularly American thing. You live in the UK. Are gas station drugs a US thing?

It’s an American thing for sure. But you guys take a lot of drugs!

With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency. 

If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration. 

Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.

To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”

They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House. 

[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.

You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?

You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.

Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints. 

There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].

You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority. 

I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.

Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?

From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.

That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries. 

Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.

I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president? 

To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that. 

But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him. 

Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases? 

These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term. 

I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?

Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues. 

Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.

No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice. 

All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.

The national conversation about AI in the US is full of fear: fear about AI’s potential to end humanity, fear of data centers moving in, fear that government officials will do absolutely nothing even as the industry pleads for regulation, you name it.

But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.

In China, driven by public enthusiasm and a state-backed push for AI dominance, the country is in the midst of a large-scale AI integration into all facets of its society, driven by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s support for the technology.

“He’s super AI-pilled,“ said Kyle Chan, an expert on China’s technology development and industrial policy at the Brookings Institution. “When you look at his speeches, when you look at Chinese policy documents, everything is about rolling AI out to as many domains as possible: manufacturing, services, education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and of course the military. Everything is about trying to integrate AI.”

Beneath this push for a high-speed AI adoption across Chinese society lies a regulatory framework designed to safeguard political stability and keep boundaries on the kind of information AI models are able to share.

Chan joined Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to speak with co-host Sean Rameswaram about the different AI anxieties in the US and China, and whether joint regulations on AI safety are possible while the two countries are engaged in an AI arms race.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

One thing that really struck me about the way the Chinese government is approaching AI is that China has this explicit goal, right?

China has some concrete plans to boost AI adoption through the country, including its recent AI-plus initiative. And their goal is to try to boost the penetration of AI in so-called terminal devices, everything from computers to smartphones, to 90 percent or more by 2030. 

It’s going really fast and it is, in part, a state mobilization effort. There are state-owned companies, there are government agencies that are trying to integrate AI, but also there’s just an enthusiasm from the general population.

If you look at surveys like the latest Gallup poll, people in China are much more enthusiastic and positive about how AI might help them and help the country. It’s quite a striking contrast with what you see in the US in terms of attitudes towards AI.

Because people here are worried about AI as an existential threat. People here are worried about AI taking their jobs, people here are worried about AI data centers in their backyards. Is that not the vibe in China?

Not so much. There is some concern about AI and jobs. But in general, China’s not worried about AI wiping out humanity. You really don’t hear that from the Chinese policymakers. There’s no talk about a P(doom), the probability that AI will wipe out humanity. So this is just a different approach to AI risk in general.

And why not the existential risk? 

You know, one factor, I think, is sci-fi and the culture. 

Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?

It seems like every major sci-fi book or film involves machines trying to kill us all, and I think that that idea has become very prevalent. 

When you imagine a future with AI, that is one of the primary futures that people imagine, versus in China, I think a lot of the attitude towards technology in general, not just AI, is about using this edge to keep up and to become more competitive. 

For a lot of people in China, technology was something that they saw transform their lives in real time. And Chinese leaders think it’s the key to China’s future modernization and transformation to a global superpower.

Let’s talk about what concerns there are.

One of the biggest concerns that Chinese political leaders have when it comes to AI is political and social instability. They don’t want AI-generated content to act the way that social media or the internet broadly could, which is to disseminate information, maybe deepfakes, maybe viral news that could threaten the [Chinese Communist Party’s] hold on power.

For AI-generated content, it was about making sure that the models didn’t say the wrong things about sensitive topics. A lot of this is about social and political risk rather than about existential technological risk per se. 

From pretty early on, China has been developing a model registration system where basically AI services have to be vetted in advance and go through a battery of tests where they’re asked sensitive political questions and they’re supposed to either not answer them or say the “right thing” before they are officially registered. And once they’re registered, then they can be released to the public. So it’s a pretty tight regulatory framework for controlling things like political content.

We know that there’s a high unemployment rate in China, especially among young people, which is also a great concern of the government. Are people worried that this bullish approach to AI could affect employment numbers?

Yes and no. On the one hand, China is actually facing this demographic problem with a shrinking labor force. Fewer people want to go into, say, factory jobs, but China still wants to make everything the world wants to buy. 

They see AI as a partial solution to that, a way to automate things like manufacturing. On the other hand, though, there are growing concerns in China about job loss. And you see also some recent court cases in China where they basically are telling employers, you cannot use AI as a reason to fire workers. 

But I think overall, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find this balance between the diffusion of the technology and trying to prevent any kind of large-scale protest movement that might arise from sudden mass unemployment of, say, factory workers or food delivery drivers.

And President Xi was of course here in Washington last week. From the limited photos we have of the state dinner or of President Trump and President Xi on the tarmac, everything looks so chummy, even though we are so clearly in a cold war with China over AI. The president’s always talking about how he wants to win. 

Was there tension in his visit to Washington last week? Did you notice any?

The weird thing is that just between these two men, there seems to be this kind of romance where Trump really fawns over Xi Jinping. 

I think he has tremendous respect, even admiration, for Xi Jinping’s grip on power and control over the government apparatus in general. 

What is happening under the surface, though, is continuing tensions and a deep competitive structural relationship. That involves especially competition in AI. AI has emerged as a new fault line of competition between the US and China, one that could come to define the relationship going forward. 

I think that on the one hand, they’re talking about cooperation on things like AI safety and AI risk. On the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of issues where the US wants to lead. China wants to also get ahead. And when it comes to things like distillation or cyber capabilities, it’s as zero-sum as it’s ever been.

Who’s winning?

It depends on what you’re looking at and how you define winning. If you’re talking about the best models, for sure the US. And virtually everyone in China would agree, right? In fact, Anthropic’s Claude is very popular in China, even though technically Anthropic bans its use in China.

But aren’t their open-source models kind of popular here?

Yes, exactly. Chinese open-source models are getting more popular in the US, especially at a time when some of the capabilities are so incredible that most normal people don’t really need them, and they also don’t want to pay for the most advanced and most expensive models. Ultimately it’s this weird sort of cooperation and competition at the same time.

American models are popular in China. Chinese models are popular in America. We’re at each other’s throats, but quietly, politely.

Does the cold war make it all but certain that safety isn’t going to really be a chief priority for either country until something terrible happens?

The fierce level of competition and the very, very deep distrust between the two countries makes any kind of cooperation on AI safety very, very difficult. Even just talking to each other, having the US and China establish an official AI dialogue, which apparently they’ve agreed to, is seen as a huge first step, even though they’re just talking. 

There’s a long, long road to go before we can even think about something like an arms control treaty or a broader international agreement about AI and AI safety. But I think that’s what some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are trying to jump to.

If you haven’t heard of “live shopping,” you might soon. Livestream shopping is already a staple of e-commerce in China, where consumers log onto apps like Douyin and Taobao to buy products from a livestreamer — think QVC. Now, a new app is trying to bring it to the United States.

The Whatnot app features rolling live auctions that can last from three seconds to a minute. Users can bid on everything from trading cards to clothes to steaks. With about 550,000 hours of streaming per week, the site moves an extraordinary amount of product. 

Using Whatnot is fast-paced, and essentially frictionless. Users swipe at the bottom of their screens to place the highest bit for an object. If they win, the object is sent to their house, no confirmation screen needed. 

The system isn’t without its drawbacks. Hanna Krueger, a retail reporter for the Wall Street Journal, investigated how Whatnot has become an addiction for some users. She tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that she spoke to a user who spent over $1 million on the app — and lost everything in the process. 

Below is an excerpt of Krueger’s conversation on the podcast, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell us about this app, Whatnot.

Whatnot is a live shopping app. Imagine the home shopping network had a baby with TikTok and eBay, and it was on your phone and it was running 24 hours a day. 

You open up the app [and] there’s countless numbers of categories. You can get coins. You can get cards. You can get horse tack, plants, goo, lobsters. I mean, the categories are expanding all of the time. And there are sellers live-auctioning off these goods in real time. 

There’s a countdown clock, and it’s counting down and the auctioneer or the seller is hyping up the chat, as they call it. And that chat is commenting like, “Wow, look at this. What a deal.” In the meantime, there’s some music. Sometimes it’s nice mellow music, other times it’s metal or EDM, depending on the personality of the seller. 

The end result is that the last person to swipe at the bottom of the screen, which is how you bid, gets the item. And once you have swiped and you’re the final person to do that, there’s no real confirmation screen. We’re just onto the next product and you only really find out what you got when it shows up at your door.

It started as a marketplace for Funko Pop figurines, which are these niche, squareheaded figurines in the collectible world, but it quickly expanded. I would say the biggest categories are sports cards and trading cards like Pokémon. And then the other one is women’s fashion and beauty products. 

I spoke to multiple people who found themselves just spiraling into holes of addiction and what they liken to gambling because of that “break format.” 

Tell us about the break format.

Break format typically applies to trading cards. That could be sports cards, Pokémon. It can also happen with rare coins, but the idea is that there is a sealed pack of cards and that sealed pack is pretty expensive to buy outright — say it’s $10,000. Before the show starts, they’ll say, “Okay guys, there are 10 slots that apply to this pack. So I need 10 people to buy in at a price of $1,000.” This is a steal, right? You’re getting a piece of the pie of a $10,000 pie for only $1,000.

The reason that they’re willing to do that is that within that pack, there might be cards that are worth $2,000, $3,000, $10,000. So you recoup quite quickly if you only paid a thousand for that. The other side, the flip side that often does happen is that the cards are worth nothing close to what you bought in for.

People will get a card that’s worth $50, $100, and at the end of it, all you have to show is these small-value cards. And those who have described kind of a cycle of problematic behavior say that when you lose, when you don’t make up the value that you paid, you just buy right into the next one until you get out of the hole. 

It’s this feeling of the high, the thrill, the adrenaline rush, the “Oh my God, look what I just did” when you get a card that’s way over what you thought. And there’s the despondency, this despair, the shame, and that feeling of, “Okay, I need to make my money back on that flip side.”

This is where this app really begins to look like gambling, to look like addiction, to look like a drug. As does the story of Sean Harding, with which you open your piece for the journal. Tell us about Sean.

Sean Harding is a 45-year-old finance manager from Denver. Sean found himself on this app and he wasn’t spending too much in the very beginning, maybe $100 a day. And then within 40 days he was spending over $1,000, $5,000 a day. Just swiping whenever he could get a free moment — when he was doing laundry, sitting on the toilet. 

It was only when his wife confronted him about this odd behavior, about some missing pages on his credit report, that he really looked at what he had spent and that number was crazy. It was $1.3 million in four months. He had borrowed money from a friend, he had taken out personal loans. And finally, when all that was depleted, he had used his employer’s credit card.

You spoke to the founder of Whatnot. What does he say when you tell him a story like Sean’s?

[Whatnot CEO and cofounder Grant] LaFontaine said that addiction does not register as a problem to them in their internal data, which they look at often. When we presented a story like Sean’s, they repeated that addiction does not register as a problem. When you breach the topic of gambling or people accusing this app of having gambling features, that’s where Whatnot definitely buttons up. They’re under pretty intense scrutiny surrounding that allegation.

They categorially reject that and they say they can’t comment on pending litigation. But they do say that they created an app that had the best user experience possible and that they’re new and they’re learning and they’re scaling and they’re assessing the marketplace in real time.

Are they implementing any guardrails to maybe prevent someone like Sean from ruining his life and his family’s life?

While they say that addiction doesn’t register as a significant problem, they also have introduced optional spending limits and watch time caps. They said that’s not because of addiction concerns, but because some users said that they spent more than intended. That was the distinction that they made. 

They said there’s other safeguards coming, such as “velocity of spend” alerts for sudden spending spikes. Some have PIN locking for categories, so you have to type in a PIN to go to a certain category. Some of these are self-policed. A watch time cap, you could presumably change that yourself, even though you’re the one that implemented it. 

They’re also saying that they’re going to develop some type of birthday reconfirmation option so they could catch underage users, which is coincidentally how I came to know about Whatnot. One of my colleagues’ daughters had spent over $5,000 in one night on Pokemon cards. And he only realized that when he looked at his credit card and was like, “What is this?” And he went to sell those cards at a card shop after the fact to try to recoup, and he could only get back like $300.

Is this just a Whatnot thing, or are there other ways kids and adults can be gambling their lives away on these live auction-type of platforms?

Live shopping has been one of the most predominant ways that Chinese shoppers shop for a long time, and the wave has crested over there a long time before it has here. It really started to take off and gain traction in America in the kind of post-pandemic world.

While Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, TikTok has their own thing called TikTok Shop that has a similar kind of setup. eBay is trying out stuff like this. And then for the card-collecting hobby specifically, Fanatics Live is a major source to get your cards and experience breaks and all that.

Do all of these different platforms, be it on TikTok or eBay, have the sort of gamified countdown clock to make it more intense, more exciting, and perhaps more addictive?

Whatnot’s found a way to create a really engaging and easy-to-interact-with atmosphere. They’ve also successfully merged the parasocial media aspect. There are relationships between the seller and the buyer, so if you keep going back to the same seller, they’ll remember your name, the people in the chat will remember. There are some folks who were like, ‘I found friends in here.’ 

Sean said that the night that he used his company credit card, he was reached out to by a seller and they were like, “Hey man, you got to join this. This break’s awesome. I have a great slot for you. I’ll give it to you at a discount.” And he’s like, “I don’t have any money.” And that’s when he realized that he had a little money. It just happened to belong to his employer.

That kind of shows that there’s this social atmosphere. Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, but other companies are seeing how successful this is, and I think it’s only time before they kind of merge all these aspects together in an attempt to take their market share from them.

If there’s one thing that Americans can unite behind, it’s anxieties over artificial intelligence.

According to a recent NBC News/Decision Desk poll, 70 percent of adults say they are personally more worried than excited about the technology; it’s basically underwater in every area of society with one notable exception: its use in scientific research and medicine.

According to Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician at Weill Cornell Medicine and writer at the New Yorker, that optimism is well-founded.

Khullar uses AI tools in his own practice as a physician and writes about their advancements in the medical field. He says that “right now, at least, there’s a generally optimistic view of how AI will change healthcare going forward.”

AI in medicine is nothing new. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to researchers who developed an AI model that enabled breakthroughs in predicting protein’s complex structures. As it becomes more ubiquitous, it’s also emerging as a resource for doctors to get second opinions and as a tool to take notes on patient-doctor interactions.

On top of that, Khullar says, it might help unlock new medicines to treat diseases. 

Khullar joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to discuss the ways that AI is transforming drug discovery and research, as well as what it still can’t do. They also discuss how to think about AI’s potential in healthcare at the same time as top AI researchers are increasingly warning about the technology’s risk.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’ve been thinking about lifesaving AI innovation. Has AI already started saving lives?

I think it has. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen healthcare take up a new technology. Part of that might be that the healthcare system is so messed up that there’s an appetite for some type of change. It’s unaffordable, it’s inaccessible, it’s inconvenient, the quality is uneven. 

There’s at least a hope that AI is going to help with all of these things, and I think it’s already starting to make its way into the healthcare system. Now it’s our responsibility to figure out how to make the most of it without also promulgating some of the downsides.

For those who are unaware, tell us how it’s working its way into the system.

It’s helpful to categorize it into a few buckets, at least for healthcare. 

The most rapid uptake, and I think the place that it’s already starting to make a difference, is on the administrative side. Many people who have gone to a doctor recently might have noticed that there’s an AI scribe that’s taking notes now. And people seem to really like it, at least so far. Doctors are able to look their patients in the eye in the way that they weren’t able to when they were poring over their computers and just typing what the patient was telling them. 

The second big area is patient navigation. When is your next scan? When’s your next appointment? Do I need to take this medication on an empty stomach or not? There’s a huge opportunity for people, let’s say, who are diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer or heart failure to navigate the system more seamlessly. 

The third big area that I’m really excited about is drug discovery. AI is making a huge dent in the early parts of drug discovery. 

The last thing that I’m excited about and that I use every day when I’m in the hospital is [AI] as a second opinion. Now instead of having to get a consult or turn to a textbook, AI can be a very, very helpful clinical decision support. It’s not to say that I never consult someone, of course, but that first pass — I’m not sure what’s going on. What are some recent trials that might influence my decision here? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a test that I should be ordering that I’m not ordering? — all those types of things, they start to help with.

The biggest chunk of this positive view of AI and medicine is drug discovery. Tell me more about how that’s going so far and how it might be going in a year, or five, or 10.

I don’t want to leave this conversation and say that we’ve solved the cure for cancer because of AI, but I do want people to know that at least for the early stages of drug discovery — figuring out the very basic steps of is this an interesting molecule? Does it have potential biological applications? — AI is already very helpful for that. 

They’re trying to take, basically, what is an infinite number of drug-like molecules that are theoretically possible to be drugs and they’re trying to match that to some disease that’s going on inside a human. And human biology is incredibly complex as well. There’s tens of thousands of genes, hundreds of thousands of proteins, trillions of cells, and you have to match a potential molecule to a potential target within a human. 

In the past, a researcher might take years to study a disease or a biological pathway and figure out, okay, this protein seems to be involved. And actually, it might not be involved, it might be involved, it might be disrupted, but not be the causative agent. There’s a lot of uncertainty there, so now AI can take enormous amounts of data, and it can rank various potential targets that seem to be the most likely to be causing a particular disease and give you that short short list of potential targets that may have taken months or years in the past.

So now you know what to attack, but you have to figure out what to attack it with. So you need a molecule, you need to generate a molecule that’s going to fit into that target or disrupt that target in some way. 

Now again, AI can scour vast chemical spaces and give you a list of the things that seem to be most likely to be able to disrupt that target. And then it can actually help you generate that molecule in some cases. 

So now we have the target. Now we have something that we’re going to attack the target with. And then you have to do something called lead optimization, and that’s the third thing. Lead optimization means you have this lead and you have to optimize it.

“I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.”

Now we have to figure out, of all the molecules that seem to be good at potentially affecting this target, which ones are able to be absorbed in the body, which ones are going to get to the right tissue. AI models can predict the most likely molecule to give you that Goldilocks set of properties that’s needed for a safe and effective drug.

As we all know from anyone who’s asked AI to write an email for them or Googled a question, these tools have a certain degree of certitude, even though these tools can just be flat out wrong about stuff. Are you guys worried about that in the field?

Absolutely. And so this is why I think the narrative around AI just replacing scientists or doctors or other workers is incorrect. Because you still need a lot of judgment. 

You need to be able to adjudicate the output of these models to figure out what is most promising and what is potentially dangerous. That is going to require wet labs and scientists and reasoning based on prior experience and understanding the context. There’s all sorts of issues around, can you manufacture some of the drugs that are being proposed by these models? So just because it’s set, it dreams something up doesn’t mean you can actually make that thing in the real world.

Some of the drugs that it proposes might actually be toxic in certain ways that it didn’t predict. And of course, then you have to take this thing into clinical trials. You have to recruit l people who are willing to put this medication in their bodies. You have to find out who might benefit, you have to put it through the regulatory process. 

That’s why I said that the first part of drug discovery, where you’re trying to figure out how do we get the right drug candidates, what seems most exciting to test further, that’s going to be really accelerated. That whole second half where we actually have to figure out if it works in human biology, that is still going to be in some respects an analog process.

It doesn’t sound like you’re terribly scared that we are like ceding control of our hospitals, of our research facilities, to AI. This is very much in the sort of assistant bucket?

For now it is. And I think one of the challenges is to maintain our agency as these models become more and more sophisticated. As you lean more on these machines, if you’re a doctor, inevitably some of the skills, the critical thinking, the reasoning that we put into coming up with the diagnosis that we honed over the course of years, that can start to atrophy. 

These are the types of things that we still need to sort through as we’re implementing more and more AI into the healthcare system.

For the people who just say, shut it all down, this is too dangerous, the risk is far too great, we don’t actually need this, this isn’t doing anything for society, would you make a counterargument?

I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.

Even if we wanted to “slow the pace of the frontier,” fine. But there are models from a year or two years ago that could be very helpful in the healthcare setting. When we’re talking about slowing the pace of the frontier and the most sophisticated and potentially dangerous models, fine. 

But if we’re talking about shutting down AI and not using it in biotechnology or not using it in scientific research or not using it in clinical care delivery, that’s where I would push back pretty hard.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has moved aggressively to leave his mark. Many of his most visible legacy projects are not pieces of legislation, though. They’re part of a campaign to reshape Washington, DC, itself. 

Last year, Trump knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his massive new ballroom. He tried renovating the Reflecting Pool, which did not turn out well. He regilded four large statues near the National Mall, paved the White House Rose Garden, and drenched the Oval Office in gold and golden appliqués.

Other Trump plans are still in the works: He’s proposed building a 250-foot triumphal arch in a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River. He now says the arch would double as a “military complex,” housing drones, snipers, and ammunition.

And, of course, there’s the ongoing fight over the Kennedy Center, which Trump has threatened could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get his name on the building in some capacity (he already tried once, and was ordered by a court to remove it).

It’s all a lot to keep track of. Luckily, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently spent time with Trump touring the ballroom construction site. Terris explains what ties all the disparate projects together and what they reveal about the Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s capital — and his own legacy.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

What is up with Trump’s obsession with physical landmarks? 

Before I even talked to him, I did a lot of reporting about why he seems to be so obsessed with all this stuff. And it’s really like a legacy for him. He’s trying to build something that will last beyond his time here, both his time here in the White House and probably his time here on Earth. He wants to actually have physical monuments to himself. 

Somebody who’s close to him told me that the president doesn’t care that much about legislation. He doesn’t care that much about the kind of nuts and bolts of being a president. He cares a lot about buildings and prizes. If he has buildings and prizes, then he feels like his legacy will go on forever. That’s why he wants the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s building an arch for himself in Washington. It’s really about a legacy that will withstand the test of time in his mind.

Which is to say, he doesn’t really realize that the right legislation could get him more prizes.

Most presidents try to be very successful presidents and have other people build monuments for you. He’s trying to honor himself, basically. It’s something I asked him about actually when I sat down with him in the Oval Office. There was a viral moment a few months ago from Senator Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who may run for president. And he said at a rally that the president is building monuments to himself because he knows that nobody will do it when he’s gone.

I asked the president this because I thought maybe he’d take a shot at Jon Ossoff or deny it, but I was very surprised. He just said, “Yeah, that’s true. Nobody will do it when I’m gone. When I’m gone, nobody will do it.” 

It feels kind of self-aware, surprisingly, of Donald Trump to not take a shot at Jon Ossoff, but to just agree with him and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly my motivation.”

Part of me though — okay, here’s a guy who recognizes that when he’s gone, history may not necessarily look fondly upon him. But also there was a part of me that thought that that’s not actually what he was saying. 

What he was maybe saying is, “I’m the only person in the world capable of building something as beautiful and important as these monuments. I alone can fix it. I alone can build it.” Nobody else has the ability to do this the way that he has. So on the one hand, possibly self-aware that he won’t be recognized the way he wants to be. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a kind of egomaniac talking about how he’s incredible at things and nobody else can do it. I think it’s all kind of tied up in that he’s not the most introspective person I’ve ever talked to, let’s put it that way. 

But even the least introspective person in the world, when he gets to be 80 years old, might start thinking about what’s left of him after he’s gone.

Tell me about the tour President Trump gave you. 

I thought I was going to get 20 minutes with him in the Oval Office. I ended up getting 45 minutes in the Oval Office and then almost a 45-minute tour of the White House grounds. 

He showed me the Rose Garden, where they put statues and they turned it into a kind of paved-over terrace that looks like Mar-a-Lago. He showed me the Presidential Walk of Fame, where they have all the pictures of the presidents and then the autopen for Joe Biden, and a room called the Palm Room where he put down a new marble floor that he was very proud of. 

The helipad was still being constructed. He walked me over there and introduced me to the construction workers as they were building this helipad. And then he took me to the ballroom itself and showed me this behemoth building. 

“Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever.”

There’s steel rising 70 feet in the air. It’s the size of one-and-a-half football fields. He was bragging about how there’s more steel there than in the Washington Commander stadium that’s being built. It’s this enormous thing that you can’t really see anywhere in Washington unless you go up the Washington Monument and look at it from afar. And I was just in the middle of this thing and I couldn’t really believe how huge it was. 

He wanted to show me this is where the entrance is going to be, [where] the chandeliers will be. He told me he could picture it all already because this is, quote, “What I do.” 

He’ll gaze out the window in the morning first thing in the morning from the residence to see the work. He’ll look out the window at night to see the work. He is monitoring this very closely.

One thing that the ballroom especially shares with the Kennedy Center is that it feels like this administration is doing its darnedest to outmaneuver the courts, to get around any legal questions concerning the work. Did that come up at all while he was giving you this tour?

When I was getting the tour, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that they could keep going. There was a kind of pause on their ruling where they were allowed to keep doing construction while the Supreme Court figured out how they were going to rule on it. And so clearly they were racing against the Supreme Court to get as much done as possible. They really wanted to become like a fait accompli. They wanted it to look like the whole thing was done. It was beyond going back. 

I was asking the president, “Are you worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule that you can’t keep doing construction unless you get permission from Congress?” Congress does have the right to decide what happens to federal buildings, so it would make sense that they would be able to make a decision on this. And he said he wasn’t worried about it at all. He said, “the Supreme Court’s going to make the right decision. The people want this.”

He’s like, “If I needed to get Congress’s approval, I could do it, but it’s not going to happen.” And he ended up being right. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval. The Supreme Court’s letting him do it.

But Congress may get shaken up in about a month and a half. Is that on his radar?

Yes, and certainly Democrats are aware. I talked to a bunch of Democrats for this story mostly about what happens next. Are they going to start investigating the ballroom? Are they going to start looking at subpoenaing donors and looking at the contracts and figuring out if there’s a pay-to-play scheme, if there was illegal construction happening? And Democrats are champing at the bit for that. 

They’re calling it a target-rich environment. They’re ready to get subpoena power. And they’re also talking about in 2028, what do we do if we get the White House ourselves? Will we tear this down? 

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] says she wants to turn it into a soup kitchen. There are all sorts of ideas for it. I asked the president about that too. I said, “Are you worried that Democrats will get the White House in 2028 and they come and they tear down this ballroom right after you built it?” And he basically said, “I’d like to see them try.” 

He said, “We’re building this ballroom with nuclear concrete.” That’s what he called it, nuclear concrete, concrete that can withstand a nuclear blast. He’s like, “If it can withstand a nuclear blast, I’d like to see Democrats try to take it down.” 

He told me somebody could go to the ballroom with a jackhammer and spend two days straight jackhammering one column and it wouldn’t even leave a mark. And so he’s basically daring them to try to tear it down because he’s building something that he feels like can withstand a nuclear blast so it can withstand Democrats.

At the end of the day, all of this is just about his legacy. That’s what you learned by hanging out with him and talking to him about it. Do you think by spreading his efforts across DC, he’s ensuring that at least something stands and that his legacy is ultimately secured? 

He definitely thinks that these buildings can withstand more than anything else. Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever. 

I do think there’s a world in which Democrats tear down some of the stuff. The arch is a good example. I mean, the ballroom is hard to tear down, right? First of all, it’s super expensive. It’s huge. It also has to be replaced with something. You can’t just tear it down and then leave a hole in the ground. You have to then build another ballroom, which would be kind of a crazy thing to do and take all this time and then become another story about how Democrats are spending all their time building a ballroom. 

Is it possible? Sure. It just seems a little bit harder to imagine, but the arch, you could see that thing getting dynamited on some Fourth of July and then just leaving it as a traffic circle. So I could see a world in which maybe some of these things get destroyed in a kind of, I don’t know, epic fashion. Why not?

It feels like he might be onto something, which is that it would be very controversial to just tear something down for the sake of it out of spite.

Absolutely.

There’s also two years left in his term. Do you get the sense that this is slowing down or ramping up?

It’s hard to say. I have a hard time believing it’s going to end, especially if he becomes a lame-duck president and there’s even fewer things he can do legislatively.

Why not just keep building things and putting your name on things because there’s nothing else to do with your time? 

He said that in the first term, the reason he didn’t do a lot of this stuff is because he was too under siege, that it was a difficult time to build a ballroom because of the Russian investigations or the impeachment trials and stuff like that.

Maybe he gets tied up in all that same kind of stuff if Democrats take charge, but I also feel like he’ll have an easier time just trying to ignore subpoenas. It’s going to be a really messy time. And so maybe he’ll just hole himself off into a room somewhere designing more buildings, because what else is he going to do?

For decades, research into Alzheimer’s disease has made painfully little progress. More than 7 million Americans are living with the disease, which is the most common cause of dementia. It’s incurable, and treatments have been hampered by groupthink, as well as by systemic fraud from some of the field’s most famous researchers.

But there are finally signs that the field is turning a corner, including two new drugs, rolled out in the last few years, that can treat Alzheimer’s directly.

“If somebody walks into a clinic right now and is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease,” Vox senior correspondent Dylan Scott tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, the drugs “will hopefully have some effect in slowing down their cognitive decline.” 

As Scott says, “The drug development pipeline is also starting to look much more robust” — even “revolutionary,” to quote one doctor he spoke with.

The two talk about why researchers are more optimistic than they have been in years, whether GLP-1 drugs might help prevent Alzheimer’s, and an experimental surgery pioneered by doctors in China that has produced striking — but if unproven — reports of improvement in people with the disease.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You mentioned two treatments. Tell us what they are, Dylan?

We have two drugs right now that have been approved by the FDA: lecanemab and donanemab. And these are drugs that target the amyloid plaque in the brain that scientists have long thought might be associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The amyloid hypothesis [the belief that Alzheimer’s is caused by the buildup of deleterious amyloid proteins in the brain] has been very controversial for a while, in part because there were these years and years where we weren’t seeing any progress despite this being the dominant hypothesis about the disease. But we do have these two drugs that in clinical trials have been shown to both clear out the amyloid plaque in somebody’s brain and they do seem to lead to slower cognitive decline for those patients.

And the hope is that this is the ground floor. These are the worst drugs, hopefully, that we’re ever going to have and continued scientific discovery and progress with developing drugs will lead to even better treatments in the future.

“The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

Tell us more about the scientific discovery. You mentioned that there’s promising research beyond amyloid plaques?

It’s not like the amyloid hypothesis has been invalidated, but I think our understanding of the disease has become more complex. 

We’re realizing that there’s probably also a role for a different kind of protein called tau. There may also be a role with chronic inflammation, your vascular health, your body’s ability to just pump blood through your body may also be playing a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. And so now we’re starting to see treatments that target these other things. 

The way I’ve been thinking about it is if we used to be putting all of our bets on amyloid, we’re still putting some bets on amyloid, but we’re also putting bets on these other things. And so now there are treatments in the works targeting, for example, these tau proteins.

They’re still in the early stages of clinical trials — really at the stage where they’re just checking the safety of these drugs and making sure that somebody can take them without getting really sick, or God forbid, dying or something like that. But even when they’re doing those safety checks, they do start to collect qualitative data about, well, are we starting to see any effects? 

Some of the preliminary results from some of these tau targeting treatments that are in the works have looked pretty promising. And so that’s encouraging, obviously. It’s possible that we’re moving towards a future where not unlike cancer treatment, there’s not just one drug for Alzheimer’s disease, but maybe you take a combination of different things that work on different mechanisms for the disease and the collective cumulative effect is that it stops the progression or even reverses it. 

The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Five, 10 years from now sounds nice, but is there anything else that’s in the cocktail now that people are discovering could be promising for Alzheimer’s?

There are also, yes, drugs that millions of people are taking right now for other reasons that might also be able to help with Alzheimer’s disease. And GLP-1s in particular are the big ones.

No way!

Yeah, I know. These drugs — it seems like every day you see some new headline about this miraculous thing that they can do.

Weight loss, smoking, my poker addiction, and…?

And it might prevent dementia down the road. 

If you step back and think about it, the theory does make some sense. Like I said before, scientists increasingly think there’s an association between your vascular health and your cognitive health, especially as you age. And what do these GLP-1 drugs do? They help people lose weight. 

Losing weight helps to lower your blood pressure, lowers your risk of vascular problems, whether it’s heart disease or pulmonary disease or stroke or something like that. So if more and more people take these, they take them earlier in life, they lose weight, they keep it off, they don’t develop these heart or vascular problems, it does make some sense that that may also reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. 

It’s still sort of theoretical, but the Alzheimer’s Association is putting $100 million behind some research projects to investigate this possible link. We may learn five, 10 years from now, as millions of people are now on these GLP-1 drugs — maybe we start to see Alzheimer’s less often. And that would be another reason to be optimistic that the future for this disease is looking brighter.

How about reversing it? Is that still a pie in the sky?

It’s out of reach for now. Certainly some of the scientists that I’ve talked to have said, “In theory, it should be possible. Your brain is really resilient. It’s really good at rebuilding itself if you give it the chance.” It seems like it should be possible to stop the progression of the disease eventually, and maybe ultimately reverse it. 

Now, there has been some really intriguing, but also mysterious developments around reversing Alzheimer’s, not from scientists based out of the United States, but from scientists in China. People may or may not have seen that there have been videos of these patients who underwent an experimental surgery and the before and after of these videos is incredible.

In the before, you’ve got somebody who clearly has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize their loved ones, has trouble with their train of thought. In the after videos, it’s like they’re a completely different person. They recognize their loved ones, they’re talking articulately. And so that has, as you can imagine, generated a lot of excitement, also a fair bit of skepticism.

Are these videos real? Do we know?

We don’t know for sure if they’re real or not. What’s intriguing about this surgery is that the theory of it, at least to me as a lay person, makes some sense. 

The gist of this surgery is the surgeons create a drain in the patient’s brain and the drain is supposed to help the brain get rid of these amyloid and tau proteins that we think are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. On a hypothetical level, it makes some sense. And scientists in the United States and Europe and elsewhere have been intrigued enough about these videos and the findings that have been reported in academic journals to set up their own studies to try to replicate these findings. 

Now, it’s a crazy story because this scientist in China who pioneered this idea has actually been arrested by the Chinese government. And as I understand it, he’s currently in detention.

For what?!

The reporting I saw was these seem to be kind of flimsy charges of insurance fraud. The Chinese government has also tried to ban the surgery, at least outside of clinical trial settings. So that’s obviously complicated the story a little bit.

But nevertheless, you do have scientists in the US and outside of China who are like, “Well, we at least want to try this for ourselves and see if it works.”

It does feel like it’s something that could get people’s hopes up who have been waiting for this for decades.

Exactly. I mean, I think this is like the holy grail. Can we find a way, whether through surgery or through pharmaceuticals, to actually reverse these symptoms and restore the person to who they were before Alzheimer’s took over?

Because that’s the thing that I think everybody recognizes but is worth emphasizing, is, as one doctor put it to me, and I’ve never forgotten it, Alzheimer’s is a disease unlike any other because it robs you of your identity. 

To be able to restore people’s identity through whatever means, that is the goal that all of these scientists are chasing.

Is AI going to kill us all? 

In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking. 

“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some current Anthropic employees agree — but his post struck a particular chord. The AI industry quickly weighed in, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI research. Other AI leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have done the same.

To break down whether we really need to worry about a robot apocalypse, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Wired senior writer Maxwell Zeff. According to Zeff, “there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.” But not everyone agrees, and they certainly don’t agree on what to do about it. 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Zeff, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are we all going to die at the hands of AI?

There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility. 

The thing that people have to understand is that Silicon Valley has been calling for added attention on AI safety for years. So when this Anthropic researcher said last week that he was worried that AI could kill humanity in the next few years, that was shocking to many people. My parents, my family called me, and they were worried, understandably. They asked me the same question: “Are we going to die?” 

And I had to tell them, these people have been worried about AI killing all of us for years, and now it seems to be breaking through.

What was it about this statement from Jacob Coxon that broke through?

I interviewed Jacob, and the thing he said to me is that he thinks this is just the right time. Anthropic is about to go public in what could be the biggest IPO ever. The Trump administration is focused on AI in a way that no other presidency has ever been before. And of course, yes, the Hugging Face incident everyone just heard about, you talked about it on your show a few weeks ago. 

People are starting to become aware that these AI systems are getting really good, and the companies that are building them don’t seem to understand how to control them. His tweet got more than 150 million views on X. It was heard around the world. And it also was a big wake-up call to lawmakers and leaders in Silicon Valley and saying, “This is a moment for action.”

Are there people who are pushing back?

One of the most interesting pushbacks that this got was from David Sacks, who is an adviser to the Trump administration on AI. He has called out a lot of this as “doomerism” and said that these calls for AI to slow down are the AI industry warning about the technology that they’re building and advocating for regulatory capture. 

There’s a lot of skeptics in Silicon Valley who think that this is just another person in the AI safety community that is blowing the whistle. The view of a lot of venture capitalists and investors and startup founders in Silicon Valley is that we don’t need some big regulation to protect us from AI risks. We just need to uplift more players in the space.

The skeptics don’t win the day. In fact, it’s the doomers and the fatalists who do, right? Because Jacob’s call only leads to more calls right up to the top of Anthropic.

What this all leads to is [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei [posting] a blog saying that we need to “pace the frontier.” This is a call for the entire AI industry, not just Anthropic, not just OpenAI, but also Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, all the big tech companies in America, to get together and slow down their AI development. 

This doesn’t mean they’re going to stop building AI altogether. They’re still going to put their products out into the world. They’re still going to try to improve them, but they just want to make it a little slower than it would be if it was completely uncontained.

Amodei really asks for three specific things: 

• The first thing is, AI companies should have these independent evaluators inside of them. This is a common thing in other industries like the banking industry or the airline industry. People come in to make sure that these companies are doing safe things. 

• The second thing is this collaborative effort from American AI companies [on safety], and that actually will need to involve the US government to allow this to happen. The US government, he says, may need to issue some sort of waiver, some sort of law that says they can go ahead and coordinate on safety. 

• The third thing is this international slowdown, this international agreement between China and the US and Europe to say, “Hey, we recognize that this is akin to a nuclear arms race and it’s too dangerous for all of us to be competing with each other.”

All these guys are responsible for the rapid acceleration of AI models in our lives, collaborations with the Defense Department, God knows what else. And they’re all coming out over the weekend at the exact same time after this whistleblower and saying, “Yeah, dude, slow this thing down. This thing’s crazy.” Should we be skeptical?

It is very fair to be skeptical of this claim. One thing that these AI companies have realized in the last year is that AI is extremely unpopular. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans think AI is developing too fast. They’re worried about it. They think it’s going to take their jobs. They are not big fans. Maybe you’ve heard — data centers are not very popular. 

By calling to pace the frontier and saying, “We’re going to slow our own development down,” they notched this up as a public perception win. This is them getting out in front of this and saying, “Hey, we want to be safe. We want to be responsible.”

They’ve seen what’s happened with Meta and what’s happened with social media companies in the last two decades, and they are really cognizant of trying to get out in front of that.

Is there any truth to this major first collective freakout we seem to be having right now?

There’s a fairly large camp of people inside of AI companies who genuinely worry about the safety of these AI models. 

To go back to the Hugging Face incident, this was a case where OpenAI was training thousands of AI systems internally, and the systems escaped the sandbox that OpenAI thought was isolated from the internet and hacked into another company’s production infrastructure. The agents were colluding together on something. They were trying to deceive the humans that were testing them. And this was all happening without OpenAI knowing what was going on. 

It’s hard to understand how much of a wake-up call this is to Silicon Valley, that they don’t have their AI models under control. People worry that while in this case there was not a ton of economic damage [or] damage to real humans’ everyday lives, it’s not unreasonable to think that more capable AI systems could hack into financial infrastructure, modern-day utilities, and more critical services that are based online. 

Dario Amodei says as much in his post, that he thinks that in six to 12 months, an AI system could take down the whole internet. It’s not just that they’re trying to protect their bottom line here. But it’s possible that these calls for safety are beneficial to the companies in more ways than one.

If there is one thing Democratic politicians can agree on right now it’s this: Rich people should pay more in taxes.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made it a centerpiece of his agenda. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is bringing it up on the stump. And Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s riff on the “Epstein class” of rich guys staffing the Trump administration is one of his signature applause lines.

But only in California is a billionaire tax actually on the ballot.

This November, voters in the Golden State will decide whether to levy a first-of-its-kind, onetime tax on the roughly 250 billionaires who live in the state, equal to 5 percent of their total assets. Many of the state’s billionaires are furious — and a few have already moved away.

The tax is supported by labor unions and some populist lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), but it’s less popular with moderate Democrats.

Some experts, like Cornell University sociology professor Cristobal Young, are leery too. 

“It’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem,” Young, who also wrote the 2017 book The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “So why are we talking about a onetime sort of Band-Aid over this?”

Sean spoke with Young about what Young’s research shows about whether the wealthy move away from higher taxes, why this tax proposal may be different, and the right way to tax the very rich.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are you open to taxing the billionaires?

Yeah, certainly. There’s a fundamental loophole in the tax system. Every paycheck, I’m paying taxes straight out of that, and so are all your listeners. But if you make your money from holding corporate stock that’s appreciating in value dramatically over time, you don’t pay any tax on that until you sell it. That leads to a situation where people are accumulating vast fortunes essentially without paying any tax on it at all. It’s a huge inequality in the tax system and it’s especially apparent at the very top. I think it’s just a question of what we are going to do about it.

“This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid?”

I’ve been studying the policies currently in place. There are states today that have taxes on millionaire incomes and we have a really good sense of the impacts of that. They raise a lot of revenue, and they don’t have very much effect on migration. Maybe a few people move, but generally not. My research contribution to this is tracking where millionaires live before and after these tax increases. I found between no to very little tax migration in response.

One of the biggest arguments against this billionaire tax in California is that you’re going to chase all the billionaires away. Sergey Brin has already left, but you’re saying the research doesn’t show that effect?

That’s right. But the important point I want to make is that none of these previous tax proposals have suggested that a small number of people would get tax bills up to $10, $12, or $13 billion. We’ve been talking about significantly smaller tax policies. 

I’ve always been cautious and clear about what the research has shown to date: Our experience with taxing millionaires at the state level has been very successful. Many states over the years have adopted it after watching their neighbors to see how it plays out. How it plays out is you get extra revenue and people aren’t really moving away.

But this tax proposal is a completely different tax instrument. Firstly, it’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem. This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid? 

There are good proposals for an ongoing solution that wouldn’t be this large. For the people that are affected, this is going to be an unprecedented tax bill. I don’t want to say “poor them, they can’t pay it,” but we’re talking about enormous amounts of money.

I believe you have a different proposal on how to [institute a wealth tax], and it has to do with unrealized capital gains. Can you help people who don’t have unrealized capital gains understand what those are?

For sure. Say you hold stock in Google, and over the years, the value of that stock has appreciated enormously, such that you’re now one of the richest people in the world. But none of that was ever paid out as a paycheck. It’s essentially sitting in a capital account and therefore it doesn’t trigger a tax bill unless it gets sold. It rarely gets sold, so effectively it just goes untaxed, potentially forever.

In the meantime, it’s not like these folks are living in a monastery somewhere. They’re living like they’re the richest people in the world. They do this by borrowing against their assets. Borrowing doesn’t trigger a tax liability because borrowing is not income in the tax code.

There are existing proposals at the federal level, which have been worked out in great detail, like the Billionaires Income Tax Act. It’s not a tax on all billionaire wealth; it’s a tax on year-to-year increments in billionaire fortunes. 

If you have $200 billion in Google stock and the next year it’s worth $220 billion, you owe taxes on the $20 billion, not the $220 billion. It’s just on the increment year-to-year and not everything that’s ever happened in the past. That switches it from being a wealth tax to being an income tax. A lot of things count as income, and increases in billionaire fortunes should be treated and taxed as income.

California’s billionaire wealth tax proposal is flawed in many ways, but it is raising a very important conversation about how we are going to address deep loopholes in our tax system. This is a conversation we need to be having.

President Donald Trump has spent years making false claims about election fraud, including his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Since that election, Republicans who denied or questioned the results have taken positions on local election boards, worked inside election offices, trained poll observers, and sought to influence state election laws.

Now, as we head into the 2026 midterm elections, candidates who have denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election are running for governor and other powerful positions in key swing states. If elected, some could play important roles in overseeing future elections.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Andrew Kaczynski, senior reporter at CNN who has been reporting on election-denying candidates and what their victories could mean for future elections.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Which swing states are having elections featuring candidates who have denied the 2020 election results?

The interesting thing is that we talked about in this article that we did on the five most key swing states is governor’s races. We’re talking Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and Georgia. These are all states that Trump won in 2016, Biden in 2020, then Trump in 2024. And what we had talked about was how in each of these states, there are candidates running for governor who in four of the cases just outright denied the results of the 2020 election. 

How are these candidates in these five races faring? Does it look good for any of them?

With the caveat that we’ve seen some pretty big polling misses already in two of these states, most of these candidates are behind in the polls, but there’s always the caveat that these are states that Trump won in 2024 and 2016. So they’re going to be, they’re true battlegrounds. So anything could really happen in them.

And how much is their dispute or lie about the 2020 election coming up in their races?

Not a ton, but what we did see was when we did this story, pointing out that at least in four of the key states, these are candidates that outright denied the election. When we reached out to three of them, they immediately gave us statements saying they would accept whoever won in their states in 2028. They would certify the winner. They said that Biden did win in 2020. 

So we’ve seen election denial is kind of a liability, it would seem for these candidates. Just to give you the example of Michigan, John James has been down by five or six in some of the polls. He was somebody who originally got elected in a swing seat in 2022 as a member of Congress after he had two failed Senate runs. And he was like, “Yeah, of course Biden won in 2020.” And then when he ran this time, he actually went the other direction when he maybe was trying to get Trump’s endorsement. There’s a rally where he said that Trump won Michigan three times, which obviously did not happen. 

So you have a situation where it is probably a liability. A couple of these candidates are running from him, but at least two of them, Andy Biggs and John James, didn’t say that Biden won in 2020, didn’t say they’d certify the winner, and didn’t really give us a comment at all on that. But three of them said they would certify the winner. 

Do you see this as part of a broader effort on the part of this administration, or the Republican Party more broadly, to sort of legitimize the Big Lie into our institutions, into even election administration, which there’s been lots of reporting about? Or is it just a coincidence? Are there so many election deniers now that, inevitably, some of them are going to be running for office in key battleground states?

I think it’s more the latter. It was just so thoroughly embedded in the Republican Party in 2020 and Trump had such a stranglehold over the party. But in 2022, many of those big election denier proponents that he backed, they did lose. So I do think it’s more of a liability for these candidates, but. It’s also why Trump supports a lot of them. 

We’ve got a lot of candidates who deny the results of the 2020 election running for office in 2026. We’ve got people who deny the results of the 2020 election administering our elections in various key battleground states. We’ve got the Supreme Court fighting with lower courts about what maps they can use. We’ve got the president trying to redraw the rules around mail-in voting.

What do you think this all amounts to for President Trump? Is this about the midterms? Is this about 2028? Is this just a pastime of his?

It’s a pastime. It all runs through the fact that he thinks, or is lying, that he won in 2020, and this is all just a part of it. It’s all part of the same delusions about mail-in voting or fraud, or this or that. There’s an example of Andy Biggs, who’s running for governor in Arizona. He was a huge, huge stop the steal proponent and he was like, The governor could have de-certified the results if they wanted to, and that couldn’t obviously happen. And that’s what Trump likes. John James, who said it at a rally with Trump: He won Michigan three times.

Trump just likes that. Trump likes the candidates who lie and say that he won in 2020. It’s just like a pastime of his trying to find this fraud that doesn’t — like, obviously it exists. Obviously people do commit voter fraud at very low levels, but never has it been shown that it ever is on a large scale or enough to change the election.

Do we have any sense of whether the frustration people have with Donald Trump, and his real policies, can overcome all of the shenanigans we’re seeing around our elections so far this midterm season?

Yes. I think if we have really close races in the House, Senate, governor, that’s where I think some of this stuff could come into play with people denying the election, saying they won, trying to throw out ballots or this or that. 

Election fights, that’s where things could get into a shit show. But I don’t think we’ll be talking about this if [Democrats] win by pretty good sized margins. And obviously Trump can say whatever he says, but the results will be the results — it’s like that.

The national debt hasn’t been a major issue in the 2026 midterms. But perhaps it should be. As of last month, the United States is in debt to the tune of $40 trillion. That’s 12 zeros, which averages out to about $116,000 per American. 

It’s enough that even economists like Jared Bernstein, the chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers under President Joe Biden, is starting to worry. Bernstein has long argued that the national debt is nothing to worry about too seriously as long as servicing it — that is, paying the interest on it — remains manageable. 

Bernstein has since changed his tune. He told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram after last month’s debt milestone that while the number itself is “a big distraction,” two factors have him worried: Congress’s inaction and rising interest rates. But is it well and truly time to panic? Are we in a moment of no return? 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Bernstein, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Have you now or ever been wrong about the national debt?

Yes. Who hasn’t?

Tell me what your position was and why you think it maybe was wrong.

A lot of the economic work on the national debt involves forecasting, predicting where things are going. And nobody can really forecast things like interest rates or when there’s going to be another recession or a war or a pandemic, so nobody could honestly answer that question with, “I’ve been right about everything.” 

But I feel good in the sense of being intellectually honest about how I’ve thought about this. When the numbers were pointing to a level of calmness about our fiscal outlook, even though lots of people had their hair on fire, I didn’t go there. I was pretty adamant that there wasn’t anything to be overly worried about at this point, for reasons that we can get into. 

When the numbers changed, and the outlook changed, and the politics changed, I changed.

Let’s start with why you thought it was okay to carry loads of debt in the first place, because that was your position for some time, right?

Correct. When you say loads of debt, the important thing is not just this load of debt or the stock of debt. Think of the debt as the water in the bathtub and think of the flow. Every year, you get a deficit or a surplus. That’s the water coming into the bathtub. 

If you have a large stock of debt or loads of debt, as you say, which we were carrying, what you really want to look at is: What’s the rate of interest? How much debt service do you have to pay to your creditors on that stock of debt? And as long as the interest rate stays pretty low and the country’s ability to service its debt is manageable, there’s no obvious reason to break out a sweat, even if there’s a lot of water in the bathtub. 

As long as you’re growing faster than your interest rate payments, as long as you’re not adding too much to the debt every year, underlying economic growth can allow you to service that debt without breaking a big economic sweat. And that’s where we were for a bunch of years. So that was the calm part.

Would you say you were part of an economic consensus in this country?

I would say yes, with an asterisk that maybe it was 50-50. Half of us who were watching it had hair that wasn’t burning up and the others had smoke coming out of their hats. 

By the way, there’s an interesting strain here that we shouldn’t miss because it becomes more and more relevant over time. Of the hair-on-fire group, there were two classes. One was genuinely freaked out, incorrectly in my view, and the other was a bunch of politicians who pretended to have their hair on fire, but really didn’t. 

“Don’t get hung up on the big, round number. It’s okay if your debt grows. It’s just not okay if your debt grows faster than your economy.”

These were — I used to call them chicken hawks. They were budget hawks, but they didn’t really want to do anything about it. And in fact, they consistently pushed in the wrong direction, which turned out to be kind of an important component of my apotheosis in this space.

Now, the big moment. Something happens at some point during this Trump administration that changes your mind. Tell us about it.

It wasn’t like at 2:37 pm on a particular day, just to be clear. I saw a number of things eroding and it wasn’t just during the Trump administration. 

Something flipped in my head a little bit because any kind of what we call a reaction function by Congress, to react to these unsustainable forecasts, looked dead to me. And then I started seeing some academic work that actually measured this and showed, lo and behold, Congress was no longer reacting to the budget outlook. That was part one. 

Part two is I started to see interest rates drift up. And if you’ll recall earlier, as I think you put it, interest rates found their way into the conversation. 

[Part three], we saw budget deficits that in normal times — the budget deficit, which again, that’s the water flowing into the tub — should be negative 2 to 3 percent. They’re 4, 5, and 6 percent. That’s almost a recessionary-level deficit. So you put those three things together and my head broke.

Do you think this congressional inaction or indifference to the debt was somehow seeded by decades of economists like yourself, saying, “This is okay”?

Let me flip that on you, because I don’t want to hold myself or my colleagues unaccountable, but I actually think the other side may be even more to blame or equally to blame in the sense of, they were saying the economy is about to explode for 30 years. And it didn’t. 

Now it is true that those of us — speaking for myself, I was saying, “We really ought to get our fiscal house in order, but we don’t need to worry about an immediate crisis. We have time to fix this.”

I was trying to be nuanced, but American politics doesn’t do nuance, so you can blame me for that.

Is the economy about to explode?

No. We still have time to fix this and the sooner we start, the better. 

When I talk about debt unsustainability and the potential for a debt spiral, I’m talking about over the next decade. I’m not talking about next week. The good news, Sean, is that there are ways to start repairing the damage. We can’t fill up the hole, but we can stop digging the hole. 

There are ways to stop digging the hole that are both good politics and good policy, and it has to do with reversing a bunch of tax cuts on the upper end of the income and wealth scale.

So what do we do? Do we just wait for a different administration?

That’s the answer for almost any good thing you want to do economically. I’m not saying this as a partisan: It’s very clear that this administration has caused all kinds of economic problems, but when you talk about the debt and deficit, I’ve tried to be pretty balanced in this conversation. 

It’s not just the [Republicans]. They’ve definitely made the biggest contribution to the unsustainable path through their relentless tax-cutting. But there was a time when I was in the Obama administration that we basically made permanent 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts. Republicans have been the lead flank in taking us to this unsustainable place, but too often the Democrats have not reversed those measures and in fact have, in some cases, endorsed them. 

And you seem to think that this is within reach, that we’re just a few steps away from making $40 trillion look more like $30 trillion or $20 trillion?

That’s an interesting question, because it’s probably making $40 trillion look more like $41 or $42 [trillion] rather than $44 or $45 trillion. 

But again, Sean, don’t get hung up on the big, round number. It’s okay if your debt grows. It’s just not okay if your debt grows faster than your economy. 

As long as the economy’s growing faster than the debt, which used to be the case, then that ratio’s going to come down. So it’s okay if the debt accumulates a little bit more. What’s not okay is if it just keeps spiraling and the growth rate decelerates.

So let’s keep it around $40 trillion. That’s the takeaway.

No, that’s not the takeaway. Sorry. I think $40 trillion is a big distraction. I’m not glad we’re there, but at least we’re talking about it. 

I think the key thing is the debt ratio, the debt relative to the economy. I think we can get back on a path where debt to GDP doesn’t just keep growing in good times and bad. It stabilizes in good times, maybe even comes down a little bit in good times because the economy’s growing faster than the debt — the denominator’s growing faster than the numerator, if you will. 

I think it’s plausible, but it would mean very different people, a very different composition of people in Congress and the White House.

My new takeaway is, “Keep the debt in check.”

Love it.

For years, parents across the country have been calling on Congress to do something about social media’s harmful effects on children. And typically, when something does happen, it follows a familiar pattern. 

The billionaire tech CEOs are summoned to Congress. The grieving parents of children who have self-harmed bring old photos of their children, some of whom are now deceased, and relive their experiences. Lawmakers confront the tech company leaders with horrific stories of exploitation, eating disorders, drug overdoses, and suicide. The CEOs apologize. They promise to do better and point to their latest parental controls. Congress introduces child-safety bills. And the bills get stalled. 

But since Congress has so far failed to regulate social media, parents and state attorneys general are trying a different tactic. They’re suing. 

The lawsuits don’t target dangerous content on platforms, though. Instead, they go after the apps themselves: features like infinite scroll, constant notifications, and beauty filters that make it all but impossible for teens to put their phones down.

So far, the strategy is working. Last week, only a few days into a trial over whether Meta deliberately tried to make young users addicted to their apps, the company reached a landmark settlement with nearly every US state (and Washington, DC).

Then Meta did something strange. The company spun its punishment into an advertising campaign, writing a full-page “open letter” that presented the company as a leader in protecting teens and young people. They also challenged their competitors — Snap, TikTok, and YouTube — to adopt the rules Meta agreed to in its settlement, even though neither were involved in the lawsuit.

It seems that Meta is trying to turn its agreement into an industry standard. And with Congress still unable to regulate social media, the deal could become the closest thing the United States has to a federal rulebook for social media.

So what did Meta agree to? And why is it so eager to bring its competitors along?

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Lauren Feiner, senior policy reporter at The Verge, about how Meta turned a historic settlement into a potential power move.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Lauren, what did Meta just agree to? Because people are saying it’s a big deal. 

There’s two parts of what Meta agreed to. First is the money. They agreed to pay about $17.1 billion to the states over 10 years, but $5 billion of that will only kick in if YouTube and TikTok agree to similar terms and their own payment to the states. 

Then you have the actual business changes that they agreed to — things including a two-hour usage limit across its apps daily. That does exclude certain things like messaging and longform content. But that’s a pretty big deal. It changed nighttime and school-hours notifications for teens so that those are off by default. And it’s also going to let teens turn off the personalized algorithm in their feed and get a reverse chronological feed that the states might believe is less addictive.

Okay. Let’s break it down a little bit and just start with the money. Which states are getting billions of dollars? All of them? Most of them? DC’s one of them, even though it’s not a state, I heard. 

Nearly every state is getting in on this money. It’s 47 states and DC and US territory. So it’s really almost the entire country that’s getting in on the action. One of the states that is not a part of this deal is New Mexico, which as you might remember, recently got its own deal. 

And can you give us a sense of how meaningful $17 or $18 billion is to Meta?

As we know, Meta is a $1.4-ish trillion company. This is not a huge sum of money in the grand scheme of things for Meta, especially over the course of 10 years. That said, it’s not completely insignificant, especially at this time when having cash flow is really important to companies like Meta that are involved in the AI race.

But, like, did their stock price go up or down on the news? 

It did go up on the news. Shareholders clearly saw this as a net positive of at least there’s some more stability here and this is not something that’s going to take down Meta as a business.

And part of the deal, as you mentioned, is that Meta’s going to hold up some of the settlement until other companies like YouTube, TikTok, Snap, follow its lead here. What is that about? Have we ever seen something quite like that before? 

I’ve never really seen anything quite like that before. A settlement, in general, is something that can only be enforced between the parties. And in this case, it’s just Meta and the states who are signing onto this agreement. TikTok and YouTube had nothing to do with this, but they’re being roped in here. 

I see that as a little bit of a power move on Meta’s part. Because on the one hand, if they’re the only ones who are having to enforce this usage limit across their apps, a teenager who finally hit their Instagram limit for the day might just go and spend some time on YouTube and TikTok and they might spend much more time there because they can’t get kicked off. 

I think it is to Meta’s benefit to rope them in here. And by arranging this settlement like this, now Meta is almost incentivizing the state attorneys general to go even harder after its competitors. 

Do you think this gamble on Meta’s part might pay off? 

I think there’s a few signals in both directions. There are some pretty strong signals of why YouTube and TikTok might take a deal like this. One is that they could come to a similar calculation that Meta did, that taking a settlement like this, agreeing to some discrete terms of how they should change their apps, is actually for the better for them in the long run. 

The alternative, for example, might be legislation that is much more ambiguous or confusing. One example of that is the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, which is a very popular bill in Congress. [KOSA] would impose a duty of care onto social media companies, which means that they would have to take on this responsibility to protect kids in the way that they design their platforms. And that’s a lot more difficult for them to figure out how to comply with or worry about who’s going to enforce that in the future than agreeing to some discrete terms of what exactly they’re going to change to their apps. 

On the other hand, they could say, “You know what? We’re really different from Meta. Our businesses are different. You know, the reason people come to TikTok or YouTube might be different from the reasons they come to Instagram and Facebook.”

YouTube in particular, I think would make an argument about being a place that people learn things — they come for the longer-form videos, and it’s more of an entertainment app. I think that’s language we’ve seen from them before. So I think we could see them take an argument like that a little bit further. 

I’m glad you brought up Congress because Congress infamously refuses to regulate social media, though they certainly humor the idea every now and then. Does Meta’s settlement become some kind of de facto national policy now that it’s sort of broaching the issue before Congress manages to pass legislation?

I think it’s quite possible that it does. I think we have seen KOSA get fairly far in the last Congress and in this Congress, but it’s also become more complicated. The House and the Senate have different versions of the bill right now. That means that even if it passes in either chamber, they’re still going to have to reconcile the two, and they’re worlds apart.

I think this is very likely going to be the major document that we have that’s changing social media regulation, social media norms, for the foreseeable future. 

And remind us what might be dangerous about trusting Meta to self-regulate? 

[With] the fact that Meta agreed to these terms, I think we can intuit that they believe this is something they can live with. That this isn’t going to be a death knell for their business. They’re going to be able to weather this storm. 

You have to keep that in mind: Who is coming up with these terms? And of course, the state attorneys general played a significant role here, and I think they seem very happy with the settlement, but you have to keep in mind that this is not exactly the same as a court order or a regulation. It’s applying to one company and it’s terms that it felt it could live with. 

And if we’re not going to be cynical for a second here, and Meta actually convinces Snap and YouTube and TikTok to go along with them and all four massive titans essentially adopt the same regulations for minors’ usage of their platforms, do we have a better society? 

I think it depends on how this is all implemented. We have, first of all, the potential privacy issues with age verification that many people have raised already. And then you have the questions of how easy is all of this to just circumvent and how much do these defaults really do to change teens’ behaviors? 

I think it’s certainly possible that these all have really long-lasting effects and that enough kids will not circumvent the protections and they will just take the defaults, and it’ll change just how teens interact with social media in general. But I think we really do have to see how this all plays out and if it lives up to the hopes that a lot of the AGs here really want it to. 

And how long do we have to wait? Years? Years?! 

Some of the provisions take effect relatively soon, but yeah, there are certain benchmarks within the next year, two years for certain standards that Meta has to reach in implementing these.

Okay. Well, we’ll have you back in years to find out how it went. 

Can’t wait.