Extended Interview: Abdul El-Sayed

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: So I have some questions for you that are pretty close to identical to questions that I asked your opponent, and we're going to start with some of those. Why are you running for U.S. Senate? It shouldn't be as hard. [00:00:12] Speaker 2: It shouldn't be as hard in the richest and most powerful country in the world to afford a tank of gas or your groceries or to pay your rent or your mortgage. It shouldn't be as hard to see a doctor. And it doesn't have to be. It's a choice we make about what kind of politics we have. And now we've watched politicians get bought off by big corporations, and those corporations have their way in Washington, D.C., and it means they do two things. They suppress our wages, they raise our prices, and we end up bearing the brunt of it. I'm a doctor who rebuilt health departments, put glasses on kids, took on corporate polluters, eliminated medical debt. I know I'm not supposed to run for office. I've got 11-letter first names, got sounds that come out of parts of people's throats. Most people don't know they have. But I also know it just shouldn't be this hard. And so we built this campaign the old-fashioned way, going everywhere, talking to everyone. And I believe in that kind of politics. And if we're going to actually get our democracy back, it's going to be that kind of politics. Democracy is a process, not an outcome, and it's about working the process. [00:01:06] Speaker 1: Out of that range of issues and ideas, what is the most important issue that you hear about from Michigan voters in this campaign? Pick one. [00:01:16] Speaker 2: Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said health care. It still is really, really high on people's minds. I think right now we are barreling total world where the most important issue I hear about every day is AI. It is foundationally going to change our economy and change our economy at a timescale that we cannot adapt to. Even if that happens, or if AI slips human control, or it's taken by some terrorist group who wants to create a bioweapon, or it ends up in an arms race where we end up winning, but then losing half of what it meant to win in the first place, which is preserving humanity. All of these outcomes are really, really quite scary. I hear it in so many different ways. [00:01:53] Speaker 1: Yeah. Tell me about that. I mean, this has been a very important elite level conversation over the last couple of years, but are you hearing about it on the trail? [00:02:02] Speaker 2: It comes in two different ways. One is students saying, so I just took $60,000 in loans and the job that I was supposed to have on the back end doesn't exist anymore or might not exist in 10 years. Or it's folks in rural communities who say, they're trying to put a data center in my backyard. I already can't afford my utilities and I'm worried about what it's going to mean for our water. These are issues that people are deathly afraid of, and it shows up in just all kinds of ways. But I also think that, you know, it goes back to the healthcare question too. You know, they promised us that AI was going to cure cancer. I haven't seen a cure for cancer yet. But now it's being used in this arms race around prior authorization, this arms race between hospitals and insurance companies to figure out who can bill more or pay less for healthcare that's getting whittled away. And we forgot what the point was, which is to provide people care, not to make money for a few large corporations. It all kind of really goes back to the same issue, which is why I want to get money out of politics to put money in pockets for Medicare for all. [00:02:58] Speaker 1: Conveniently, this was also one of the questions that I had from Mike Rogers, which was what should Congress do about the risks of AI? I think there's a couple of things. [00:03:07] Speaker 2: Number one, we need a cabinet-level agency that is going to invest in and focus on regulating the inside of the AI industry, kind of like an FDA or an SEC for AI. We need to also make sure that there are no AI or AI no-go's, meaning AI shouldn't fire a weapon, shouldn't fire you, shouldn't be able to deny you healthcare. And when it comes to the corporations themselves, I think they need to be divested from traditional big tech. They need to be reborn, rebuilt as public interest corporations. And I think we need democratic- [00:03:40] Speaker 1: Nationalized? [00:03:41] Speaker 2: Not nationalized, but democratically appointed leadership at 50% of the board. So you're talking about sort of a public-private- Right. [00:03:50] Speaker 1: And is that about democratic control? Is it about sharing wealth? What's the goal? [00:03:54] Speaker 2: In part, it's going to be democratic control, in part sharing wealth. The other thing I think that needs to happen is that you need 50% of their value held in what could kind of be called a sovereign wealth fund. And the point here is this: Number one, you need to make sure that the risks that we are barreling toward are thought through at the board governance level. That we're not just inadvertently following this micro-scale incentive to create technologies that could kill us all. And that if the CEOs are right, that this is going to potentially take 50% of the white-collar jobs in the order of five to 10 years, that part of the value that might be created isn't just held by a few billionaires in San Francisco, but instead is held in part in the wealth of the federal government to be able to reinvest in A, the capacity for job creation, but B, the capacity to make sure that folks who are pushed out of the economy aren't left destitute. And then the last thing I'll say is that we need a terms of engagement for data centers. This really is where the rubber hits the road for a lot of folks. And those terms of engagement are the following: Number one, you need community benefits agreements that are negotiated in good faith, transparently, with local communities, with the ability for the local community to say, "We don't want this here." Two, if you're going to put a project in a local community, it cannot raise utility rates. Three, it has to make sure that it improves reliability. Some of that revenue that's created goes to improve reliability. Four, you cannot touch our waterways at all. And five, all union labor. And I think that terms of engagement needs to exist at the federal level. And until then, we need local and state moratoriums. [00:05:27] Speaker 1: What about the frontier where companies are pushing forward? Would you limit that? We need a full on pause. Full on pause. Full on pause. And what happens then, the instant question, what happens if we pause and China doesn't? [00:05:40] Speaker 2: See, I just don't think that that's-- I don't take that as seriously as a lot of people do. Here's why. A lot of the frontier research is just spoofing our models. China's research. China's research. And it'd be like, you know, you're pulling a skier on a boat. And you speed up the boat, and you're like, the skier is still so close. We've got to speed up. The skier is still so close. Well, it's because you're pulling the skier. And I think that's in part what's happening, right? And they've been very, very good at just mocking our technology. So I think if we slow down, I think we will find that a lot of what China is doing is more about the dispersion of this technology than it is on frontier research. And at the same time, I think we need an international treaty. I think we need to be working with the Chinese, because at the end of the day-- [00:06:22] Speaker 1: Because eventually, the water skier can still swim and catch up. Right? The analogy falls apart. [00:06:28] Speaker 2: Sorry, just running with the medical. But eventually, yes, they are going to be able to hop on a jet ski and catch up. But the point that I'm making here is that I think all of us are interested in the preservation of humanity, right? Because in China, there are humans too, and we're humans too. And creating robots that get to this point of recursive self-improvement, kind of like that horror point in Fantasia, where you've got the mops with the buckets that are self-creating. But none of us want to get there, and none of us want to see what happens when you open Pandora's box and all of a sudden AI has far exceeded our control. So I think we all have an incentive to get this right, but to understand that we are going to have to figure out how to work together similarly to what we've done when it came to other potentially What we've done is that we are going to be able to maintain the potential threat and work together to make sure that we are focused more on protecting humanity than just simply what the micro scale incentives might look like. [00:07:22] Speaker 1: Set aside AI. Pick one economic issue that you think should be the priority for the next Congress. [00:07:29] Speaker 2: Monopolies and oligopolies. We live in corporatism. We don't live in capitalism. I'm a capitalist. Capitalism is about the leveraging of supply and demand to allocate capital. It's about free entry and exit into the market. If you read Adam Smith, he'll tell you that there's no market without morals. He'll tell you that the biggest risk to capitalism was never government regulation. It was always monopoly and oligopoly. And I think when you think about the most lucrative sectors of the economy, they are dominated by a few very, very powerful corporations now. When you get a monopoly or oligopoly, it has two clear powers in the economy. The first is the ability to, in effect, raise prices on you, which is why we can't afford so much of what we can't afford. And it has the power to suppress wages. They act as what economists call monopsonists, meaning that they can suppress the effort for us to trade our labor on a market to make a good living. And so you're watching as our ability to get paid for the work we do is stagnating while the prices we pay goes up. We solved this problem, like, over 100 years ago. And that was because we created the Federal Trade Commission. We empowered it to break up monopolies and oligopolies. And we've basically walked away from that. And we've allowed a lot of these huge corporations to be able to accrue power. Just give me an example. [00:08:44] Speaker 1: Because just one thing that has tended to happen in these debates is that anti-monopolists will identify a company and they'll say, look at Walmart. You know, it's cornered the market on everything. And then next thing you know, Amazon comes along and Walmart doesn't look so powerful. Or in Silicon Valley, Facebook looks dominant and then five years pass and you have companies like Anthropic and OpenAI as dominant players. So what's an example of a monopoly that, you know, holds power over an extended period of time in our era? [00:09:17] Speaker 2: I'll give you one example. DTE, our local utility. They have raised our rates faster than in 46 other states over the past 20 years. They buy off almost every politician in our state so that they all look the other way and they just make money hand over fist and that comes out of our back pockets. And rather than invest that money in improving our reliability, I lose power two or three times a year for three or four days at a time. That's one example. Similarly, everybody out there watching probably has a phone in their pocket or their purse. That phone is probably made by one of two companies, Samsung or Apple. If you think about the carriers on those phones, probably AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. That's just one example. Similarly, you talked about Amazon versus Walmart. Yeah, you traded one oligopolist for another. And it's actually a perfect example. The reason that other one comes along is because that one has no incentive to actually compete. And so they start to ossify. They don't really change their business practices. And you get another one that's able to build a more powerful monopoly on top of it. But either way, either way, you don't have many players in the game. It's not like people are choosing, do I go to Walmart or Amazon or another place? [00:10:19] Speaker 1: Right. But there are advantages of scale where prices-- Sure. --well, you know, bigness drives down prices for a lot of people. Walmart drove down prices. Amazon drove down prices, right? [00:10:29] Speaker 2: Until they start driving them up, right? Until Amazon basically becomes the marketplace, can compete with any product on its marketplace, can undercut their price and then raise their price because now they're the monopolist. That's just not how the system has worked. I mean, unfortunately, this is just a truth of economics, that when you have a monopoly, you are able to charge whatever price you want to charge. Americans right now are not complaining because things are too cheap. We're all complaining because things are too expensive. And I think that's a big part of it. The other thing, you know, I think we need is a union. I think unions are one of the most important antidotes to monopsony, right? The ability of a few employers to set the price for what they're going to pay in employment. Unions empower you to then stand up and say, listen, we're going to collectivize our labor and we're going to make sure that if you are going to suppress our wages, we are going to push back. It's about leveraging exactly those same economies of scale against the corporations that have managed to lower our overall wages. [00:11:25] Speaker 1: Could you describe your opponent in the most fair-minded terms possible? [00:11:32] Speaker 2: I think he's a man who at one point said he wanted to serve publicly and then started playing the game and got addicted. I think, you know, for him... [00:11:41] Speaker 1: I'm not sure that quite passes. [00:11:44] Speaker 2: I'm trying to be fair-minded. Look, I think at some point, like, I think early on in his career, he really got into public service for the right reasons. I think at some point you start to play the game and you start to take the rules of the game as fixed. And the rules of our game in politics are about taking corporate money to do corporate bidding and then make money on the back end off the same corporations you were regulating. And I think he played that game. It worked out really well for him. He made 14 million bucks and moved to Florida, bought a mansion and two yachts. And he's watching Donald Trump play that game and make billions. So he's like, I better get in while the getting's good. I mean, look, I think he's somebody who has never asked why things are the way they are. Okay. I think he's somebody who, for him, it's just like, I guess this is how it works. [00:12:26] Speaker 1: I'll just say this was a challenging question for both of you and leave it at that. Let's go into your biography. Tell me how your family came to the U.S. My dad wanted to make cars. [00:12:36] Speaker 2: And, you know, he was the eldest son of the smartest person I ever met who never got to go to school. My grandmother. She was the 9th of 14, raised her six of eight kids to whom she gave birth, who died before the first birthday. My dad was her eldest. So he watched his two siblings pass before he turned five. And he was a great student. And he, you know, I remember him telling me the first time he saw a full page spread in a magazine of a Corvette. And he was like, I want to make that. And, and that's what he did. He, how old was he when he came to the U.S.? I think, well, let's say he came in 1978. So he's in early twenties, came to do a PhD at this university at Wayne State. And, and became an automotive engineer, worked at GM at the tech center, helped the design 96 Corvette. And for the car lovers out there, that was also the engine that was put in the 96 Impala, which is the fastest boat you ever saw. And met and married my mom. She came to the United States. They realized that after creating the one thing that they ever created, which was me, they had deep creative differences and got divorced and both remarried. I was raised by my dad and my stepmom, Jackie. She is a daughter of the American Revolution from Gratiot County, middle of the state. She is the daughter of Jan and Judy Johnson, with siblings Jeff and Jenny Johnson. You get the picture here. I should have been Jabdul, but you know, I missed that boat. And, you know, I grew up with, with my dad, my stepmom and two siblings. I've also got two other half siblings on my mom's side. [00:14:08] Speaker 1: What was it like growing up as a child of immigrants in Michigan? Pretty great. [00:14:13] Speaker 2: I mean, I moved around a lot. So I spent some of my childhood years in Missouri, some of my childhood years in Florida, but was back by the fifth grade. And, you know, people talk about code switching, right? Trying to figure out like where you fit. I was raised in this family where my dad is an Egyptian immigrant. My, my stepmom's a daughter of the American Revolution. Really understanding these differences in perspective and culture, but also coming to understand how to sort of explain the least common denominator of things. You know, in a given summer, my, my folks would ship me out to Egypt, where I'd, you know, be the only one of the family who went. It's been like four months there with my tata, my grandmother, my grandfather, my, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. And then I'd come back at the very end of the summer to a cottage on a lake in the middle of Michigan, Montcalm County. And the crazy thing about it is, you know, whether it was my tata Soad or my grandma, Judy, one of the things you come to appreciate is these two women could not have imagined the lives that one another lead, but I got to live part of them with both. And I, I remember explaining one grandmother to the other grandmother. But the thing about it is when your grandmother makes your favorite meal, gives you on a forehead, tells you it's going to be just fine, it feels the same. And those are the, I think the least common denominators of what make us human. And so in a lot of ways, I've never been able to take for granted that I was normal in any room I walked into, not one, not even my own house. And that's a gift because you get really good at having to explain yourself and having to understand how people understand you. And I really appreciate that. [00:15:39] Speaker 1: If you're elected, you'll be the first Muslim senator. Sure. And, you know, there's a lot of people, Muslim, Christian, otherwise, who are raised in a religion, and it doesn't stick. Why did faith stick for you? [00:15:52] Speaker 2: I think anybody of faith has on again, off again, relationships with one's own faith. Faith is a choice one makes every day, right? And in my younger years, I certainly rebelled. And it was something that kind of came back to me in college. And I was sort of out from underneath my family and trying to make sense of the world. And I think the thing about faith is that it reminds you you're small in the eyes of God, right? And when you realize that you are small relative to everything else around you, you don't even need faith for this, but like staring at the ocean does this. Staring at a mountain does this. Thinking about how you fit within the cosmos does this. And when you appreciate how small you are and the fact that, you know, on average, you know, you and I are right around the same age, we're about halfway done, right? And you start to think about like, what is it that I mean here? And how does one's life make meaning? And you start to realize that the things that matter the most in the world are the ways that you relate to the people around you. And, you know, like I said, I've never really quite fit in anywhere. But I've always sought to find that least common denominator to ask, you know, what does it mean to have the things that I had? And I had a front row seat to what my life should have been. I was, you know, born in the United States of America. I got to go to amazing public schools, got to get a medical education. I got to, you know, go to Oxford on a scholarship. Those are opportunities my cousins couldn't have imagined. Crazy thing about it, though, is I could go 15 minutes from where I grew up. And there were kids growing up in this city whose opportunity sets looked a lot more like my cousins than mine. And you start to think, okay, what is my responsibility to my fellow humans around understanding that I am small and insignificant in the broader eyes? And it's also a discipline. It's a way of orienting your life. I know you're a devout Catholic. And it's those rituals that you can touch to that help to provide a certain subtext of meaning, a baseline almost, in the song of your life. And it's always been really meaningful for me. [00:17:53] Speaker 1: Tell me something about how that faith shapes your politics. And tell me something that is, like Catholicism or Judaism, specific to Islam. [00:18:02] Speaker 2: You know, there is this notion of speak the truth, even if it be against yourself. And I try to be, like, radically honest. You know, for me, I've always tried to find the incoherence of a thing to try and see it and look at it. And I think I bring that to my politics every single day. What are the inconsistencies that we hide from in our politics? What are the places where we're not quite consistent with what we say we want to do? We want to talk about those things. And that honesty, I think, is really, really important. There's also just a command to justice. There's this saying of the prophet, peace be upon him. He said, I was commanded to be charitable with my neighbor so much that I thought that when I died, my neighbor would inherit my wealth. And that notion of just charity, I know it's shared by so many of the great faiths. But that sort of notion of, like, the responsibility that you have to the person next to you, with whom you share the space, and the responsibility to be honest and direct, even if you're speaking against yourself. Those are things that I take really seriously and I try to bring to my politics. And at the same time, you know, as a person of faith, you know that the beauty of this place is that you and I love our country. And despite the fact that your faith might be different than mine, there's a lot that we share and a few things that we don't. It's amazing to me that in this country, neither your faith nor mine, nor somebody else's, gets to dictate how we live our lives. That's an amazing thing. I mean, you know, my family immigrated from a place where you don't have the freedom of your speech. And as a kid growing up as a Muslim, especially somebody who experienced 9/11 as a junior in high school, where I had to become a lot more aware of what my faith identity meant for me. It's an amazing thing that in this country, we have the freedom of our religion and nobody gets to read their faith into the law to the exclusion of anybody else, whether you're a person of faith or person with no faith at all. And that's a civic, that's a civic faith, a civic religion that in this country, as we practice our politics, we have to cling on to. That is, again, that lowest common denominator of what makes us all American. [00:20:14] Speaker 1: Let's talk about ideas of justice in politics. You ran for office in 2018, right, for the first time. You were endorsed by Bernie Sanders in that race. I know you like to say, I'm a capitalist. You've said it already in this interview. Were you ever a socialist? No. [00:20:31] Speaker 2: I'm not a, I'm too much of a scientist to actually believe in any sort of ideology. Like, at the end of the day, any of these things are really about, like, process, even as a capitalist, right? Like, I'm not a capital C capitalist. I'm a capitalist who understands that, like, a really good way to beget the most value is, to enable people to have the basic means. And then if they've got a great idea and the wherewithal to work, they can create really, really cool things with that. You see it work every single day. And so, like, I just don't do ideology. I'm, like, a person of faith and everyone else brings evidence. And so there are things that seem to me to be quite obvious. So, like, Roth, as a point, right? The idea that you should have guaranteed health care in the country. Anybody who tells you that's anti-capitalist is not really understanding how capitalism works. It would be like saying, you know, if you want to go play football, right? There are some players who are faster, some players who are bigger, some players who are stronger. But, you know, not everybody needs pads. No, I'm so sorry. I don't care how big, strong, fast you are. Everybody gets a basic set of pads and a good helmet. And then you get to go play, right? And to me, health care, child care, good infrastructure, good schools, those things to me are, like, giving a player pads so that they can go and play and at least understand that they're not going to get, like, catastrophically injured, God willing, in playing the game. [00:21:41] Speaker 1: So what do you think about the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a group that you've been associated with, again, despite being a proud capitalist, right? Do you think that they're generally right about things? Do you think that they're too ideological? Again, I don't really think about them as a group, you know? Never. You've never—you only see people, not groups. [00:22:02] Speaker 2: No, no, I'm just saying, like, as an organization, I understand why you might want to ask me about my association with a group that everybody wants to fit me into. [00:22:08] Speaker 1: I'm not asking about your association. I'm asking, what do you think about them as a force in your party's politics? Do you think that they're a force for good? I think they're right about some things, and I think they're not right about some things. [00:22:19] Speaker 2: Give me one thing you think they're wrong about. I think some of the—so I'm running for U.S. Senate. I've heard. Right? And, like, to run for U.S. Senate and say you want to abolish the Senate seems kind of inconsistent, don't you think? So, like, obviously there's a number of things. You've got to tear down the master's house with the master's tools. It's also the socialist thing that I just don't agree with. Like, I think Medicare for all is a really great way to guarantee everybody health care. Also, it's actually very highly capitalist if you think about it. You're just saying— [00:22:45] Speaker 1: So what is a socialist idea in health care that you would disagree with? Just— [00:22:50] Speaker 2: Well, it's not necessarily that I would disagree with it. I just don't think it would work here. It's like, you know, we get compared to the U.K. Medicare for all gets compared to the U.K. It's not single payer. It's single provider. Right. It's like every hospital is government run. That's not what I'm advocating for. I'm just saying that health insurance in the year of our Lord, 2026, doesn't have to be a product. You can just give it to everybody. And then from there, people can decide where to use their health insurance that they get from the government. It's actually not a government takeover of health care. It actually is the freeing up of a market in health care. Because right now, our health care market gets squeezed by the negotiation between the health insurance industry and providers. So what happens now is that the rate that gets set is not transparent, which, by the way, is in complete violation of the principles of capitalism. So we don't have capitalist health care at all. And the best way to allow every doctor or every provider to be like, "Hey, let me put up my shingle and see if I can compete," is to make sure that we hold the insurance part so that everybody gets to participate in that market and go and decide and shop around their health insurance wherever they want to go. If you want to see a flourishing of the health care system, pass Medicare for All and watch how many different kinds of providers are able then to compete. But right now, we're seeing less and less competition because if you're a private practitioner, you own your own business in health care, you're not getting the same reimbursements as the big guys. [00:24:10] Speaker 1: Before we go deeper into Medicare for All, I asked about your disagreements with the DSA. I want to ask about your disagreements with the former president of the United States. President Obama, he's endorsed you. He's campaigning for you, I think, this week in Michigan. In the past, you have been pretty critical of, let's say, the Obama-era Democratic Party. Give me that critique. What was wrong with the Democrats under Obama? [00:24:36] Speaker 2: I think there are things that we could have done more of. I think there are things like, you know, the ACA was amazing policy. I mean, I'm so grateful I got to do what I did in the era post-ACA rather than before ACA. I would have loved to see us go further when it comes to like a public option, right? You think about, you know, there's a lot on immigration that I critiqued, right? War and drones. And I was clear about my critiques. Now, you know, people want to argue that somehow because you can critique an era or critique a president that somehow you deeply disagree with him. I don't. I mean, President Obama did what he did. And in doing that, enabled me to do what I'm doing. I get to do what I do because President Obama did what he did. And my part is to say, look, where I had fair critiques, all right, you take the baton and try and try and build further. But I also understand I'm building on the edifice he built. And also he was doing it at a different time than the one that I'm doing it in. And so it's impossible to disaggregate what I'm hoping to get done in the United States Senate from the leadership that he showed in the times in which he showed it. And then there are some things he did that were masterful. You think about the JCPOA. We're at war with Iran because Donald Trump, with the lack of general nuanced wisdom and intellectual capacity that he has, decided to tear up that agreement only to take us to war that everybody could have told you was going to be almost impossible to pull out of because, of course, the Strait of Hormuz. And here we are paying more in gas, more in groceries and paying our taxes, losing the lives of our servicemen and women over a war we never had to fight. [00:26:09] Speaker 1: Your critique of the Obama era, I think, was shared by a lot of people in Joe Biden's White House. And if you look back at especially the first year or so of the Biden administration, there was a sense that they were going to go bigger and do more than Obama did. They did a bigger stimulus. They had lots of new spending on new programs. They had a more liberal immigration policy in certain ways. Donald Trump won in 2024 after the Biden presidency. Was it Democratic policy or Democratic politicians that lost? I'm going to say it's Democratic politics. [00:26:44] Speaker 2: Let me explain why. I think we have, in this era, failed to understand the nature of public communication. And part of that is you look at the Inflation Reduction Act. It's a basket of really important policy that nobody fully understands or can capture. And part of what you're doing as a politician is you are asking the public to empower you with the means to achieve a certain policy end. And then ideally you achieve it, take it back to the public and say, here's what we did. Now I want your support to do this other thing. The problem with the way that we've often done politics as Democrats is we do these big omnibus bills that we don't really communicate about. And so it's a lot. And in the minds of the public, it's so little, but it's so much. And so I think that's part and parcel of where our failure was. The other part is, and I've been very clear about this, is the corruption of our aims because of the power of corporations in our politics. I think in the 1980s, when you saw Reaganism defeat unions, Democrats went to corporations to support their campaigns as well. So when you have Republicans funded by corporations and Democrats funded by corporations, at the end of the day, corporations win. And so if you can't talk about what you want to do for the working people against the very people who are disempowering working people, you've got to find something else to talk about. And so we ended up talking about all kinds of other issues that opened up these culture wars. But politics isn't about cultural war. Politics is about the allocation of scarce resources. And so there's a reason I and a lot of us don't take corporate money, because we believe that the responsibility that we have is to fight for working people. And you can't serve two masters. [00:28:27] Speaker 1: And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve two masters. 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And you can't serve two masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And you can't serve three masters. And that's extremely inflationary. You look at the war in Iran. You look at the tariff war. And you see a failure of leadership. Not because the guy is trying. But because the guy has basically given up on actually trying. [00:31:00] Speaker 1: But in running against the Republican Party. In running against Donald Trump. Right? You have your own policy agenda. And it's reasonable for voters to look at what happened under the Biden administration. And ask, are we going to repeat the same story? Well, Russ. Let's just take two. We'll take two issues. And start with Medicare for all. Sure. Your favorite issue. I've heard it many times at campaign rallies in the last couple of days. Medicare for all is a very expensive program. How do you pay for it without? American health care. Without. American health care is very expensive. So, Russ. [00:31:35] Speaker 2: Russ. [00:31:36] Speaker 1: Let's just step back. [00:31:37] Speaker 2: You're a smart guy. Right? American health care is insanely expensive. When they're flattering me. Yeah. 19 cents on the dollar for every dollar spent in our economy. It's attributable to a third. A third of all bankruptcies attributable to health care. We carry $225 billion in medical debt. This system is not working. And the idea that the frame of reference on health care ought to be Joe Biden's policies, who famously did very little on health care, seems to me to be a little bit inconsistent. The frame of reference on health care ought to be the health care system we have right now. Which is about to be made a whole lot worse. Because you're about to find a whole lot of people kicked off their Medicaid. And when that happens, what's going to happen is this. Adverse selection. You're going to see a death spiral in the insurance industry. We already saw our premiums go up 15% last year. They're going to go up even more than that now. Why? Because when you kick enough people off of Medicaid, the hospitals have to figure out where they get that money. What are they going to do? They're going to pass that cost on to insured patients. Those insurance companies are going to pass that cost back into the form of premiums. You're going to see premiums go up. And more people are going to get priced out of health care because of it, which is going to kick off this absurd spiral. So things are going to get a lot worse. Medicare for all is about recognizing that in this moment, we don't actually need to continue to allow these health insurance companies to dictate what happens in our health care. We can guarantee it for everybody. We can take 20% off the top of all of the costs of health care by addressing all of the bloat, all of the $10 million salaries for health insurance CEOs and address the problem and guarantee everybody health care in the process. [00:33:04] Speaker 1: But the centers of cost in American health care are not just the insurance companies. And the insurance companies themselves play a very unpopular but real role in disciplining health care spending, saying they won't cover certain things. Centers of cost also include things that are popular. People love hospitals. They love their doctors. American doctors are very well paid by international standards. American hospitals make a lot of money. Medicare for all basically says, we're going to take this very expensive system, and we're going to push a lot more money into it. And we promise your standard of care won't change, right? I just think that ends up being a very expensive proposition. And I just want you to tell me how you're going to pay for it. [00:33:48] Speaker 2: So, as you know, I want to tax billionaires their wealth. As you know, a tax billionaire is about 8%, right? We as a society agree that it's probably better to have an economy that provides everybody basic health care than one where a billionaire can make an extra billion dollars. You're returning, what, $4.6, $5 trillion back to the economy. You can use that to subsidize a lot of the cost of health care. Now, if you have the choice between paying an insurance company a premium to have to pay a deductible on the back end of that or being able to pay FICA a touch more for health care you won't lose when you lose your job or turn 65 or get married or get divorced, that is ultimately going to be less expensive. Which do you choose? I think the American public would rather have that durable health care that costs less. The other thing I'll tell you is this. And do you think that that argument- And the other thing I'll tell you this. You talked about the disciplining of the costs. Health insurance does not discipline the cost. We created all of these out-of-pocket costs, this effort to push more of that cost back onto everyday people in the form of a deductible and a copay because famously the insurance companies don't actually want to press down. And so what's happened is that you actually don't have any payer big enough to negotiate back down. So what would happen? Passing Medicare for all. Medicare becomes the payer for most. I don't want to take away anybody's private health insurance, but everybody's covered. It's like public school, right? Everybody can go to public school even if you want to pay for a private option. And it now has the power. It will immediately take up the cost. So Medicare reimbursements have to go up substantially from where they are right now because you have to pay for the cost of the system as it is. But over time, Medicare can reduce the speed at which prices are going up. And that's something that no other payer can do in our current system. So if you actually want to address the rising prices, you don't create a system that allows any insurance company to just tell you that you're insured when there's nothing sure about it except you're going to end up paying more. What you do is you actually cover everybody and you create an incentive to stop the speed at which the prices are increasing. [00:35:47] Speaker 1: But all of this is happening against a backdrop where the U.S. population, like every developed world population, is aging. We have fewer younger taxpayers paying into the system. And existing programs, Medicare and social-- Notwithstanding all of your efforts. Notwithstanding. Notwithstanding. You have children too. We both tried to address it. But Medicare and social security, as they exist, programs that you obviously definitionally support, are themselves likely to run out of money at a certain point. I just think in the story you tell, what happens is even if you find a source of taxable income from the wealthy and plow it into the system, that money ends up propping up the existing system. And you do, to go beyond it, to do what you want to do, you are in a zone of middle class tax increases that are-- Well, here's my question to you. This is actually the real issue here. You can't ask me questions. Well, it's a conversation. [00:36:40] Speaker 2: You told me we're going to have a conversation. I did. That's right. How expensive is having kids? You have five of them. How expensive is it? [00:36:47] Speaker 1: I don't know if my employers are watching the show. It's considerably expensive. It's very expensive, right? Does your partner work? [00:36:54] Speaker 2: She does, yes. And so that means that you probably had to pay $2,000 per kid for childcare. Think about the albatross that that sits on our economy. Think about the premium that you have to pay for health care for all of your kids. And I'm just going to say, I'm about to walk into a room full of very young people who are looking at the future and saying, there is no possible way I could possibly have a kid. So if the issue in our country is stagnation when it comes to the capacity to have children, the question we really ought to ask ourselves is, how do you make it easier to have kids? So, Ross, how do you make it easier to have kids? Maybe we should stop making it so expensive to have kids. Which means that if the only argument that we have about America is we can't possibly do anything to make it easier to have kids, we are going to have a race to the bottom. And I get it. A lot of people always say, well, we're going to ban abortion and we're going to tell people it's a good thing to have kids. Yeah, that doesn't really quite work. What tends to happen is we ban abortions. People just get abortions. They're just not safe. [00:37:46] Speaker 1: So my point is this. I appreciate that. You need to be invested. [00:37:49] Speaker 2: Just hear me out. You need to be invested in the means of making it easier to have children. That means you have to address the rising costs of having kids. So if your argument is that we can't have childcare, we can't have healthcare, we can't subsidize housing, we can't do these things, do not be surprised when all of a sudden we age past the point at which we are viable. I'm trying to address that problem. And I've got my solutions for it. Our party that wants to tell me that they're pro natalist, their solution is let's cut taxes for the billionaires and let's go to wars. We have no business fighting and somehow if we rub two sticks together, we're going to get people to want to have kids. It's not serious. So I'm just trying to be serious about the problem is. And I think the problem is we have made it too expensive. And if we cannot make it cheaper, do not be surprised when people don't have kids. [00:38:34] Speaker 1: Immigration. You mentioned that you support abolishing ICE. You have also said just now that the Biden administration border policy was a failure. I think this is one example of a larger reality where you have a lot of Democratic politicians right now telling voters that, yes, mistakes were made in the Biden presidency, but don't worry. This time we're going to secure the border even while we're getting rid of the agency that does interior enforcement. Why should voters trust the Democratic Party with immigration policy, even if they dislike ICE or dislike Donald Trump after what happened under Biden? [00:39:17] Speaker 2: Well, take a look at what we have now. Do we like what we have now? Do we like the idea that ICE is running around shooting people in the face or the back of the head? Shooting at the cars where there are five-year-old children? Is that working? So I rather think of this as being iterative. You and I both well know that the agency that enforces the border is not ICE. That is Customs and Border Protection. So I think we can secure the border. We can invest in that ability to keep it secure. And we can go back to a time when we had something more like INS that was able to enforce immigration policy without shooting people in the face. [00:39:50] Speaker 1: Why didn't the Biden administration enforce the border? What was the problem? [00:39:55] Speaker 2: I think the politics of it at the time were complicated. Complicated by what? I mean, complicated by a lot of advocacy, right? And I think we've learned the lesson. And I also think that it's important for us to realize that the idea that politicians don't learn from what comes before them because it was done by a different party is kind of ridiculous, right? There are things that some Republicans have gotten right. It's just that they also get a lot of things wrong. So learn from the things that they get right and fix the things that they got wrong. [00:40:27] Speaker 1: So do you think the Trump administration has gotten border enforcement right? [00:40:30] Speaker 2: I think there are ways to do border enforcement that borrow from the broader goals without doing it in contraposition to a lot of our highest ideals around human rights. You can humanely enforce the border. I think the problem with the Trump administration is that most of what they do is inhumane. Whether it's ICE enforcement, whether it's the border. [00:40:53] Speaker 1: But your party, I watched the 2020 primary, your party decided that border enforcement in general was inhumane. And we got that wrong. Okay. One more social cultural issues question. We talked earlier about your faith, about Islam. A lot of Muslims have, like a lot of Christians, have traditionalist conservative positions on issues like abortion, same sex marriage, transgenderism. I've had Michigan Democrats tell me that Donald Trump made inroads with Muslim American voters in this state on those issues. Do you feel any tension between your faith and being part of and a champion of a very socially liberal and culturally liberal party? [00:41:40] Speaker 2: See, this is the irony of the Trump line of attack on me, which is like, oh, he's both an Islamist and a socialist. I'm like, well, you know, I'm a constitutionalist. And under the Constitution, I think rights are rights, are rights, are rights, are rights. The minute you assent to government taking anybody's rights, whether you use them or you don't, you are assenting to government taking everybody's rights. And I believe in rights. And even though somebody might use rights that you don't understand, you never mean to use yourself, you still got to show up and fight for those rights. And that's the thing about this moment. I think it is a responsibility for us to stand up against the risk of government making incursions on any of our rights to build the kind of continuum, the kind of coalition where any of us and all of us who have our rights at risk are standing up and fighting for all of our rights. And I think this is an important responsibility. So I, in conversations with folks in the Muslim community, conversations with folks in the LGBTQ community, the point I always make is to say, listen, I don't care whether or not you will ever use a right that you were fighting for. Understand that the failure to show up and fight for that right is a failure to show up and fight for your own. So whether people are trying to take your right to put your face on the ground 35 times a day in a mosque or 34 times a day in a mosque or people are taking away your right to love who you love. I think we all got to come together and say, no, no, no, we are not going to allow government to take rights because that's what the Constitution protects. [00:43:06] Speaker 1: Is there any area where as a religious Muslim in a party that has a lot of secular voters, you think secular liberalism gets something wrong? [00:43:18] Speaker 2: As a matter of civic life, I stand for folks' rights under the Constitution. I live my life a particular way, but I love that I get the choice of doing that, and that other people get the choice of doing what they choose to do. And I think that's the beauty of this country. And that's exactly it. [00:43:35] Speaker 1: So that's a no? You don't think there's anywhere where cultural liberalism goes wrong? [00:43:40] Speaker 2: No, but see, this is the problem that I think this is where you and I have slippage. You keep talking about cultural liberalism, and I'm talking about constitutional rights. Culture is about choices that people ought to make. Constitutional rights are about the ability to make those choices. I will always fight for the ability to make choices, to live who you are. But I think at the end of the day, the question of culture and the question of politics are separate. And this is actually, I think, where the Republicans tend to get it wrong and they don't understand. The fact that one can show up and fight for a right that one may never ever use is exactly what the Constitution is supposed to protect in the first place. Right? Because I don't need people to understand why I pray the way I pray. I just need people to decide that if they try to take away my right to do it, that that's wrong under the Constitution. Similarly, I don't need anybody to understand. [00:44:26] Speaker 1: Just to, what about, since this is a flashpoint in these debates, what about the rights, what about the rights of parents to control over their children's education? Because a lot of places where there's tension between Islam and Muslim voters and what I'm calling cultural liberalism are around issues like what is taught in school? What happens with transgender kids on sports teams and so on, right? Like, these are places where rights are in conflict, right? What do you think happens there? [00:44:57] Speaker 2: I don't know that that's actually true. I think we manufacture these social issues. Because here's the thing about it. Ross, you have an iPhone in your pocket, probably. Or is it an iPhone or a Samsung? You have a phone in your pocket, right? You can get access to everything and anything in the whole world, all the world's information in your pocket. The notion, somehow, that you are going to prevent your child from being exposed to something that you may find disagreeable and that that is going to be because of school is so profoundly outdated. Because, of course, you have all the information and they have all the information. So here's the thing about it. I think it's really important for us to recognize that the free flow of information is actually a beautiful thing. It's really important. And the most important thing you can do is not try to protect a person from seeing a thing. It's about trying to make sure that as you coach your kid through the world, that you are engaging with them and saying, here's what I believe. Here's what you may see in the world. You get to make your choices about who you're going to be in the world. But that's going to require us to make do with the fact that, like, the Internet is a real thing. And this debate about, like, quote, unquote, what's taught in a classroom, I think, has been made into a cultural flashpoint because a lot of the folks who want to make this a topic of conversation don't want to be talking about the real issues that we face in our lives. I mean, I'm just going to say, like, a lot of the culture war issues that get fought right now are about trying to distract us from the fact that we can't afford our gas, can't afford our groceries, can't see a doctor, are worried about whether or not our kids are going to have a good life. And instead, we're out here talking about who gets to play what sport, which, you know, should be the question of the people who govern sports. I'm not running to govern sports, right? My interest is in making sure that people have the ability to live a good life, that they can have the health care that they need, that they can breathe clean air, drink clean water, that they've got good schools that are well-funded in the first place. [00:46:41] Speaker 1: All right. Let's talk about an issue where there's a lot of agreement between more secular progressives and Muslim American voters. And that is the critique of Israel, Israeli policy. You alluded to the Gaza war already, and America's relationship to Israel. In your view, what's wrong with America's relationship with Israel? [00:46:59] Speaker 2: Number one, we have been told that we are pursuing a two-state solution, only to aid, arm, and abet the very people who are trying to foreclose on the possibility of a second state. So it's incoherent on its own terms. Number two, I don't know about you, but I don't pay my taxes to buy another country a bomb or a tank. That's Israel, that's Egypt, that's Saudi Arabia, that's Pakistan. My interest is making sure that our kids get good schools, that we have functional roads, that we're paying for things like health care and childcare, and we're spending billions to do the worst things. Three, the state of Israel did a genocide. I don't think that's disagreeable. You don't look at anybody who actually studies this stuff, and they'll say it's a genocide. The human rights community in Israel says that it was a genocide. And so the notion that our money was spent to do a genocide by a foreign government, and that we cannot continue to have a conversation about this, to me, is deeply problematic. Finally, we are actively fighting a war that we have no business fighting. This has been the goal of one person in our civics for a very long time, not even our civics, in international civics, and that is the prime minister of the state of Israel. And we're told that Israel is our ally. But I'm just so sorry, but if you're walking with a friend, and you see a bear, and you're like, maybe we should just steer clear of the bear, and your friend's like, no, we ought to poke the bear. I don't know if that person is really your friend. And so I just think that we've got to really rethink the nature of this relationship based on a position of principles, just simply based on a position of principles. Now, I understand that we have a bipartisan consensus that Israel is an ally. I understand that most politicians aren't willing to say anything otherwise. But that may have a lot more to do with the nature of political spending, which is why I want to get back to money out of politics. When I ran to my primary, one organization spent more than any other organization to beat me, that is AIPAC, who is focused on making sure that politicians do not say what I just said. [00:48:51] Speaker 1: Let's go back to that list of countries that you had earlier, not just Israel, but Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others. I think there's a lot of people, including Jews, including Zionists, people who support Israel in various ways, who look at Israel's war with Gaza and say, if it wasn't genocide, at least there were war crimes, it was a bad thing. There's a lot of people who disagree with the U.S. decision to go to war in Iran. But some of those people look at the progressive left, which you are a champion, and say, there's a zeal about Israel that isn't there when you talk about the crimes of other countries in the Middle East, just to take Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. Just let me finish the question. Saudi Arabia is, unlike Israel, a dictatorship, not a democracy. Saudi Arabia is ruthless and cruel in all kinds of ways. Saudi Arabia killed a lot of people in Yemen to very little attention from left-wing politics in the U.S. Saudi Arabia, as far as we can tell, may have also supported the decision to go to war with Iran. I'm sure you're going to tell me that you oppose all that, you know, you don't love our alliance with Saudi Arabia, but we're sitting here and, you know, there's a crowd gathering outside. I'm just going to cheer for you. I'm skeptical that if you went outside and just talked about Saudi Arabia instead of Israel, that you would get a kind of hyped-up enthusiastic reaction. Why do you think Israel stands out as a place of anger and critique in a way that other countries in the Middle East do not? The scale of spending. Just the scale of U.S. spending? [00:50:32] Speaker 2: The scale of U.S. spending, the scale of those war crimes, and the impact on our politics. There is not a, I don't know. You don't think Saudi Arabia has a big impact on our politics? As big as, as big as AIPAC. Is there any? I'm just going to tell you, in my own election, right, overall spending $70 million in the primary alone, okay? 33 of which was spent by AIPAC. So can you point to any other spending impact? I would say that Saudi, well, part of it, part of it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, Ross, Ross, you're a smart man. Do you really think that there is any entity on behalf of the Saudi government that is as strong as AIPAC is on behalf of the Israeli government? Come on. [00:51:11] Speaker 1: I think that the, first of all, there is not, basically half the world's Jewish population lives in the U.S. Half lives in Israel. Half of Saudi Arabia, you know, like, Saudi Arabia is, let me put it this way. You brought up Saudi Arabia. I did bring up Saudi Arabia. You just don't like the example you brought up. No, no, I do like the example I brought up. Saudi Arabia has exercised lots and lots of influence over U.S. foreign policy in all kinds of ways. So the same? All kinds of debates, all kinds of debates around 9/11. Do you really think? And the Saudi, and the Saudi rule at 9/11. Wait, so I'm not defending Saudi Arabia. But there is not, there is neither, I'm saying there is not, it's, I agree with you, there is neither sort of, there is a very powerful Saudi lobby in Washington, D.C. It's not a big organized force in U.S. elections. But in part because there isn't a big anti-Saudi lobby or movement operating on the, on the political left. Don't you think? [00:52:03] Speaker 2: I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to defend Saudi Arabia. I'm not going to defend Egypt. Like, I, I really, like, I am, I am principled in my opposition. But when one organization spends $33 million in one election on behalf of the interests of the foreign policy of a foreign government, yeah, there's going to be a big response there. And I just, I just look, I just, I want to be clear about this. But this is a, there's a dynamic interaction. [00:52:29] Speaker 1: I know where you're trying to get here. The spending, the spending is also a reflection of the fact. But here's the, here's the other challenge. You have an outsized critique of Israel that, right? [00:52:36] Speaker 2: So you think it's the outsized critique that created the policies? I think. Like, they created a pack that, that creates the response. I think the response. That's an interesting chicken and egg interpretation. [00:52:45] Speaker 1: A lot of politics is a chicken and an egg debate. I know. [00:52:48] Speaker 2: And, and the question of what comes first really dictates the way you see things. But, you know, I don't ever get the question of, does Palestine have the right to exist? I don't ever get the question of, does Israel have a right to do a genocide? I don't ever get the question of, does Israel have the right to our tax dollars? [00:53:01] Speaker 1: Does Palestine have the right to exist? Yes. Does Israel have the right to exist? [00:53:06] Speaker 2: Yes, if there is a shared understanding. Wait, you said, you said. Let me just, let me just, let me just understand. I believe, and this is the, this is the problem with this debate. We start from where we sit rather than start from principles. You're a principled guy. Okay? I've heard you do this on your podcast. I don't know how many times. I believe in equal rights to peace dignity and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike. If the Palestinian people decide, and the Israeli people decide, that they want two states for two people, and they decide that on equal terms, I'm for it. If they decide that they want one state, shared in a different way, I'm for that. If they decide that they want 23 states, or land for all, I'm for that. I want to start with the process. Like, remember talking about democracy. Democracy is not an outcome, it's a process. I'm very process-oriented. I think that the process ought to start with the, the, the notion that there is a self-determination among Palestinians, which has never been respected. And our public policy has never respected that. Okay. So, if we want to, if we want to talk about the right of Israel to exist, it has to exist alongside a Palestine that is the consensus of both of these communities. [00:54:12] Speaker 1: But that is, that is the argument, that is the argument for the two-state solution. No. Which, however... [00:54:17] Speaker 2: That's actually not the argument for the two-state solution. Because otherwise... [00:54:19] Speaker 1: Two-state solution assumes that both Palestinians and Israelis want independent states. [00:54:25] Speaker 2: Except for that's not de facto how it's operating. It's operating right now as a salve to tell us that what Israel is doing, right, is somehow consistent, because we keep saying we're for a two-state solution. Okay. [00:54:36] Speaker 1: But why not, why not just say I'm for a two-state solution, but a better and real one? [00:54:39] Speaker 2: Because I don't know that the Palestinian people have had a voice to say that they want a, a state. I don't know because we've never actually allowed for equal rights of peace, dignity and self-determination. I start with the process in mind. Okay. And right now... But don't you think we... No, no, no, just let me finish the point. Too often when this question is asked, we start with the currently existing state of Israel that is existing in contraposition to the possibility of a state of Palestine. We have to start on that premise and then from there we say, okay, where do we carve out a Palestinian state? That's not equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination. So again, I want to be clear about this. Equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination. Now, anytime I say that, people like to interpret that as being in anti-position to any one community. It's not. It's in recognizing that these two communities should have equal rights. And our public policy, both de jure and de facto, has run roughshod over the possibility of any sort of Palestinian self-determination. And we run over that, right, in the notion that we say, oh, well, how come you won't agree to this thing that we all keep telling ourselves we're for, despite the fact that we are operating in complete contraposition to it? It's not serious. [00:55:41] Speaker 1: I think one reason people ask you that, and they've asked you that a lot, right, is that they are looking for a recognition from you that there is no world where Israelis don't want a Jewish state. So there's no reason for you, like you're saying, you know, if Israelis want this and Palestinians want this, then that's, then that's what will happen. Why not just say, so do we know Israelis want a Jewish state? And therefore there should be a Jewish state and a Palestinian state? I don't know that. [00:56:17] Speaker 2: I actually don't think that, I don't know that that's true. I think the question right now is how do you empower two communities with equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination to have the conversation amongst themselves to see where that, where that lays out. But the problem is that process has never been dignified. You know, the challenge with this conversation really, right, is that we have not dignified the self-determination needs of Palestinians. And here's the big question, ultimately, is it really comes down to where should we put our tax dollars and how. My focus is always going to be on Michigan. And right now the same money that's being spent over there should be money that's spent over here. I want to be clear. When it comes to the well-being of the Jewish community here, I am lockstep in standing with Jewish safety. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish community. I'm really grateful for that. And it's not about the disagreements with any one community and their need for self-determination. It's in asking how do we allow these two communities to come together in a conversation to talk about how best to navigate their mutual draws and claims to a land. And I don't think we've done that. And too often when you take the currently existing state of Israel and you take its claims as being the most important, what you are by definition doing is saying that the claims to self-determination are not equal. And ultimately, our responsibility is to stand up for international law. Our responsibility is to hold every country accountable to the same set of ideals. Right now, we're aiding, arming, and abetting a government that has been dead set on foreclosing on the possibility of Palestinian self-determination. We subsidized the genocide with our tax dollars that should be spent here. I want our tax dollars spent here. [00:58:01] Speaker 1: One more foreign policy question then. You want to end the war with Iran? Yes. You want the Senate to use their war powers to end the war with Iran? What do you do if Iran doesn't want to end the war? If the U.S. says the war is over, we're pulling out, and Iran says, great, now we're in charge of the Strait of Hormuz forever and ever, world without end, amen. What does the U.S. do? [00:58:24] Speaker 2: Well, how did we get to the JCPOA? You know, we pretend like the only thing we have is our sabers, and we rattle them or we use them. That's Donald Trump's logic. We got to the JCPOA because there are other needs that Iran has. Iran does not want to be a pariah. There is a lot of power that we can inflict that is not just war, because right now the war doesn't seem to be ending, and all that's happening is escalating, and that war is spreading. So I think we need to end the war, and I think we need to get back to the negotiating table to get to the kind of space where we can get to where we have a pathway like we had at the end of the Obama administration. [00:59:03] Speaker 1: Let's bring it back to Michigan politics, but connected to the foreign policy discussion we've just had. One of the big questions around your campaign is about Jewish Democrats and whether they will vote for you. And there are Jewish Democrats out there who would say, "What I was looking for from Syed was reassurance that at the end of the day, whatever happens with the peace process or anything else, he will support the existence of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East." Do you think that you are saying enough to reassure those voters that you are on their side? [00:59:42] Speaker 2: Well, let me broaden that conversation out. Wherever our disagreements are when it comes to Israel, there are a lot more things that we agree on here. The right to pray as you choose to pray, safety for religious minorities, the right to choose. These are things we all agree on. The sanctity of our democracy here at home. There is so much more that we agree on than we disagree on. When it comes to standing up for Jewish Americans, I will be right there. I understand what it's like to fear what happens at my place of worship. So I'm hoping that the things that bring us together are bigger than the things that draw us apart. And I'll say this. Again, I do not reject the idea that we should have equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination. I just reject the idea that we are anywhere near that in our current conversation. And I want us to get to a point. This is my hope. That a Jewish child growing up in the homeland and a Palestinian child growing up in the homeland can look forward and say, My life is not going to be at risk because of violence. That's what I'm that's what I'm trying to build toward. I don't think we are anywhere near there right now. Because if there is not a clear opportunity for the Palestinian people to have their right to peace, dignity and self-determination alongside the Jewish people's right to peace, dignity and self-determination, I fear that we're just going to end up right back in a circle of violence. [01:01:00] Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I'm going to push you one more time on this. The world is filled with nations that have historic ethnic identities that are not just sort of state systems, but are nations for peoples. And I don't think it's hard to say there should be a Japanese nation for the Japanese people. There should be an Egyptian nation for the Egyptian people. I just, I feel like that should be something that should be easy. What do you make of the Palestinian people? I think the Palestinian people deserve to have a homeland. Where? Where? In, I mean, I would say generally, historically, I would support a version of the two-state solution, which creates problems. Because yes, there's Gaza, and there's the West Bank, and they're separated. It's not the ideal landscape for a state. So only on Gaza and the West Bank? [01:01:54] Speaker 2: They have no other self-determination except for Gaza and the West Bank. I think that that-- And the small pieces of it that have been, like, now annihilated, and the parts that are being encroached upon by settlers. [01:02:04] Speaker 1: I think that there was a very plausible scenario that would have gotten the Palestinian people not-- Every version of this conversation goes back to some time in history where it could have been. [01:02:14] Speaker 2: I don't want to go back some time in history. I want to go into the future. It could be now. And look, the hard part is this. This is exactly my point. You proved my point perfectly. I want equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike. And the problem with saying, yeah, we're going to just take as fixed the idea of the state as it is implies that you are just taking whatever's carved left, and there is no actual real opportunity for self-determination for the Palestinian people. It's like, hey, listen, after I eat, then you can have my seconds. I just don't think that's fair. I think if we're serious about this, we're going to have to bring people together and ask, how do we navigate the shared understanding of this space? You made the point perfectly for me, is that when I ask you, what about Palestinian self-determination? You're like, I guess we could carve a state out there, maybe. It's not serious. So I'm just saying, look, right now, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying. [01:03:06] Speaker 1: I think that it is more serious than a theory of purely hypothetical negotiated future that ignores the realities of borders that have existed for decades. So yes, I think it is more realistic and probably delivers more for the Palestinian people right now. But you are getting me to deliver opinions and I'm going to stop and ask you, I'm going to ask you. Let me just finish the point. [01:03:31] Speaker 2: Do we need to get from where we are to where we're headed? Yes. Are we headed to where we want to go? No. So what I'm trying to do is say, look, in order for us to get to where we need to go, we're going to have to figure out how to have a conversation that dignifies equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination. And right now our foreign policy does not do that. And I would like us to get to a point where it does. [01:03:52] Speaker 1: Last question. Same as one we asked your opponent. This is a very fraught, high stakes Senate race. Lots and lots of money has been spent in it. What's the biggest thing that you think is different in U.S. politics if you win? [01:04:06] Speaker 2: The ability to run a campaign and win against big money by engaging with people, having a conversation about who we are and who we want to be. I take the idea that you can persuade people really seriously. I go everywhere. I talk to everybody. I go on Fox News. I go talk to, you know, you name the podcast. Talk to me. I'm talking to you, right? Even though I have misgivings about the people who run your whole station, all of CBS. But I'm talking to you because I want to have a conversation with the broader public. I think if we can have a conversation together, our politics can shift. But right now, that's not how we do politics. Right now, we allow a few corporations to pay huge amounts of money. By the time this is done, right, all of the outside spending will have reached a third of a billion dollars just to beat me in a campaign. Why? Well, because I'm willing to tell you what I think because I'm willing not to play that game. I don't take money from corporations. I want to stand up to them. I want to fight for working people. So that's what changes. It's the ability to actually have a voice in the United States Senate that says, look, whether it's corporate money and dark money going to Republicans or Democrats, that's the problem. I think we need to have a conversation about who we are and who we want to be. That's the kind of political movement that we're building here in Michigan. And God willing, that's the kind of political movement we will have because that's what our framers intended us to be. Government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for corporations, billionaires, and special interests.