S15 EP162: Hour 2 - Affordability

Erick opens with the hard economic numbers Republicans keep trying to spin past: the Atlanta Fed says a household now needs $124,674 a year to afford a median-priced home against a median income just over $80,000; wholesale prices rose 0.4 percent in August with the producer price index running 5.4 percent annually, diesel surged 24.1 percent, and West Texas crude sits above $101 a barrel with Brent at $106. He argues that President Trump should stop spinning and level with people, because Iran is deliberately wrecking the American economy to elect weak Democrats and win a nuclear weapon. Then the story of the hour: Erick walks through the case that Jacob Coxon's dramatic resignation from Anthropic after six weeks is not organic at all, but a funded operation to regulate American AI into oblivion.

• The Atlanta Fed housing math, the August producer price index, 24.1 percent diesel, oil over $100 a barrel, and why the Federal Reserve interest rate decision next week still points to a hike
• Trump's claim that the war ends immediately after the election, and Erick's case that Iran is holding the American economy hostage to install Democrats who will let them go nuclear
• Erick's frustration with the tariffs and the Canada trade war, and his pitch to blame Joe Biden's economy while running on common sense versus crazy
• The Jacob Coxon story: six weeks at Anthropic, a Wall Street Journal exclusive, a Twitter post 18 minutes later with 149 million views, and Anderson Cooper and Brett Baier interviews demanding an international body to control AI
• Following the money, from Extinction Rebellion and Newspeak to Jan Tallinn, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, Encode AI, the AI Policy Network, the AI Futures Project, Dustin Moskovitz and Bernie Sanders' bill to ban artificial superintelligence, with Elon Musk, Dylan Loomis and Parker Thayer questioning whether any of it is organic