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Part 2 of the election panel. Sean Forbes chairs again, with Charles McGuinness, the party's vice chair Ash Seiter, and Theo Slater, who founded the California National Party. Same four issues, same zero-to-ten scores.

Issue one, the midterms: Ash expects more of the same, whoever wins; Theo expects a blue wave lowered by several feet of dirty tricks, a toothless majority, and asks whether America gets a Khrushchev moment after Trump. Issue two, why end this bad marriage: incompatible cultures, a donor state, fewer state legislators than Iowa, and the belly of the beast. Issue three, how CalExit happens: a California convention and a list of grievances, an Olive Branch Petition for the twenty-first century, the Irish model, or a slow drift as the empire loots itself into the ground. Issue four, what an independent California would look like: Scandinavian government, Finnish schools, a rail network, foreign investment in the shiny new nation, and Switzerland and Japan as models. Then a lightning-round conspiracy theory, and the book: The Courage to Secede.

Part 1, with Maya Ram and Hal Lohr, is episode 10.

In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome, and the panel
• 1:34 — Issue one, the midterms: Ash on more of the same
• 5:59 — Theo: a blue tsunami, several feet lower
• 11:03 — Theo: a Khrushchev moment, or Obama after Bush?
• 16:22 — Issue two, why end this bad marriage? Ash: two diverging paths
• 22:50 — Sean: 44%, and how Washington would react
• 27:37 — Ash: Prop 50, and nothing the United States could do
• 29:03 — Theo: the belly of the beast, and the last days of Rome
• 35:11 — Theo: acclimated to worse governance
• 39:03 — Theo: the center won't hold
• 41:53 — Issue three, how does CalExit happen? Ash: a convention and a list of grievances
• 47:22 — Sean: an Olive Branch Petition, and the Irish model
• 51:31 — Theo: a slow drift, and no Senate
• 55:35 — Sean: the Berlin Wall fell in six years
• 1:00:07 — Issue four, what would an independent California look like? Ash: rail, schools and food security
• 1:05:02 — Ash: foreign investment for a brand-new nation
• 1:06:51 — Theo: Switzerland, Japan and soft power
• 1:08:29 — Lightning round: Ash's conspiracy theory
• 1:12:23 — Goodbyes, and the book

Facts, sources and further reading. We checked what was said in this episode, right and wrong, with links: checkpointcalifornia.com/011

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A week before the midterms, Sean Forbes chairs a McLaughlin-Group-style panel: Charles McGuinness, Maya Ram (NorCal chapter secretary) and Hal Lohr (KPFK's Working Voices, Red Star Report). Four issues, everyone scores zero to ten, and nobody is allowed forty minutes.

Issue one, the midterms: what happens, and what happens after. Charles's Thanksgiving scenario, in which the Speaker sacks the Clerk of the House and the roll call on January 3 comes up short of Democrats. Maya on the 20,000-name list, flagged ballots, and whether a reverse January 6 is coming. Hal on why nothing changes: you're voting to change the puppets, not the ventriloquists. Issue two, California and Washington: why end this bad marriage? Charles makes the case from a counterfactual (we don't need the drama), Maya from the divorce court (irreconcilable differences), Hal with a challenge: name one benefit Californians get from being Americans. Issue three, how CalExit actually happens: collapse, occupation, a referendum, a billionaire, or fifty-four electoral votes held hostage. Issue four, what an independent California would look like: the Switzerland of the Pacific, the rail of Japan, the health care of France, and a border between us and Wall Street. Then a lightning round of conspiracy theories, and the book.

Part 2, with Theo Slater and Ash Seiter, follows.

In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome, and the panel
• 1:15 — Issue one: the midterms, what happens and what happens after
• 1:51 — Charles: sand in the gears, and the Clerk of the House
• 4:51 — Maya: the 20,000-name list, flagged ballots, a reverse January 6
• 8:48 — Hal: change the puppets, not the ventriloquists
• 13:41 — Sean: alarm bells in the bunker ballroom
• 17:49 — Issue two: California and Washington, why end this bad marriage?
• 18:38 — Charles: we don't need the drama
• 21:39 — Maya: irreconcilable differences
• 26:58 — Hal: name one benefit
• 34:48 — Sean: a blank slate, and a lifeboat called California
• 41:15 — Issue three: how does CalExit happen? Charles counts the guns
• 42:55 — Maya: a referendum, and what Washington does next
• 45:10 — Hal: the United States limps along until 2037
• 50:23 — Sean: Singapore, fifty-four electoral votes, and a UDI
• 57:22 — Issue four: what would an independent California look like?
• 58:30 — Maya: Canada or Norway, and universal health care first
• 1:00:00 — Hal: a border between us and Wall Street
• 1:02:47 — Sean: the Switzerland of the Pacific
• 1:05:52 — Lightning round: conspiracy theories you should believe
• 1:09:27 — The book: The Courage to Secede
• 1:11:03 — Bye-bye

Facts, sources and further reading. We checked what was said in this episode, right and wrong, with links, and added the briefing the panel prepared from: checkpointcalifornia.com/010

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Sean turns the microphone on his co-host. Charles McGuinness, who took a master's in AI in 2019 and has built with it every day since 2023, says everything the boosters and the skeptics claim is true at once — and explains why.

How AI got here a decade early: not better chips but doubled money, over and over, like the Space Race. Why that is ending, told through the Canada lynx and the snowshoe hare: the transformers, memory chips, power and water have run out, and so has the patience of towns asked to host data centers. The Luddites, who weren't against machines but against shoddy ones. What a model actually stores, why it can't recite Pride and Prejudice, and why asking it who was Cuba's first president after the revolution is the wrong job for it. Who really loses their job, and why "we replaced them with AI" is the dog-ate-my-homework excuse for layoffs the tariffs caused. Then the California answer: health care, basic income, childcare and school lunches, so that people are safe enough to take the risks AI makes possible — including, Charles says, this podcast.

In this episode

• 00:22 — Charles, the show's other host
• 01:18 — A master's in AI, by dumb luck
• 03:06 — Is it the next dot-com bubble? "Everything you said is true"
• 03:57 — Moore's law, and buying the future with money
• 06:08 — Grandparents: horses to the space shuttle
• 07:07 — The Space Race, and why we stopped going to the moon
• 08:46 — The Canada lynx and the snowshoe hare
• 10:20 — No transformers, no memory chips, no patience
• 10:58 — The Long Beach data center that became an industrial park
• 12:28 — California makes data centers pay their own way
• 13:40 — Tropical storms, El Niño and Los Alamitos High
• 14:16 — The Industrial Revolution and its Luddites
• 18:20 — A table saw, not a brain
• 19:10 — Whose electricity, whose blueprints: the training question
• 19:32 — What a model holds, and why it can't recite Pride and Prejudice
• 21:24 — The first president of Cuba, and hallucination
• 23:46 — "Probably helium": what AI doesn't know about certainty
• 25:12 — The only driver of the economy
• 25:55 — Which jobs go: paralegals, leasing agents, maintenance crews
• 28:02 — The CEO's two speeches: the dog ate my homework
• 30:09 — Robots, cars and China
• 31:32 — Amazon, the contractors and the bottles
• 33:08 — The Star Trek future, and universal basic income
• 34:11 — Health care first, then Friedman's negative income tax
• 36:03 — Childcare, school lunches, and feeling safe enough to take risks
• 37:30 — How this podcast is made
• 39:40 — Too long, didn't listen
• 40:59 — Experts in government: "you don't want me in charge"
• 43:03 — Sign-off, and the Discord

Facts, sources and further reading. We checked what was said in this episode, right and wrong, with links, and added the reading list Charles prepared the show from: checkpointcalifornia.com/009