Now, a look at the state of Pennsylvania. It's one of the most important states in this presidential race. Both Pennsylvania senators, Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dave McCormick, voted in favor of the bill to end the government shutdown.
In this situation, we both agree that shutting our government down is wrong for our commonwealth and for our nation. We're looking for ways to find common ground. And when we disagree, we disagree. But when we can agree, we agree. Our votes are about country over party at this point. We're trying to set a good example because we have lots of disagreements, but we trust each other. We like one another, and we look for ways to work together.
Fetterman: I'm proud to call Senator McCormick a good friend. Things are more polarized now, and I refuse to engage in the kinds of extremism. We're going to fight together for Pennsylvania and for our nation right now. We're going to continue to have conversations like this, whether in Pennsylvania or here across the country. We have to find a better way forward through a lot of the circumstances.
If you put this moment in perspective, I think it's probably the most consequential moment in all of our lifetimes. And in fact, I think it might be the most consequential moment in humankind. So much change is happening. It's artificial intelligence, of course, but it's really how that's affecting everything β life sciences, defense, energy. That change creates a lot of anxiety that lends itself to polarization and extremes. And so if there was ever a time where it's more important to find ways to work together, it's now.
McCormick: We've found ways to work together on everything from energy policy to the fentanyl crisis, to anti-semitism in Pennsylvania and across the country, to drone technology. These are issues of such consequence that you can't get there by just being with your team. You have to find common ground.
Fetterman: I'd like to remind everybody that we are the only two people in our respective cycles that flipped seats. Both parties want that β they want to flip seats. We've done that because I think we've rejected the extreme kinds of views, and now it's better to work together for Pennsylvania, for our country.
Pennsylvania is 19 electoral votes and it's a microcosm of the country. You have two big urban centers β Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, mostly Democrats. You have rural areas that are mostly red, mostly Republican. You've got to build a coalition across those to win. A lot of the same people that voted for Senator Fetterman voted for me β and voted for President Trump. Even though all the national unions endorsed Kamala Harris and Bob Casey, the rank and file β two-thirds of the electricians, the pipe fitters, the steam fitters β voted for me. Same with him. That coalition includes a very significant Latino turnout, a very significant African-American turnout β the highest African-American turnout in 2024 in the last 30 years.
Host (JCal): The Senate is at an all-time low in terms of approval rating. We have the lowest approval rating of a president in history after Biden, who was extremely low rated. You guys can't control the debt. The American populace believed we'd be in a golden age right now. They're not seeing it. Inflation is soaring. The president seems to be running amok with no check in the house, and you guys are responsible.
McCormick: Tell us what you really think, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln. Well, $40 trillion in debt and you're spending more than ever. The American people are extremely frustrated with both parties.
The conversation pivots to the institutional rules of the Senate. Fetterman makes a striking admission β his own party got the filibuster question completely wrong back in 2020 when many Democrats wanted to abolish it.
The Democrats β all of us, including myself β were completely wrong about the filibuster. Manchin and Sinema were right. The filibuster is the protection of minority rights in the Senate. It forces you to work with the other side. It's a hill we should die on now.
Fetterman: If we had nuked the filibuster in 2020 and 2021, we would now be living through every single thing Republicans want to pass at 51 votes. We would have lost the institution that forces us to talk to each other. I have to be honest about that. My party was wrong. And the people who took the political hit for being right β they deserve credit, not the punishment they got.
McCormick: Trust in Congress is at an all-time low. I think the only way we start rebuilding that is through example. You can give all the speeches you want about institutional health, but if the public doesn't see members from opposite parties standing next to each other and working together on the things that actually matter β energy, AI, fentanyl, anti-semitism β then nothing changes.
Fetterman: The TDS β Trump Derangement Syndrome β is real in my party. If Trump comes out tomorrow and says he loves ice cream and lazy Sundays, half of my colleagues will say "well, we have to be against ice cream and lazy Sundays." That's not a political strategy. That's a mental illness. The American voter sees through it.
Fetterman: For me, if you reference inflation is soaring β well, just recently that's primarily driven by energy prices right now. And why are those energy prices high? Well, because the president decided to hold Iran accountable. I'm the only Democrat that actually agrees with that. That was not a radical idea for a Democrat β protecting the United States and our allies. But because Trump did it, my party had to be against it.
The last ten years have been the greatest ten years in human history for asset holders. But if you leave everybody else behind, we can't do anything. The median income in Pennsylvania is fifty-two thousand dollars a year. Fifty-two thousand. Those families have not participated in the asset boom. They've watched their groceries, their gas, their insurance, and their housing go up β while their wages have crawled.
McCormick: My answer is not bigger government. It's structurally different. Invest America Accounts β every American child gets a small investment account at birth that compounds. School choice β we did $1,700 per student per year in Pennsylvania. The idea is to bypass the bureaucracy and use incentive-based wealth transfer. Modern Carnegie thinking. The government has had its shot at solving this for two generations and it's gotten worse.
Friedberg: There's a really under-appreciated dynamic here. The more government spends, the more expensive the market becomes, and the lower economic mobility goes. Federal spending bids up assets. It bids up housing. It bids up education. So when you say "we need more government to help working families," you're actually pricing those families further out of the asset markets they need to participate in.
Fetterman: The fentanyl number is one we don't talk about enough. In Pennsylvania alone, we went from about four thousand fentanyl deaths in the late Biden period to around sixteen hundred now. A sixty percent reduction. That's mothers and fathers and sons. That happens because the border was closed and the supply chain was disrupted. Whatever you think of the politics, that's lives saved.
McCormick: In July we hosted an energy and innovation summit in Western Pennsylvania. We got ninety-two billion dollars in investment commitments in a single day. Ninety-two billion. Pennsylvania has the fourth largest natural gas reserves in the world. We are the second largest energy producer in the United States. And we have a workforce β electricians, pipe fitters, welders, steam fitters β that knows how to build big projects.
Homer City was a 4.4 gigawatt coal plant that shut down. Dead asset. We're converting it to natural gas. 3.4 gigawatts will go to a datacenter campus on site. The remaining 1 gigawatt goes back to the grid β that actually brings energy prices down for Pennsylvanians. That's the model. Stranded coal asset, retrofit to gas, anchor a hyperscale datacenter, return excess to ratepayers.
McCormick: Take the Berwick datacenter project. There are four buckets of economic impact. One β construction phase, five to ten thousand jobs over the build. Two β operating phase, hundreds of permanent jobs at high wages. Three β every three to four years there's a hardware refresh cycle, which means another wave of hundreds to thousands of jobs every time. Four β logistics. For every one datacenter job, two trucking and logistics jobs follow. That ratio matters for towns that have lost industry.
Fetterman: The trades are booked out. A new welder, a new electrician β they're walking into six-figure salaries. That hasn't been true in Pennsylvania in a long time. And it's not just datacenters. US Steel is building a new plant. Eli Lilly is putting a new facility in. Hanwha just bought the Philadelphia shipyard. These are all connected β once you have the energy build-out and the trades capacity, manufacturing wants to come back.
McCormick: Wages in the trades are up twenty-five to thirty percent over the last couple of years in Pennsylvania. That's the kind of wage growth that actually moves a family from the bottom half to the middle of the K-curve. This is what re-industrialization looks like in practice.
Sacks: This is the macro story the bears are missing. We talk about hyperscaler capex at six hundred billion dollars and people argue about whether that's a bubble. But you're describing the second-order effect β the trades, the gas pipelines, the steel mills, the logistics. That's a real multi-year cycle of GDP creation, and Pennsylvania is at the center of it.
This is the most politically pointed exchange of the episode. Fetterman breaks openly with his own party on the proposed datacenter moratoriums being floated by progressive Democrats and some America First voices on the right.
For me, a moratorium for datacenters β that's a China first kind of policy. America is going to build that chassis or China is going to build that chassis. Which side do you want to be on? I'm going to continue to push back on that. I'm not going to describe AI as a scourge. I'm going to describe it as an incredible new opportunity.
McCormick: I'll go further. A lot of the misinformation about AI and datacenters β the campaigns to whip up local opposition β a meaningful portion of that is being driven by China and other foreign actors. We have evidence of this. They have every incentive to slow America down because right now we are six to eight months ahead of China on frontier AI. A moratorium hands them that lead.
Fetterman: Compare it to the shale debate ten years ago. Shale was contentious β environmentalists versus farmers collecting royalties. That was a domestic fight between domestic interests. The AI and datacenter pushback is different. Yes, there are real local concerns about water and grid load β those are legitimate and we address them at Homer City by returning a gigawatt to the grid. But the difference is that this debate is being amplified by a foreign nation-state that has a strategic interest in our paralysis.
McCormick: If we lose the AI race, we lose the next century. It's that simple. So when a Democratic legislator in a swing state proposes a five-year moratorium on datacenter construction, I want to ask them β do you understand that you are objectively serving the strategic interests of the Chinese Communist Party? You may not intend to. But that's the effect.
Sacks: Permitting reform is the single biggest lever the administration has over the next two and a half years. If we can shorten permitting timelines for energy and datacenter projects from years to months, that's a massive accelerant. If we don't, we lose the race regardless of who builds the chips.
The hosts ask about Graham Platner, the Maine Democratic Senate candidate facing serial scandals β alleged Nazi tattoos, affairs with twelve women, and disparaging comments about US service members. The fact that Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and other mainstream Democrats continue to back his campaign has become a flashpoint.
If my party is willing to back Graham Platner β Nazi tattoos, twelve women, denigrating American soldiers β and then turn around and try to push me out because I support Israel, what does that tell you? That tells you the direction of travel. I voted with my party ninety-three percent of the time. Ninety-three. And I'm somehow the problem because of one issue. They're not going to push me out. But they're going to keep pushing voters out.
Fetterman: The rise of anti-semitism in my party is a thing I cannot stay quiet about. It's a thing I will not stay quiet about. October 7th was a turning point. Hamas committed atrocities. And the response from too many people on the left β including elected officials β was to find ways to blame Israel. That is morally wrong. That is politically suicidal. And it has accelerated the realignment of Jewish voters and a lot of other voters away from the Democratic Party.
McCormick: The counter-signal in Pennsylvania is Josh Shapiro. He's a Democrat. We disagree on plenty. But he has been a serious, principled voice against anti-semitism. He's been a partner on economic development. That's the kind of Democrat the country needs more of. The Platner direction is the opposite.
Chamath: The question is whether the mainstream of the party has institutional capacity to push back, or whether they've decided that the activist base is the only constituency that matters. Right now, the evidence is the latter. And if that's true, you're going to see more Fettermans get isolated β or leave.
Fetterman: I'm not leaving. I'm a Democrat. I'm going to stay and fight. But I'm also going to tell the truth about where the party is right now.
Fetterman: My 2022 race cost three hundred and thirty million dollars. Three hundred and thirty. For a Senate seat. I think when the public sees that number they assume the candidates are pocketing some of it. We're not. It's all going to ads, consultants, polling, field operations. It's a machine that exists to consume money.
McCormick: My race was over five hundred million dollars total β about three hundred million on my side, including roughly two hundred million of my own money, and the rest from the opposing side. Five hundred million for one Senate seat in one state in one cycle. By 2026 and 2028, you're going to see numbers that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
We agree that money should come out of politics. Both parties agree about that in the abstract. But honestly β it's not in the top five priorities for either of us. The debt is. AI is. The border is. Energy independence is. China is. Money in politics keeps getting pushed back by the weight of everything else. We don't think that's right. We're just being honest about where it sits on the list.
Chamath: The cynical read here is that the people who win under the current system have the least incentive to change it. That includes both of you. So when you say it's not in the top five, what you're really saying is the system that elected you is fine.
McCormick: Fair point. I'll own that. I think the honest answer is that until there's a constitutional path β and there isn't one right now β the current system is what we operate in. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
JCal: Alright, gentlemen β thank you both. This is the model of what bipartisan engagement looks like. Whether or not it scales beyond Pennsylvania is the question. But it's a starting point.
Fetterman & McCormick: Thanks for having us. Let's do it again.