Today on Amped Up: Cliff and David Shuster open with FBI Director Kash Patel’s grotesque VIP snorkeling trip over the USS Arizona war grave, dig into Trump’s primary bloodbath that just took out Thomas Massie and has Ken Paxton lining up to take out John Cornyn next, and then bring on Blue Amp Media’s COO Lawrence Winnerman—who just sat down with his shrink this morning, half-joking, to talk about why the political class is missing what is actually about to happen to the American economy.
Lawrence’s new essay, Running with the Devil, is the most comprehensive AI labor-displacement diagnosis you will read this year, and it is now being read inside congressional offices, including by Rep. Ro Khanna.
The conversation walks through the math: 93 million white-collar jobs at risk inside 12 to 18 months, per Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, said on the record with his face on the byline. It walks through the screaming inside the labs (96% blackmail rates and 95% let-the-technician-die rates in Anthropic’s own published safety testing, the doomsday clock moving, the godfathers of AI quitting their jobs to warn the rest of us). It walks through the joke of a Ted Cruz / Brian Schatz Chatbot Act that pretends it is keeping up.
And it walks through Lawrence’s specific anchor—the one that makes the math feel real—that he replaced twenty-five knowledge-worker roles for $200 a month, in six weeks, on a Costco gaming desktop in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Hit play. Take an hour.
This is the show that connects both stories—the GOP bloodbath in front of you, and the bigger one nobody in Washington is naming.
📖 Read Lawrence’s Essay
Running with the Devil, by Lawrence Winnerman Why the political class is missing the labor crisis already unfolding.
Cliff’s Note
The political class is missing both stories at once—the bloodbath in front of them and the bigger one behind it. BAM is one of the very few independent publications still in a position to name both, and the only reason we are still here to do it is because subscribers and donors fund it. Subscribe at $60 a year—if you have ever wondered what good your subscription dollars actually do, the answer is this episode. Throw a few bucks at our Ko-fi if a sub is not in the cards. Every dollar there pays for the kind of conversation cable will not run, because cable cannot afford to slow down for an hour-long interview with a former Amazon and Microsoft technologist who just sat you down and told you what the math actually is.
