Greg Casar

I think a lot of the establishment, traditional democratic politics, this is happening in Washington, D.C.

right now, are telling candidates, don't even say the words AI.

And if you do say, there needs to be safety, but innovation, and then shut up.

The traditional democratic politics is, don't step out there, don't take a risk, because maybe AI lobbyists are going to spend tons of money against you in a campaign, or

Or there's a lot of sort of democratic politics that says we've got to be in this race against China on AI.

And so we can't have guardrails against surveillance.

We can't have guardrails against it taking your job because we've got to beat China.

And in my view, being progressive means let's unite all the people that are getting their costs jacked up and have them vote for a politician, even if the AI industry spends against them.

That's the uniting working people part of being progressive.

And then the hopeful part of being progressive is saying, well, look, I don't want to become a surveillance state and there's race against China.

I don't want us to have to lose our jobs.

We could ask for more than the status quo.

And I think the hopeful part of being progressive is that we can all come together and figure out how it doesn't make us poorer and how it doesn't actually make us an authoritarian state that starts seeming similar to the countries we're racing against.

Mm-hmm.

I think you get all different kinds of answers, but if I am willing to be critical of our own movement or critical of, you know, we always got to be self-critical because I want to win.

And in many ways we had some very significant losses, especially against Donald Trump, just last presidential election.

What I think is really important is for people to know that we care about your everyday ability to pay for your childcare and your housing and save some for retirement.

But there are lots of folks who think that general civil rights might be our very first idea or ideal.

And I, of course, believe in that deeply.

But I think we will continue to lose immigrant rights