Senators John Fetterman and Dave McCormick: Bipartisanship, Money in DC, Datacenters, Graham Platner

The besties get both of Pennsylvania's sitting senators — Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dave McCormick — on stage together in front of a live audience, and the two lean hard into their double act: the only two candidates in their respective cycles to flip Senate seats, both elected by the same working-families coalition of electricians, pipe fitters and steam fitters, and both refusing to shut the government down. McCormick frames the AI moment as possibly 'the most consequential moment in humankind'; Fetterman spends the hour cataloguing where he breaks with his own party, starting with its push for a data-center moratorium, which he calls a China-first policy.

J.Cal opens the hostile questioning: record-low Senate approval, $40 trillion in debt, soaring inflation. Fetterman's answer is that energy prices are up because the president held Iran accountable — he says he's the only Democrat who agrees with that — and that $5-a-gallon gas will 'seem quaint' next to a nuclear Iran. He then delivers a full mea culpa on the filibuster: the entire party, himself included, wanted it gone in 2020, history vindicated Manchin and Sinema for saving it, and defending it is now a hill he'd die on. McCormick counters the do-nothing charge with the border, fentanyl deaths in Pennsylvania falling from 4,000 to 1,600 in a year, and the energy agenda, while conceding the debt is the intractable problem nobody is touching. Pressed by Chamath on the bottom half of the K-shaped economy — median Pennsylvania income is $52,000, and these are the same towns globalization gutted — McCormick's answer is Invest America accounts and the $1,700 school-choice provision in the Working Families Tax Credit Act: Carnegie-style redistribution routed around the government.

The back half is the data-center war on the ground. McCormick gets roughly 100,000 constituent contacts a week and says opposition is swelling, driven partly by Chinese-funded misinformation; his answer is a clear 'covenant' with townships on energy, water and tax base. He points to the $92 billion committed at his Pennsylvania energy summit and the Homer City conversion — 4.4 gigawatts at a former coal plant, 3.4 to a data-center complex, one back to the grid — and both senators reach for the fracking analogy: fifteen years from feared methane menace to broad support, once the royalties showed up. Sacks draws out the blue-collar boom case: construction wages up 25 to 30 percent, seasoned welders and electricians clearing $100,000, and about two logistics jobs for every data-center job.

On politics itself, Fetterman goes after Graham Platner — the Maine candidate with a Nazi tattoo who called an American soldier something unprintable and the Army 'absolute trash' — and at mainstream Democrats campaigning for him anyway. He says he can absolutely be primaried and doesn't care: he votes the Democratic line 93 percent of the time but won't call Trump a fascist or run on rage bait. The closer is money: McCormick's race cost $500 million, Fetterman's 2022 race a then-record $330 million, and both would rather see that money spent on Pennsylvania.