It Doesn't Have to Be You

Jason Kander on who has "it" for 2028, AI as a public utility, and uncapping the House

I'm not on today's episode, but I know you'll love it. Sarah is joined by Jason Kander, THREE time Pantsuit Politics guest. They start with an update on the Missouri redistricting fight and then turn to 2028: who do they like to lead the Democratic ticket, and what should that ticket stand for? They talk about AI, the future of work, uncapping the House (mark your Bingo card!), and how "back to normal" isn't a winning message. Outside of politics, they talk about the Chiefs -- the stadium, the "guy on the Chiefs," and KC geography. Don't miss Sarah's announcement at the top about our Good Neighbors t-shirt design contest. We can't wait to see what you create! - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Will Missouri Voters Veto Partisan Redistricting?

• What Democrats need to win elections in 2026 and beyond

• Outside of Politics: Kansas City Stadiums Explained

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Help us celebrate our community in Minneapolis! Submit your design for our Good Neighbor T-Shirt Contest by April 30.

Episode Resources

• Jason Kander

• Majority 54 with Jason Kander and Ravi Gupta

• People Not Politicians

• Missouri is next to answer Trump’s call for redrawn maps that boost GOP in 2026 (The Associated Press)

• The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics (The New York Times)

• Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt

• Leaders We Deserve

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:30] Jason Kander, welcome back to Pantsuit Politics.

Jason Kander [00:00:32] Good to be with you. Thanks for having me again.

Sarah [00:00:34] We love having you on the show.

Jason Kander [00:00:36] Thank you. Are you going to tell people that when we first came on the camera you said you have more gray hair than the last time I saw you. And then you tried to pretend that because it looks good.

Sarah [00:00:45] I’m not pretending and our audience will know that I’m glad we didn’t talk about this until on the air so I can get you on this. I am firmly on the record as in favor of silver foxes. Firm. Established on the internet. So there you go. How about that?

Jason Kander [00:00:59] Well, I appreciate it. I don’t have a choice. I’m going silver.

Sarah [00:01:03] You do. You see men out there trying, bless their hearts. It’s not a good look.

Jason Kander [00:01:07] Yeah, I’m going silver.

Sarah [00:01:09] Remember Rudy Giuliani and it was running down the side of his face?

Jason Kander [00:01:12] Yeah, that was so bad.

Sarah [00:01:13] Bless him.

Jason Kander [00:01:14] Yeah. You know what, it’s too much work.

Sarah [00:01:18] Word. Listen, mine’s starting to go gray up here in my bangs. I was telling my friends last night my mom got to where it was like she was dying it like every two to three weeks. Do you know how long that takes? Do you know how much money that takes? I’m not doing that, no. It’s just going to come in when it’s going to come in.

Jason Kander [00:01:31] My wife swears she found one gray hair like a year ago, and I haven’t seen it.

Sarah [00:01:37] Dang! Jealous. I mean, I’m 44, so I’m going pretty good. My red has faded, but I have more than one.

Jason Kander [00:01:45] I’m 44. She’s 44.

Sarah [00:01:46] She didn’t have but one?

Jason Kander [00:01:48] Well, she’s always looked much, much younger. When we were 21 and we’d go to the movies together, if it was an R movie it was always funny because they’d be like you can go in and they’d be like, well, I guess, actually you’re old enough, you can take her with you. And I always thought like what sort of scandalous thing do you, a, think is going on and, b, are doing nothing about?

Sarah [00:02:11] That’s funny. Good for her. Because also that is not something she has control over, but also super feminist because I feel like always men age better than women. So I love that she’s got the other going.

Jason Kander [00:02:27] Yeah, it ain’t going that way in this house

Sarah [00:02:31] Well, let’s talk about where you got some of those gray hairs from, which is this redistricting in your state.

Jason Kander [00:02:37] Sure.

Sarah [00:02:38] What’s going on? Give us an update.

Jason Kander [00:02:40] First thing you need to know is that Missouri has this really unique thing that is really great that everybody should have. It’s called the citizen veto. So we’re going to come back to that in a moment. But basically, the Missouri Republican controlled legislature decided that they were going to get rid of a Democratic seat. And the way they were going to do it was they were going to get rid of the Democratic seat here in Kansas City.

Sarah [00:03:03] They didn’t decide shit. He told them to do it and they did.

Jason Kander [00:03:06] Yeah, fair. Sorry. I forget. I sometimes inadvertently assign them free will and that is incorrect.

Sarah [00:03:12] They don’t have that. Correct.

Jason Kander [00:03:13] They were instructed to do it. And so they decided that the way they would do it is by getting rid of the seat in Kansas City. So they’ve literally taken Kansas City in this new map and they’ve split it into three separate districts, which is by the way just putting aside the partisan piece of this, just a crappy thing to do to this town that deserves to have a representative that will actually bring back federal resources. And we’re none too happy about it here in Kansas City, but that’s what they did. They passed a map that does that. Now, there was a lawsuit. So there’s two sort of branches to this fight. So there was a lawsuit to try and invalidate the map based on the Missouri Constitution, you cannot redistrict in the middle of a decade.

Sarah [00:03:57] Oh, okay.

Jason Kander [00:03:58] That, frustratingly, in the last couple of days, the State Supreme Court, which is actually not a particularly partisan Supreme Court, but it ruled four to three that there was nothing in the Constitution that explicitly disallowed them from doing that. So the State’s Supreme Court couldn’t stop them from doing it, which is disappointing but not entirely unexpected. Now, meanwhile, that is by no means the end of the story because we have this thing called the citizen veto. The way the citizen veto works, is that if the legislature passes a law, then within a certain period of days, I think it’s like 90 days from the legislative session, if the people turn in enough signatures, then what can happen is that law goes directly onto the ballot in the next major election.

Sarah [00:04:42] How many signatures are we talking here? Do you know?

Jason Kander [00:04:43] It’s in the hundreds of thousands.

Sarah [00:04:46] Okay, so a lot. Alright.

Jason Kander [00:04:47] It’s a lot. It’s a very difficult threshold to pass. It doesn’t happen very often. They are on track. They’re going to have enough signatures. So this is almost certainly going to go on the November ballot. The only things that would keep it off of the November ballot are stuff like if the Secretary of State makes some sort of successful case which is extremely unlikely that the signatures were not valid for some reason. He may attempt to do that because he’s a Republican and we’ll get to back to this in a moment. Has been trying to do some hanky-panky with the law the whole way, but that’s going to be unsuccessful. This is almost certainly going to be on the November ballot for the people of Missouri to vote on whether or not they want to veto this law that was passed by the legislature.

Sarah [00:05:27] So would the law be in place for this? Okay.

Jason Kander [00:05:32] Yeah. That’s so that’s where we’re getting into the people are starting to mess around with things deal. So the way that the citizen veto is supposed to work is that once you’re certified to have had enough signatures and it’s going on the ballot, then the people basically take the place of the governor. And if that’s the case, think about it this way; if the legislature passes a law and we’re waiting to find out whether the governor’s going to sign or veto it, it’s not like that new law takes effect. The old law is in effect and still until that’s the case. So the way it’s been done for a very long time, for the entirety of Missouri’s existence, the way it’s been done by president and constitutionally is the new law cannot take effect until the people have had an opportunity to weigh in if a citizen veto is going to happen. Now, the Missouri Attorney General, who is a Republican, and the Missouri Secretary of State, who is Republican, are arguing that that is not the case right here. They are arguing, and this is the new case that is in process. There’s going to be a decision at the trial court in not too long, no matter what that decision is, it’s going to get appealed and it’s going to end up in the Western District Court of Appeals and then potentially in the State Supreme Court, likely in the state Supreme Court. And what they’re arguing is, no, no, no, the new districts are the ones that we have to use to vote.

[00:06:49] And we have until sometime in May to get all this sorted out because that’s the time period at which ballots are going to be printed and start to be printed, that kind of thing. I am assuming that the courts follow the law here in Missouri, which they have a tendency to do. That’s the nice thing. Is that we don’t elect our state Supreme Court or our appellate court. We are actually the originator of the nonpartisan court plan that a lot of states have. It actually started here. So with some exceptions, we don’t have like a lot of political hacks on our courts. We have like good lawyers on our court. So I’m and cautiously optimistic that what’s going to happen is that the courts are going to rule that the 2022 map is what has to remain in place for this election, and therefore you’re not going to have a gerrymandered district in Missouri. That’s what I believe is going to happen. But there’s a lot of volunteers doing a lot of great work to get all these signatures and get it done. And then we’re going to have a vote in November as to whether the 2028 and 2030 elections happen on the new map or the old map. And I do not know how that’s going to go, but there will be a campaign to try and win that election.

Sarah [00:07:57] So if you’re in Missouri, there are lots of ways to get involved for sure.

Jason Kander [00:08:00] Lots of ways to get involved.

Sarah [00:08:01] Well, and let me just ask you this. I think 2028 is harder to say, but let’s just say something goes haywire and they get it through in 2026. I don’t know if all of these are going to work out the way they think they are.

Jason Kander [00:08:15] Yeah. I mean, they’ve gerrymandered this one pretty effectively, if I’m being honest. Is it possible that we could win in one of these new gerrymandered districts? It is possible. It would take a pretty serious wave year.

Sarah [00:08:30] Hey, Trump just got a state Senator Democrat at Mar-a-Lago. It’s not out of the question.

Jason Kander [00:08:36] It’s true. What we have working against us, and I’m not trying to downplay the possibility or discourage anybody, but what we have working against us is that unfortunately-- and you know this being in Kentucky-- it’s been a few years since the National Democratic Party invested resources in Missouri. Now we’re doing a lot of work to earn that status back and I think give us a few more years and we’re going to get there. There’s a lot of great work being done. I say we. Occasionally, I help raise some money for it or I give a little talk. I’m not among the group doing the hard work at all, but there’s a lot of people doing really good work. And I think in a few years we’re going to be back on that list as a potentially competitive state, but we’re not there right now. And that does make it harder to ambush them, so to speak, in a situation like that. But it is possible in a wave year.

Sarah [00:09:25] Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s good to know. Now that we’ve got the situation in Missouri, let’s move on in the next segment and talk about the bigger election environment.

Jason Kander [00:09:42] Sure.

Sarah [00:09:43] Jason, are you running for president in 2028?

Jason Kander [00:09:45] Nope.

Sarah [00:09:46] Well, are you sure? Because a lot of people are.

Jason Kander [00:09:49] I know a lot of people are.

Sarah [00:09:51] It’s a popular choice!

Jason Kander [00:09:52] Yeah, I pretty much did it in-- I was going to do it, as you know, in 2020. And then in 2018 I was like, no, I think I’ll get therapy at the VA instead. Which was also fun.

Sarah [00:10:04] In a different way.

Jason Kander [00:10:05] Yeah, but there were a lot of people doing it then. I made a lot friends, and a lot of those friends are going to run again, and that’ll be fun. I’ll give you this more serious, less flippant answer on this, which is that I last held office-- I left office at the beginning of 2017, and I last ran for an office in 2018. Ended up getting out before I was on the ballot. But last ran for an office then, was going to run for president in 2020. And in the period that has passed in the eight years since then, I have made a far greater impact certainly on my family and my loved ones, but on the world than I ever did running for or holding office. I’ve led a team that built villages of tiny houses for homeless vets across the country. I got involved in trying to get my translator’s family out of Afghanistan, which resulted in about 4,000 Afghan allies out of the country. And I never did anything on that scale when I was in office. So I say all this to say I’m not saying like you can do more out of office. I’m saying, what it would take for me to want to run for an office again, whether it be president or anything else is, I would have to look at that office and say the only way for me to change the thing that I want to change, what stands between me and doing that is being in this office. And furthermore, I’d have to decide that it has to be me, that nobody else can do it. And I think that’s one of the big things that’s changed in my life post going through therapy for post-traumatic stress, and now having two kids and all this new gray hair you pointed out is that--

Sarah [00:11:44] That hot wife you probably wouldn’t still have, let’s be honest.

Jason Kander [00:11:47] Well, yeah, or at least she’d be a lot less happy and that’d be no fun for me. And so I have reached a point I think I have a lot more wisdom and clarity about the idea of like it doesn’t have to be me.

Sarah [00:12:00] Yeah, but that’s a really good framework that maybe you should share with some of those friends.

Jason Kander [00:12:04] Yeah. Well, people call and they at least pretend they want advice. I think a lot of the time they want money or endorsement or other friends who have money. And that’s okay. I used to be in that business. But when they do at least pretend they want advice. That’s along the lines of the advice. Now, it doesn’t have to be you, but I tend to talk about quality of life while you run things like that.

Sarah [00:12:26] I’ve been thinking about you a lot with James Tallarico.

Jason Kander [00:12:30] Good guy. I like him.

Sarah [00:12:32] I like him too. And it’s giving so much of like your rise. Like he has a very distinctive sort of out of the ordinary democratic identity. He is also very gifted. I think about all the time that story of Barack Obama telling you like, you’ve got it. Like what it is, you’ve it. And he’s got it!

Jason Kander [00:12:48] He does. And I will admit to being old enough now that I look at him and I go, oh, he reminds me of me when I was younger and that makes me like him. And I had him on the show and I was texting with him the other day and trying to figure out little ways that I can be helpful to the campaign. I think he has enormous potential.

Sarah [00:13:07] I do too. I think if he wins the Senate campaign, if he doesn’t think it, somebody else is going to put it in his ear. Maybe you should think about 2028.

Jason Kander [00:13:14] Yeah. I think that the comparison to my situation those many years ago is accurate in the sense that I think the country looks at James and goes, well, this dude seems to know how to talk to these people. And I think that’s what happened with me. I always joked that I lost the election and I just barely lost that Senate election in 2016. And I thought, well, that’s probably that. And then I woke up and people were like, hey, maybe you. And I joked and it reminds me it’s like nuclear annihilation happened. And I came out of the bunker very depressed that like most of the people I’d known in my life had been obliterated, but the other survivors turned to me and were like we think maybe you’re in charge? And so that’s how 2016 felt after the election.

Sarah [00:14:02] You need to read Stephen King’s The Stand. That’s just a book with a very similar situation. I think there’s some characters in that book you would see yourself in for sure.

Jason Kander [00:14:11] Well, I’ll read it. And if it rings true, I will send it to James.

Sarah [00:14:14] There you go.

Jason Kander [00:14:16] I think he’s super talented. I mean, look, there’s a bunch a folks I really, really like. Ruben Gallego is a genuine friend, not just in the way that when you’re in politics you’re like, “He’s a friend of mine.” No, he’s a genuine friend. And I just think so highly of Ruben. I really like Wes Moore a lot.

Sarah [00:14:34] Yeah, we’ve had him on the show.

Jason Kander [00:14:35] Yeah. I know Wes a little bit, but I really like him. I mean, there’s a long list of people who would be great. Pete Buttigieg is another. I’d say he’s a good friend.

Sarah [00:14:44] But he’s in a tough spot though because he’s not in office right now and you can kind of feel it.

Jason Kander [00:14:49] You know what, I think that’s a great spot.

Sarah [00:14:51] You do? Tell me more.

Jason Kander [00:14:53] Yeah, well, for one thing, it’s great to not be in office because you don’t get to sit through stupid hearings all the time. For one thing, personally, he gets to live his life a little bit right now, which is so important for so many reasons. One, from a having the energy to run that gauntlet sort of thing, you need the time to charge up your battery before you do it. The other reason is Pete doesn’t have to go in and vote on every stupid little thing. It also gives him the freedom that if what he wants to do is run full-time, he can just run full-time. And it’d be one thing if he had never been secretary of transportation, and he were once again trying to do it as the former mayor of South Bend. But there’s nobody who doubts Pete’s leadership ability. There’s nobody who doubts his qualifications for it now. So he’s got the platform, he’s got the experience, and he’s got the time to really build something. And I say that because my situation was-- and I think we were on a good headright state in the race. I’m not saying I would have won, but we were on a good trajectory to really be in the mix. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I had left the measly little secretary of state of Missouri office, but I had this national and growing sort of buzz. And so we were building a real national network and it was pretty much what I was doing full time. And that was a huge advantage that I have over people who were better known and we’re in many respects better qualified because they had to be in DC all the time, or they had to be in the governor’s mansion somewhere all the times.

Sarah [00:16:37] Yeah, that’s true. I mean, a person we’ve been talking about a lot and we’re about to talk to is Rahm Emanuel, which I realize is a crazy name to throw out.

Jason Kander [00:16:47] Not at all. There’s no such thing anymore.

Sarah [00:16:50] That’s a good point. But there’s a lot of people who I think have it, have an authenticity, have a story, have some buzz that I think connects. I think Ruben Gallego is definitely one of them. James Tallerico is one of the. Wes Moore. I just think there’s a lot people who you’re like...

Jason Kander [00:17:11] Stacey Abrams is one of them.

Sarah [00:17:14] Yeah. I think they just seem like normal. You know what I mean? I think no way to discount normal, but...

Jason Kander [00:17:20] Once you can fake that, you’ve made it.

Sarah [00:17:22] Would you fake it? [Inaudible].

Jason Kander [00:17:25] I’m Kidding.

Sarah [00:17:28] But Beth and I are just hungry. I want to hear some actual ideas. I don’t want to hear we’re going to love our neighbors. With love, I love my neighbors and I think neighborism and I could talk about it for hours coming out of Minneapolis, but I want to hear your ideas about AI and I want to your ideas about public education and I want to hear like actual, like a vision for how we get out of so many messes. And I don’t hear a lot of people giving me those ideas except for Rahm Emanuel.

Jason Kander [00:18:01] I have not followed what Rahm Emanuel has been saying at all, but to what you were saying broadly, I think this election particularly the nominating period on the Democratic side, is going to be more focused on big visionary ideas than anything we’ve done in a long time. Because if you think about it, for a really long time, I don’t know, since probably 2008, that was probably the last time we had a Democratic nominating contest that was really about vision, now certainly 2016 with Bernie, but he didn’t prevail. So it wasn’t fully about it, right? His campaign was about it. But really ever since 2008, what we’ve had for the most part, with the exception of I’d say Bernie’s campaign, we have had a series of people saying, look, we all know what the agenda is. Pick which one of us you think is best to win the election and put this agenda in place. Whereas, Obama, was very much like I have a different vision. And it worked really well because the vision, the message, and the man all were perfectly interwoven. I mean, the slogan of the campaign was change and the candidate was a black man named Barack Hussein Obama who had opposed the war in Iraq. So it all perfectly melded together. And I actually think that this next election is going to be one where people will reward the person with the broadest and clearest vision. And the reason I think that is because I think really young millennials and Generation Z are going to play a huge part in this. And I’m monologuing here for a moment, I apologize, but this is a big thought I’ve been having lately, which is that folks like senior millennials like yourself and me, and then everybody in the--.

Sarah [00:19:47] How dare you?

Jason Kander [00:19:49] Well, you know, me.

Sarah [00:19:51] No, we’re the same age or something.

Jason Kander [00:19:53] When’s your birthday?

Sarah [00:19:55] July 28th, 1981.

Jason Kander [00:19:57] Okay. Well, I got you by two months. Like I said, I’m older. To be clear. The generations above us and our tippy top part of the millennial generation, we look at things and we think about everything going back to the way it was. That’s always the conversation we’re having. It’s when are we going to go back to normal? And our politicians of our age talk about things in terms of like getting back to these American ideals. And what we have to remember is that everybody younger than you and me doesn’t remember it ever being like that. And so I’ve become friends a bit with David Hogg and have gotten a little bit involved with Leaders We Deserve, his group, and people see that group as super extreme and super liberal. I don’t see it that way. I see that groups and I see what David Hogg is saying and others as a really well-earned impatience of that generation, because they’re going, look, we don’t really hardly remember 9/11, which means we don’t remember the pre-9/11 era and we also don’t remember the two years or year really post 9/11 where we were all getting along.

[00:21:00] We don’t remember the pre-9/11 era where we didn’t fight about every single little thing. We didn’t live through that. We were born into basically a recession followed by graduating college if we went to college and finding it way harder to find good jobs than our parents did. So all of this American dream, we all have these values that unite us. We kind of want to take your word for it, but we’ve never seen it. From their perspective, when they look at a Mamdani or somebody like that, whereas our generation might see somebody who’s really strident and really super liberal and out on the outer edge of progressivism, they don’t see it that way. They see it as here’s a person who’s making some sense because they’re not talking about tiny little changes that have never been made. They’re talking about things the way we see them, which is this is bananas. Why are we doing it this way? I’m coming around to that.

Sarah [00:21:52] I mean, that was Bernie’s appeal, too.

Jason Kander [00:21:53] That was Bernie’s appeal. And I don’t know if that makes me more liberal. I’m like, hey, none of this has been working. And so I think that’s what people are going to want.

Sarah [00:22:02] I just think it’s an acknowledgement that things are different.

Jason Kander [00:22:05] Things are different.

Sarah [00:22:05] We’re not going back. It took me a long time to realize like all these lessons that I had internalized about American politics even presidential politics, they don’t apply anymore. Forget about whether you were around during the 2008 election. Like you’re going to have voters like last election, this election who don’t know remember anything, but Trumpism. They don’t remember anything but MAGA. And Biden was a blip, but not that big of one. Trump announced two minutes after that one was over he was running in 2024. So he’s been there. And this understanding is hard as you get older to really think like these things I thought I knew, if X then Y, they don’t apply anymore. That’s just not our politics. That’s not how people think about partisanship. Our media environment is completely upside down and inside out. And I don’t think Rohm Emanuel is some alignment of a new way. But speaking of David Hogg’s The Leaders We Deserve, like he’s the first one that’s come out and said we need an age limit, period. We need an age limit on running for office.

Jason Kander [00:23:15] People want big ideas.

Sarah [00:23:17] Americans agree on that. Like they’ve wanted that for a long time. I remember. I’m old enough to remember when Donald Trump’s first thing was term limits. He promised term limits in 2016. It was on his platform. We’re going to do term limits the second I get in there. Where’d those go? And I just think this idea of like people are terrified of artificial intelligence. I’m glad AOC and Bernie are like no more data centers until we get a framework in place. And, look, the Trump administration put out a framework. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but they’re trying at least. I think we’ve got to have some ideas about what people care about, especially as Democrats. I am worried about I have a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old. I often feel like I am Indiana Jones running as the road collapses behind me when it comes to our public school system. Like we have huge problems. I’m not saying get rid of the Department of Education. Isn’t a big idea, but I really don’t think that’s going to fix it. Here’s where I really wonder how you feel about this. I think part of the struggle is-- and you saw this with the housing bill, right? The biggest problems Americans are concerned about, affordability, public education, college education, the job market-- well, maybe not the job market. But public education, housing, they’re so local. Like they need to be local solutions. And we’ve been on this run where we just consolidate power into the federal government and not just the federal government, but the presidency. We’re in a sprint on that right now.

Jason Kander [00:25:05] Yeah, we are.

Sarah [00:25:06] You know what I mean? And so it’s like I kind of want some ideas about like there’s going to have to be procedure, like even to this gerrymandering fight, tell me how we’re not going to be in this death spiral. I want to hear some ideas about that. Listen, the first presidential candidate that stands up and says uncap the House has got my vote. I’m like, okay, sold. I’ve been saying that for like six years.

Jason Kander [00:25:29] Uncap the House. What do you mean?

Sarah [00:25:30] Oh, this is my favorite. So we only have 435 members of Congress because they basically thought it fit better in the room. It’s just a freaking piece of legislation. It’s not in the fucking constitution.

Jason Kander [00:25:43] That’s a good point.

Sarah [00:25:43] And also it’s insane. It’s insane to expect 435 people to represent 330 million people. Like people don’t feel represented because they’re not. You can’t represent that many people at once. Like it’s really, really hard. And it infuriates me. Like build a bigger House, this is not working.

Jason Kander [00:26:02] That’s really interesting. I’ve literally never heard anybody talk about that, but that’s such a good point.

Sarah [00:26:06] Listen, I’m obsessed with it.

Jason Kander [00:26:08] I think I am too now.

Sarah [00:26:09] Again, I have the receipt. You should be.

Jason Kander [00:26:11] It’s not like they get to know each other now anyway.

Sarah [00:26:13] No!

Jason Kander [00:26:13] They used to. It used to work because they would get to know each other.

Sarah [00:26:16] Yeah. And I think they would build smaller coalitions. Like I think you’d have some really fascinating coalitions.

Jason Kander [00:26:24] That’s such an interesting idea.

Sarah [00:26:25] There’s like a whole campaign now. I started talking about it when we did our tour, our Nuanced Nation tour. Beth and I each came with these ideas and that was mine.

Jason Kander [00:26:33] I’m literally writing a note to myself.

Sarah [00:26:35] Do it. You should have the organizer on and everything. I’m obsessed with it, but that’s what I’m saying. If you don’t tell me something like that that’s like we’re in a new place, we need new ideas, then I don’t want to hear.

Jason Kander [00:26:45] Have you ever done politics in New Hampshire?

Sarah [00:26:47] No.

Jason Kander [00:26:48] It relates to this. New Hampshire is one of the smallest states by population and probably by geographic. But it has I think the largest house of representatives at state level.

Sarah [00:27:00] Love it.

Jason Kander [00:27:00] And what’s funny, when I was getting ready to run for president and I was camping out in New Hampshire all the time getting to know everybody, and every third person you meet is either a state representative or a former state representative. And it’s hilarious.

Sarah [00:27:14] Beautiful.

Jason Kander [00:27:15] And I never went inside the chamber. My understanding is they don’t even have desks on the floor, I don’t think. They definitely don’t have offices in the building. Now, they have a more traditional State Senate. But that’s kind of what you’re describing. And what I like about this is I’m thinking out loud.

Sarah [00:27:32] We need those desks so bad because they all sit in there and listen to each other as they give speeches. Give me a break.

Jason Kander [00:27:37] Nobody does that, even at the state level. By the way, hey, you know I’m not running for president. You just threw out a thing I’d never heard about and I’m like I think I’m for it. Which if I were fixing to run for president there’d be somebody over here being like, stop. But there’s not, there’s my dog sitting two feet from everywhere.

Sarah [00:27:54] Sounds like a good idea to me. Mine’s snoring right now.

Jason Kander [00:27:57] Anyway, when I think about the quandary we’ve gotten ourselves in, in our system, you can’t help but wonder, like, how much better would things potentially be if you could go back in time and say we’re going to have in America a semi-parliamentary system. And what you’re describing without any major constitutional amendment or anything could get you closer to there because you’re right, it would open itself up to a lot of different coalitions. But, yeah, in New Hampshire, people basically represent their neighborhood at the state level.

Sarah [00:28:26] Listen, and you can keep your dumb Senate, which basically represents land masses, fine, whatever. I hate it, but it’s fine.

Jason Kander [00:28:35] Well, you might get back to having real fights between the House and the Senate if you do that because right now that’s not what happens.

Sarah [00:28:41] Yeah, and I just think like there’s not really one Republican party, there’s not really one Democratic party. Ruben Gallego and AOC are far apart. Fine, I don’t care. They represent different groups.

Jason Kander [00:28:55] They could stand to benefit from some regionalism again.

Sarah [00:28:58] Yes, 100% and we can test ideas off each other. We’ve just gotten in this place. And I think this is true for democratic states and Republican states. There’s no testing of ideas because there’s one party control and this doesn’t work. People have bad ideas that way.

Jason Kander [00:29:13] You know what I like, so if I were running and I were running on this uncap the House thing, I would basically be like we need you in government. That’d be my message to people. It’s like you want to have fewer career politicians? Let’s have more, and why not you?

Sarah [00:29:29] Why not you? Listen, they don’t want the job anyway. They’re all quitting hand over fist. Like you can’t keep them in those jobs because it’s a shitty job.

Jason Kander [00:29:37] What does some member represent now, 500,000 people or something like that?

Sarah [00:29:39] Yeah, it’s in a massive amount of people. Like, how are you going to understand what they want? That’s why I think we’ve funneled everything through the lens of partisanship because how else do you wrap your hands around representing that many people?

Jason Kander [00:29:54] We have the worst elements of a parliamentary system. We have just the partisan elements and none of the coalition building elements of a parliament system.

Sarah [00:30:01] Well, and what I’m really worried about to the big ideas, it’s not that I don’t think housing and all these issues are huge- I do. I’m a little worried about a wave in 2026 that I do believe is coming. And I think I’m afraid the lesson that’s going to be learned is like, affordability, that’s the answer. And I’m like, yes, I want you to talk about affordability but we need ideas. Like if we went on affordability in 2028 and then we don’t fix it, which we won’t because that’s not how it works. And then we’re just swinging, I mean, that’s what we’ve done. We just swing, we swing, we swing and we swing.

Jason Kander [00:30:39] Well, and then if you don’t get it done even though you may only control one house people are like well they didn’t do it. They said they would. To your point about AI, I could not possibly agree more that the Democratic Party needs to as fast as possible establish itself as the party that is at a minimum wary or leery About AI and at a maximum even opposed to the massive growth of it. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly but--

Sarah [00:31:07] I’m getting so much out of you today, this is great.

Jason Kander [00:31:10] Let’s see. It would have been I was still getting ready to run for president, so it would’ve been early in 2018. I sat down with Sam Altman and I know Sam a little bit. He’s from St. Louis. I made it my business for a long time to know everybody everywhere who was either in or from Missouri. And on a personal level, he and I to the limited degree we’ve had interactions get along fine, I have some real concerns about Open AI and everything now, but I can remember sitting there and it was myself and my wife, Diana. And we were in his office out there in California, and he was explaining what was coming. And he said to us, he said, “In about 10 years, Americans are going to look around and feel like there’s been an alien invasion, and they won’t know what hit them.”

Sarah [00:31:55] Whoa!

Jason Kander [00:31:56] And I think about that a lot because that was eight years ago. And he was talking about robots. And I think about every time we have these really hot debates about immigration and I think aliens are coming- Sam’s aliens are coming. And people are going to want to know was anybody anticipating this? Was anybody trying to do anything about it? And the truth is right now what we have is we have a Trump administration that is so focused on trying to win some sort of war with China. And I mean literally trying to employ AI in a military context. May have actually done it to great tragedy already in Iran. They’re trying to clear the way as fast as possible and they’re trying to keep the states from having any of their own AI restrictions. And I think right now, at a minimum, we should be the party of state-level-- to your point earlier about local stuff. State level AI restrictions so that, yeah, we’re not going to lose progress on it, but we’re going to have the states as that laboratory figuring out what does and does not make sense. And I also completely agree with you about data centers. We’re about to have one in a town outside of Kansas City here and it’s just going to be great monuments to nothingness after five years.

Sarah [00:33:18] I would like to hear a different platform from a Democratic candidate. If I was running for president, here’s what I would say.

Jason Kander [00:33:25] Maybe you should be.

Sarah [00:33:26] I mean, listen, somebody wants to give me a billion dollars because the billionaires are funding everything in case you didn’t read that New York Times piece.

Jason Kander [00:33:34] I don’t need to, I assume that’s the case.

Sarah [00:33:36] Well, here’s the thing, I think you could get to the affordability crisis, the AI anxiety and the big vision with all of this. What I would say is, look, this technology is going to be incredible, but I think, you could, to the Trump of it all, be like, Trump did what Biden did. He allowed an invasion. He allowed and invasion, because Biden did do that. That’s a good analogy. Like he let in too many people, it taxed the system, it created some really toxic politics. He’s letting in too much of this technology. He’s allowing too much wealth to accrue at the top through both legal and illegal means. Hell, I would probably even sweep up the gambling and all this too while I was at it just for funsies. That’s not his job. His job is not to make the rich richer. His job is to make the American people more successful. And so this technology is coming. And what it’s going to do is going to work for us, not three AI CEOs in Silicon Valley. This is a public utility that’s going to change everything. And we’re going to make it a public utility. We’re going to take it.

Jason Kander [00:34:46] It’s a great approach that probably should have been employed at the beginning of the internet.

Sarah [00:34:51] Yeah, because now it’s like we can’t let this go too far. They’re not going to hand it over to us voluntarily, guys. You want to use the power of the federal government in a way with massive impact, here’s your way. Let’s do it.

Jason Kander [00:35:02] I agree and I think if you’re going to step further, people are going to need to have a really clear idea about the future of work and of what labor means in this new world, which is hard to do because we don’t know what the new world looks like. One answer there, I think, is going to be something along the lines of understanding that the point of work is not 40 hours of activity a week. The point of the work is to achieve the ability to take care of yourself, your family-- and my little Zoom just did a thumbs up when I didn’t even do it. So clearly...

Sarah [00:35:33] That’s the Holy Spirit. It likes your idea.

Jason Kander [00:35:35] That or it’s, you know, Sam.

Sarah [00:35:37] They’re listening.

Jason Kander [00:35:38] They’re listening. And be able to say like, hey, the point of work is not to stay busy for 40 hours a week, but the point work is to be able to provide for yourself and your family. And (this is where it gets quasi-European and maybe controversial) to provide leisure time. And if we look at it that way, this is not an argument for AI, but it’s more of an argument for how we should think about employing AI in the future. If there are things that AI is going to do and it is going displace workers, well then we have a choice. We can freak out and say what are we going to do to keep these people busy for 40 to 60 hours a week so that they can get paid if there’s nothing we really need them to do? Or we can begin to tackle the question what are we going to do to make sure that people can still provide for their families now that there is a lot more leisure time but there’s not the opportunity to earn money to put food on the table. My point is like what if the point or what if the object of all of this human evolution to the point of creating this artificial intelligence was actually to achieve more time with each other? And if that’s the case, we’re going to need policies that allow people to sustain their livelihood while they do that.

Sarah [00:36:59] Well, listen, I read this piece. I can’t hunt it down again. Maybe somebody out there can. And I think it was Kellogg’s. I hope I’ve got the company right. When industrialization came, the same thing happened. It made everything much more efficient. And so I think it was Kellogg who was like, well, everybody didn’t need to work as much. Great.

Jason Kander [00:37:25] The cut engine.

Sarah [00:37:27] Yeah, we don’t have to work as much. So we’ll just pay people the same and they won’t work as many. And there was like a panic. And basically the corporate robber baron overlords were like, well, no, that’s not going to work. And they shut it down and pulled it back. Basically it was like, no, our vision is this. And to me, look, there’s no way to stay on this road we’re on of consolidation, of private equity, of growth for growth sake, this scalability in which we have to extract, extract, extract, especially like the Disney model where we have to extract the luxury items because everybody else at the bottom we’re just going to treat like the peons. That’s not our business model. Our business model is the people making like 500,000 plus a year because there’s more of those, and you know we’ll just keep putting the experience towards those people and everybody else at the bottom is just going to kind of get left behind as we extract more and more money and make more and more billionaires. I mean, what’s that piece in New York Times it was like 2016, we had or like, I don’t remember, 2009 we had like eight billionaires, now we have like 500. But it’s still a small number of the majority of Americans, right?

Jason Kander [00:38:43] Yeah, it is.

Sarah [00:38:43] And so we’re going to have to get off that. To me it’s like we stop pushing the wealth up and we take it and we spread it out. It is a regionalism. Listen, AI is an incredible tool as a small business owner.

Jason Kander [00:38:57] Absolutely.

Sarah [00:38:57] Incredible.

Jason Kander [00:38:59] As a scientist. Hell, as a parent.

Sarah [00:39:00] Yes. It doesn’t even have to be leisure because I do think people need purpose. Like some of these universal basic income experiments, they ain’t going so great.

Jason Kander [00:39:09] Sure. Purpose is important.

Sarah [00:39:09] People need purpose. This is a utility that you have access to, to go back to your town or the town you’re already in and build it out and have businesses and have ability to follow your dream and it doesn’t have to be an hourly wage. It could look very, very different and we will pour money into building more smaller to mid-range companies than just allowing the Ellison family to own everything.

Jason Kander [00:39:39] Well, what’s interesting about the debate right now is if you watch, particularly Republicans in the Senate, as they start to realize that if they’re going to have working class voters in their coalition, they have to also say some working class things. Now we’re not all the way at the point where they do working class thing.

Sarah [00:39:56] You wouldn’t be speaking of your own senator, would you?

Jason Kander [00:39:59] He would be one of the ones I’m talking about. Is you’re starting to hear things that now it’s a very corporate version of socialism, but you’re starting to hear more and more of it. But then when you go to Silicon Valley and you talk to these folks who are doing all the innovating and who are creating all these products, if they’re honest with you, what they say is that the end game here where this obviously goes is UBI. It goes to a place where you have all of this innovation, and you have all this capitalism at this upper level. But for it to work, ultimately you’re going to have to have some degree of socialism. Yeah, they understand that. And the other thing that’s kind of interesting about talking to those folks is so many of them are they’re just such quants. Like in some ways, so many of them-- and I don’t even mean this as like a criticism. It’s just a personality type that works out there. They’re like these unemotional quants. I remember when I was raising money out there, you could have the most emotionally compelling story, but you better have numbers. So they were not moved. And that’s how they kind of look at it from that perspective, this analytical, well, it’s not about we have to care for our human man. It’s just the human man will rise up if you don’t do this. So you’re going to have to do it.

[00:41:14] And going back to the idea of large vision, it doesn’t mean like you have to be for UBI or you have to be for socialism at some level, but you better damn well have an answer to those questions. And now because Trump has been so wholly awful, you’ve seen the growth he had among generations he really erodes. But I think that part of the explanation for why he was able to win over the chunk that he was in the last election is because liberals have made the mistake of thinking that if you continue to stand for the same liberal things, the same democratic things, that you were seen as progressive and forward thinking. But if you are the younger generation who’s only seen a certain slice of American politics and you have one side talking about big ideas, now they may be bad ideas but they’re big ideas, then you start to think, well, one side is thinking about the future and changing things and the other side isn’t. And you know what happens? Young people are predisposed to be more liberal. But one side, no matter whether you call them conservative or liberal or not, one side looks like the liberals. Because what does liberal mean? It means open to change. And so if you have a whole bunch of holy bad, super bad ideas, but they’re big changes, and things aren’t working for you, and the other side is just coming up with the same changes that they’ve been talking about forever, well then the Republicans end up looking like the forward thinking liberals. And that’s the trap we walked into and we just can’t be there again.

Sarah [00:42:55] Going back to what you said about leisure, I think it’s a deeper question that I think that America, both parties, during those good old days we all think we want to get back to, really solidified around one value, and that was money, and that the economy. And all ideas had to revolve around money and the economy, and everything was framed that way. It’s the economy stupid. We still say it.

Jason Kander [00:43:22] We’re fighting a whole war explicitly over oil right now.

Sarah [00:43:25] Right, it’s just money, money, money.

Jason Kander [00:43:27] Nobody is even pretending anymore.

Sarah [00:43:27] Which is why we’re in this Polymarket gambling fucking hellscape. It’s sickening and I think people are sickened. And when you have someone like James Tallarico who stands up and says, “I have ideas about what it means to live a good life and I don’t think it’s being rich,” it hits, man. It hits. Because we’ve had 10 years of somebody saying it only matters if you’re rich. Rich makes you smarter, rich makes you successful, rich makes you better, rich makes you have a bigger life. And by the way, I work for my rich friends, not the rest of you dumb dumbs who voted for me.

Jason Kander [00:44:02] Well, that’s correct. I agree with everything you’re saying. When I was 100 years ago, which is to say, I don’t know, eight years ago when I was getting ready to run for president and I was going around, I was sitting down with these donors and kingmakers in the party, what I would say to them is that I’m not trying to say that I am the most moral or ethical or pure person, but what I do recognize is that Americans are looking for more than simply economic leadership. They’re looking for moral leadership because they haven’t had it frankly since Obama. Because what Obama did is Obama talked about things in terms of what was right and what was wrong and he also modeled the way to behave. And I don’t mean this means like you got to be a teetotaler or you got to... But they’re looking for more than just a decent person, okay? Because like you can be a decent person but not inspire people to be decent. They’re looking for somebody who’s going to say like we can be decent and we can be successful and it’s worth being decent to each other, but you can’t do it in a soft way. It has to be done in a muscular way. I think about it just makes me so sad that my kids have really, to your point earlier, only experienced Trumpism. And I’ll give two examples of my two kids. One, I’ll be in the car and we’re listening to NPR or something and there’ll be some news story and my son’s half paying attention, he’s 12. And then I’ll say, did you hear that? And I’ll just say, Trump just did X and X, and it’ll be something horrendous. And my son who very much thinks Donald Trump is terrible and is at least somewhat not super politically, he is 12, but aware and he’s somewhat invested in outcomes. He’ll be like, yeah. Like nothing surprises him at all.

[00:45:54] And then my daughter is five. And we were in the truck the other day and she’s sitting in her car seat in the back and she had asked about Donald Trump and we had said, well, we don’t really think he’s a very good person. And she asked, she said, “Why is he not a good person?” And her entire reference point, by the way, for good people and bad people is the Taliban because my translator’s family lives down the street and we’re with them all the time. And she basically has all these Afghan cousins and she understands that they escaped the Taliban. So she talks to me about she’s fascinated by Afghanistan and the Taliban and wants to talk about it all the time. Particularly they don’t let girls go to school, like that’s wild and wrong. And so she understands good and evil. She’s like so is he like bad like the Taliban? I’m like, well, no. And I’m trying to explain it. And then she says, “I think I know why he’s not good.” And I said, why? And she said, “Because he says things like shut your mouth.” And I was like, what do you mean? And she couldn’t explain it. I asked my wife later, she’s like Bella was taking a nap on the couch the other day and the TV came on, like somebody sat on the remote or something. And it was just a live Trump press conference. There wasn’t even a clip. And it was Trump talking, and it on for like 20 seconds. It was the only time Bella’s ever heard Donald Trump’s voice, and she woke up from the nap and was like, “Turn that off. I don’t like that person.” Found out it was Donald Trump. And my point is she’s grown up in an era where she’s heard the President of the United States talk for a random 20 seconds, and it solidified her view that he is not a good person.

Sarah [00:47:26] He’s hateful. He’s mean.

Jason Kander [00:47:28] And I think people have weirdly accepted that, but also instinctually like deeply understand that we deserve to be led by somebody decent who urges us to be decent. And I think that that has to be part of the big vision for the next person who runs.

Sarah [00:47:47] I have a politician in my life who I’m always like, listen to me, just get on like a vice platform. Like we’ve abandoned the idea of vices and it’s not working. Like just letting kids watch as much porn as they want on the internet and letting people smoke as much weed as they want to everywhere and letting them people gamble on anything all the time, everywhere, these were vices for all of human history. For a reason, they’re corrosive. They are corrosive to the human spirit. It’s okay to say that. It doesn’t mean we want to throw you in jail. But it’s okay to say, you know what, it wasn’t so bad when there were barriers to some of this behavior. That’s really bad for most people. Like, that’s okay. It is okay to say that. I feel like Democrats are allergic to it. Fine, just start with kids. Like let us protect kids from some of these vices.

Jason Kander [00:48:43] Let me agree with an amendment, which is to say, one, I totally agree, starting with kids. Like what other countries have done with regard to social media and kids, that kind of thing. And, obviously, look, Democrats and all politicians are going to be a lot more courageous about that because kids can’t vote. Let’s be real. It’s a lot easier for them to do that, right?

Sarah [00:49:03] Yeah, that’s right.

Jason Kander [00:49:03] But what I would say is I think what we have to be very careful to do as a party when we talk about that is we have to find a way to do it without judgment. Because we just went through a period where, as Marc Maron likes to say, we may have annoyed people into choosing fascism. So, for instance, on gambling, I think you’re right, that there need particularly on the prediction markets, that’s rife with potential corruption and real corruption now. And prop bets and all that kind of thing. And I think the way to do that, for instances, to come at it from the perspective of a sports fan and to basically pull the same bogus move that they pulled on the trans, and making it seem like everybody in the country is competing against transgender athletes. But to go at it as like, hey, look, we deserve to be able to watch sports and know that it’s not been corrupted. And so we need guardrails on things like prop bets. We deserve to know that we’re not going to go to war because somebody placed a bet on us going to war on a certain day. That has to be... And then you can also take the next step of what you’re talking about and say, and hey, we need leadership that asks us to appeal to our better angels and to try not to do these things. But at the same time, what we don’t want to do is say like, hey, look, the good people are the ones who don’t have this. You talked about Josh Hawley earlier. Josh Hawley has been really big on the like no porn thing and all that. And there’s no question in my mind that I don’t even need to see the science. Porn is not good for your mind. It’s not good for your mind particularly if somebody gets addicted to it and particularly for young men and the way that they’re going to treat women. There’s no question about that. And I’m all for there being some reasonable guardrails about that, but I also think that it is really dangerous to sound like you are judging people for their vices. And I know that’s not what you’re doing, but I think that’s a real trap we can walk into.

Sarah [00:51:03] I think the way you do that is you are clear from the beginning. The villains in this are the owners, not the users.

Jason Kander [00:51:12] That’s right. That’s a great point.

Sarah [00:51:14] They’re extractive. Every single person right now, living in the world in 2026, knows what it’s like through the experience of the last 10 years of being extracted through the experiences of social media. We all know. We’ve all been through it. We know like, oh wait, we got turned into the product. And they just wrung out as much money from us and our behavior as they possibly could. Like we know, we all feel it. We know it, we’re probably still participating in it when we’re revenge scrolling on TikTok at 10 o’clock at night. So know what that feels like. So to say we’re tired of being treated like the product to be sold... Like all these weed, alcohol still like this, the gambling, like so many of these industries are built on making money off of the addicts. Like they don’t make money off the moderate users. They make money off the people who never ever stop using. Like they know the business model. They’re very clear. Like even the gambling, the house always wins, man. The house is the villain not the person at the roulette table.

Jason Kander [00:52:19] You’re exactly right. That is exactly the right answer. And it’s even beyond that category of issues because it’s true when it comes to guns. Because on guns the villain is not the gun owner. The villain is the firearm manufacturers who want to do everything possible to make the maximum amount of money and that’s why they don’t want restrictions. It’s true when it come to agricultural policy that the villain is... I get so upset every time I listened to some urban coastal democratic politician complain about farmers being paid not to farm because that is such crap. But if you do it right, you talk about it the way you talk about unions and management and you make clear that the problem is corporate agriculture buying up everything and making it impossible for family farmers to continue to be family farmers and forcing them to consolidate. And it’s true with environmental policy, it’s true with oil companies. It’s true with healthcare with regard to insurance companies. Instead of it being about doctors, it’s about insurance companies. And you’re absolutely right. And you know what it all sounds like. And I say this as a person who is friends with Hillary Clinton, voted for Hillary Clinton but looks back and goes, Bernie was right. He’s 100% right.

Sarah [00:53:41] Bernie used to go on the dining room show way back in the day before he was capital B Bernie. And every time he went I was like these motherfuckers got everything right. Like everything he said I was like-- I’m a member in my early 20s. He would come on and I would be like why isn’t there more Bernie? And then there’s more Bernie and I was like less Bernie. It wasn’t Bernie, it was the Bernie bros that wore me out.

Jason Kander [00:54:02] Well, and the problem was is that we didn’t understand that Bernie also had the politics right. Because everybody’s talking about how do we get our own Joe Rogan? Well, we had our own, Joe Rogan. He was a Bernie voter.

Sarah [00:54:13] Yeah, and then you got mad at Bernie for going on Joe Rogan. Okay, do you have a few more minutes to talk one more sports thing with us?

Jason Kander [00:54:30] I do. Sure.

Sarah [00:54:31] Okay, I just want to say before we started, I said, remind me what Kansas City you are. I know what Kansas City you are. I know you’re from Missouri. I think what I meant was remind me which one the football team is on. I’m not great at sports because I know there’s a controversy between the Kansas cities and I couldn’t remember which direction it flowed.

Jason Kander [00:54:48] Sure. Okay. So you got Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. To do this right, I’ve got to give you a little history.

Sarah [00:54:55] Okay.

Jason Kander [00:54:55] Missouri was a state first and then there was the territory of Kansas, which is why the city that is on the Missouri side, the big city, it’s got a half a million people in it. And then the metro area has got like one and a half. It’s why it was called Kansas City. Now it was originally for a minute called Possum Trot, but we didn’t stick with that.

Sarah [00:55:13] We have a Possum Trot near my-- Paducah’s between Monkey’s Eyebrow and Possum Trot.

Jason Kander [00:55:17] I didn’t know there was a Monkey’s Eyebrow, but that’s outstanding.

Sarah [00:55:19] Yeah.

Jason Kander [00:55:20] That’s so cool. That’d be a great address.

Sarah [00:55:24] Listen, there’s so many t-shirts with that on it.

Jason Kander [00:55:26] I bet. Well, I need one. But, anyway, so that’s how you had Kansas City. And then on the Kansas side, what you really have for the most part are suburbs of Kansas City. So we have the state line. But here the state line is literally just a road called state line. I mean, up in the northern most northern part of Kansas City, it’s a river. But it’s really for the most part it’s just a road and you cross it and you really can’t tell you switch from one state to the other. It’s one big metro area. It’s why like when the mayor of Kansas City, the current mayor Quinton Lucas, when he talks about Kansas City he refers to Kansas City and surrounds because he feels like the mayor for...

Sarah [00:56:05] Everybody.

Jason Kander [00:56:05] And he taught at the University of Kansas and he’s an open KU fan despite the fact that he’s in Missouri. So it’s a normal thing here. So 50 years ago they built the new stadiums for the Royals and for the Chiefs and they built it at what they called the Truman Sports Complex and it’s on the east side of Kansas City so you got the state line. And then you go east and so it’s like from state line to the stadiums where they are now. Probably it’s true in Kentucky too. We don’t think of things in miles. We think of things in minutes. And it’s probably 20 minutes, okay? A 20 minute drive.

Sarah [00:56:41] Deeper into Missouri.

Jason Kander [00:56:42] Yeah, 20 minutes east into Missouri. Now, and it’s on the big 435, the big circle, big loop highway around us. It’s basically if it’s a big circle like a clock, they basically sit at about three o’clock on the Missouri side; whereas, 12 and six up and down the middle, that’s your state line.

Sarah [00:57:03] Okay, got it.

Jason Kander [00:57:04] What’s happening is because of this battle over incentives and stuff, the chiefs are going to move from three o’clock on that clock face to basically nine o’ clock.

Sarah [00:57:16] Okay, got it.

Jason Kander [00:57:18] And so they’re going to move across the state line to the other side of the loop, 435 loop basically. And so like me, I live down at about six o’clock just on the Missouri side. It’s 20 minutes from me either way. So what is the difference? And so the reason I say all this is to say I noticed the way it was covered nationally, people covered it like the team was moving. Like the team leaving Kansas City. And you’ve got Kansas City, Kansas, which is they wouldn’t like it if I say this, but is a suburb of Kansas City and Missouri, right? And then they’re going to Kansas City, Kansas. But Kansas City, Kansas, isn’t even really the largest population town anymore on that western side of the state line.

Sarah [00:58:00] Oh, interesting.

Jason Kander [00:58:01] So they’re going over there and they got a huge financial incentive to go over there. Now the Royals are going to go somewhere. They’re looking at downtown Kansas City as in Missouri side. They’re looking at north of the river, still Missouri side. They were looking for a long time and they’re still kind of I think it’s in play on the Kansas side and we’ll see where they land. But my point here is to say, yes, there are definite tax and municipal results, but for the average Kansas Citian, and by the way, like people who live in Overland Park, Kansas or Shawnee, Kansas, where I was born, when they go on vacation you ask them where are you from, they say I’m from Kansas City. They all see themselves as from Kansas City.

Sarah [00:58:39] So it’s not like people are going to get like new jerseys. You know what I mean?

Jason Kander [00:58:43] No, nothing is going to change.

Sarah [00:58:43] Interesting. Okay.

Jason Kander [00:58:44] It’s going to be a new stadium. There are going to some people who are real mad about it. Politically, it’s not great if you’re a Missouri side politician because you’re supposed to try to keep them. Ultimately, at the end of the day, they’re still the Kansas City Chiefs. They’re going to move the stadium 20 minutes.

Sarah [00:59:04] Right. Well, can I just say this too. They’re doing this in Nashville too. Like, why does everybody need a new, bigger, ridiculous stadium every like five years? It just feels like it’s a little out of control.

Jason Kander [00:59:16] Well, that’s a whole other conversation.

Sarah [00:59:20] They’re building a giant Titan stadium right next to the already giant currently used Titan stadium.

Jason Kander [00:59:25] It’s sort of case by case. What I will say here is that they’ve had these stadiums for really long time in Kansas City. And the other piece of it is that they were built because originally the city planners thought the city was going to grow East and it didn’t. The population growth grew west across the state line. It grew South in both directions on both sides of the state line, and it grew North on the Missouri side. And the one direction the population growth did not go-- now, there’s a lot of reasons for this and not all of them are good. Some of them have a lot to do with like urban renewal and the way the black community was treated. So it’s not like I’m not describing something that just happened naturally. I’m describing a thing that happened is that population growth didn’t go in the direction of the stadiums. So there is this huge sports complex out there that there’s very little around. Which is cool for a tailgate culture, but for instance if you’re the city planners at Kansas City and you want to take this thing, for instance, with the Royals, that’s going to get at least 81 venue event nights a year, you’d like to have it near more of your stuff that is going to get run off business. And so in that case, I think it’s a good reason to have a new location. But I think it depends on where you’re talking about and what team you’re talking about and all that.

Sarah [01:00:48] And your stance. Are you a Chiefs fan?

Jason Kander [01:00:50] Yeah, I’m a huge Royals fan and I’m also a big Chiefs fan.

Sarah [01:00:53] Okay. And your stance on Taylor Swift.

Jason Kander [01:00:56] We’re all Swifties in Kansas City. It’s funny I think people think--

Sarah [01:01:00] I thought so. I just wanted to make sure.

Jason Kander [01:01:03] I mean, when they announced their engagement, there were businesses in this town that just sent people home for the rest of the day. I’m not kidding.

Sarah [01:01:09] Listen, again, back to the theme of me having receipts. I think they’ve been dating about two weeks or we’d known they were dating.

Jason Kander [01:01:18] Oh, are you a hater?

Sarah [01:01:19] No, no, baby. I said they’re getting married and everyone’s like you’re crazy. I was like, no. Those two are going to get married. And I said it consistently for so long that when they got engaged it was like I got engaged. The amount of text messages I got they were like congratulations. I thought of you first. I was like thanks. It was great. I highly recommend like staking out your place so that when it happens, it’s like you’ve won a prize. Like it was amazing.

Jason Kander [01:01:46] Who doesn’t love a love story, first of all? Also, the Kelsey brothers are great dudes. They’re clearly you talk about good, decent role models for young boys. And then you cannot get a better role model for young girls. And as somebody who now I’m a girl dad, which I generally can’t stand the people who discover that women have value when they have daughters. So I try to shut that. I’ve found women to have equal value to men long before I had a daughter. But if having a daughter does give you the opportunity to see certain things that you can’t see without having a daughter. And so, for instance, to see my five-year-old daughter the way she reacts when a Taylor Swift song comes on-- and now she doesn’t understand all the lyrics and everything, so it’s a little different from like..

Sarah [01:02:37] I hope not, with some of the songs on the new album.

Jason Kander [01:02:39] Right. But it’s more of she understands that culturally being a girl who likes Taylor Swift, it connects her to other girls in her school and everything. And I think an element of it is that she understands that Travis and Taylor’s house is like three quarters of a mile from here. It feels very personal to her.

Sarah [01:03:00] Are you going to send him a present? Are you going to send him a wedding present?

Jason Kander [01:03:04] I don’t think they’ll get one from me.

Sarah [01:03:06] I think that you should. Maybe a card from your daughter. You’re neighbors.

Jason Kander [01:03:10] I mean, just call us neighbors. It’s three quarters of a mile. It’s not the same neighborhood.

Sarah [01:03:16] I was going to say, are you doing better podcasting than I am?

Jason Kander [01:03:20] No. To call back to what we were talking about a minute ago, it’s across the state line. It’s on that. And where we live down here-- to give you a little Kansas City geography you don’t need, but to really fill this out, we live down here in South Kansas City, but we’re in Kansas City and Missouri proper. When you cross the state line, which is not too far from where we live at all, you go into Leewood, Kansas, and Leewood, Kansas, is very fancy. It’s still Kansas. Nobody’s driving a Rolls or anything. But that’s where the med spas are in this town. They’re not on this side of the state line.

Sarah [01:04:00] Got you. Okay. I like that you live so close though.

Jason Kander [01:04:03] Yeah, it is a neat thing. My kids think that’s neat. And actually a buddy of mine they ended up buying his house. He’s an older, very accomplished lawyer. And the reason I knew is because he spent a weekend scrambling to try to get rid of furniture and clothing because they basically were like we need a place to stay that has more like--Travis’s house...

Sarah [01:04:25] Security.

Jason Kander [01:04:25] Yeah. And so they were like and we need it immediately. And we will buy it. I think what happened is they were like we will close immediately, but you got to...

Sarah [01:04:33] You got to get it out!

Jason Kander [01:04:34] Yeah, he was like, “I ended up leaving a lot of furniture in there. So I don’t know how much of my old man furniture they still have.”

Sarah [01:04:40] That’s amazing. I love that. Jason Kander. I love it when you come on Pantsuit Politics.

Jason Kander [01:04:44] I have a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.

Sarah [01:04:46] I think you need to send this episode to some of your pals. I think we filled out a pretty good platform for them to be honest.

Jason Kander [01:04:50] I actually think we solved many problems.

Sarah [01:04:53] I do, too. More people should listen to us. All right. Well, thank you. I hope that you have a great rest of your day.

Jason Kander [01:05:00] You too.

Sarah [01:05:00] And we will share this episode. We’ll put all the links so that people can go find your show and just thanks so much.

Jason Kander [01:05:05] Thank you!

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