In conversation with Dean Phillips

Phillips challenged Biden despite unusual personal access: Biden had visited his home and flown with him twice on Air Force One, yet Phillips said he should not continue leading. Phillips said he resigned from House leadership and urged Gretchen Whitmer and JB Pritzker to run; their operatives asked him not to use their names.

Phillips said presidential ballot access itself was a multimillion-dollar operation: New Hampshire required a $1,000 filing fee, while New York and Virginia could cost $450,000–$500,000 through paid signature gathering. He estimated roughly $5 million to reach primary ballots, with three staffers plus legal counsel focused on qualification.

Phillips said Congress structurally rewards separation and fundraising: his 2019 freshman class was put on separate party buses, and he called it “legal corruption” that a PAC could give a member $5,000 before related committee business. He responded by hosting bipartisan dinners and joining the 32-Democrat, 32-Republican Problem Solvers Caucus.

Phillips said Belvedere’s breakthrough came without paying Jay-Z: after the rapper featured the vodka in a music video, the brand “popped” within two weeks, alongside a campaign seeding 200 influential people. He later called the LVMH sale a mistake because his family skipped a competitive process and, he alleges, closing promises were not kept.

Phillips said he would send US Special Forces to recover American hostages, then pursue a ceasefire, Arab-led peacekeeping force, multinational campaign against Hamas, and Palestinian state-building. He also said he had warned Netanyahu face-to-face twice earlier in 2023 that Israeli policies were damaging US-Israel relations and future security.

After two southern-border visits, Phillips backed stronger barriers and technology but argued the deeper fix was adjudicating asylum in migrants’ home countries, with safe dormitories near US consulates. His economic logic was that qualifying migrants could arrive legally with the $6,000–$7,000 they otherwise paid smugglers, while rejected applicants would remain home.

Phillips paired higher Social Security taxes on upper incomes with aggressive cost cutting: raise the taxable-wage cap to $250,000, zero-base federal budgeting, and audit every Pentagon program, base and overseas deployment. He also backed portable national health insurance and capitated provider payments, arguing existing healthcare spending could fund coverage without new taxes.

Friedberg highlighted DeepMind’s GraphCast, a 37-million-parameter graph neural network that he said could produce global 10-day weather forecasts in about a minute and outperform ECMWF’s traditional model. He argued the same approach could slash forecasting compute costs and extend to simulation problems in chemistry, biology and materials science.