Day: September 21, 2026

Jill, Barb, and Joyce run through a week of quietly lowered bars across the federal government — and can’t decide whether to laugh or cry about it. The EPA has stopped enforcing clean air and water rules it’s supposed to uphold; Joyce, fresh off a party conversation with an environmental rights lawyer, calls the lack of enforcement more disturbing than almost anything else because it hits the basics — the water we drink, the air we breathe. Barb pivots to AI, invoking a whistleblower’s warning that unregulated AI could threaten humanity by 2030 and drawing a comparison to how Truman-era lawmakers actually moved fast to regulate nuclear weapons — a contrast to today’s do-nothing Congress. Joyce shares her own slightly unhinged experiment asking ChatGPT how it planned to kill her. But the segment’s real head-scratcher: the FBI has quietly dropped certain past disqualifying conduct from its hiring standards. Cash Patel’s explanation raises more questions than it answers, and Joyce wonders aloud whether this was a deliberate, targeted change or just one item scrubbed from a long list in a broader effort to make hiring easier, since nobody wants to work at DOJ right now.

Timestamps:

00:00 — Cold open: the FBI’s surprisingly loose new hiring standards
00:31 — Welcome, and this week’s topic: regulations quietly disappearing
01:14 — The EPA has stopped enforcing its own clean air and water rules
02:07 — CDC rollbacks, the return of measles, and vaccine conspiracy talk
02:28 — The AI whistleblower warning: human extinction by 2030
02:47 — How Truman-era Congress actually regulated nuclear weapons — and why today’s Congress won’t touch AI
03:17 — Joyce asks ChatGPT how it plans to kill her
04:21 — The Doomsday Clock just moved closer to midnight
04:50 — The FBI’s lowered hiring bar, explained (sort of)
05:35 — Cash Patel’s explanation raises more questions than it answers
06:32 — More standards, quietly removed