EXCLUSIVE: Abdul El-Sayed joins Rebekah Jones on Mesoscale News

Rebekah is first to speak with the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate's about his newly-released AI plan.

The full transcript for this interview is available after the article. Video not loading? Click here.

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Washington, D.C., was under an extreme heat warning when I spoke with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed outside the United States Supreme Court last week.

Temperatures were approaching records set during the 2011 heat wave, while electrical grids across the eastern United States prepared for near-record demand.

The setting underscored the themes of the conversation.

Behind us stood a Supreme Court preparing to issue major rulings on executive power and birthright citizenship. Around us, the realities of climate change were impossible to ignore. And threaded through nearly every topic we discussed was a broader question confronting American politics: whether democratic institutions can keep pace with the economic, technological, and environmental transformations already underway.

El-Sayed, a physician and former director of the Detroit Health Department, is seeking Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat on a platform that combines traditional progressive priorities with proposals for expanded regulation of artificial intelligence, greater corporate accountability, and structural democratic reforms.

When asked how he would approach climate change in the Senate, El-Sayed argued that policymakers have often failed to connect the long-term climate crisis to the immediate economic concerns facing voters.

“We have to find the points of alignment between the ongoing crisis of climate change and the short-term affordability crisis that people face in their lives,” he said. “We can make energy way more affordable by investing full-scale in renewable energy; in solar, in wind, in geothermal. We can bring down the cost of energy. We can also create a whole bunch of energy jobs.”

That argument comes as the United States faces a sharp increase in electricity demand after decades of relative stability. Much of that growth is being driven by the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure and hyperscale data centers.

Recent analyses by the Department of Energy and independent researchers estimate that data centers could consume between approximately 9% and 15% of U.S. electricity by the end of the decade, depending on the pace of AI deployment and infrastructure construction.

For communities across the country, those projections are no longer abstract. They increasingly translate into disputes over water access, electric rates, air quality, land use, and local political power.

El-Sayed’s recently-released AI proposal reflects those concerns. Unlike many legislative proposals that focus primarily on regulating AI outputs, his framework emphasizes ownership, governance, and public accountability.

“We’re proposing an additional amount of democratic control for AI,” he said, arguing that advanced AI development should be separated from existing technology monopolies and subjected to public oversight.

He framed the stakes in direct terms.

“You are talking about technology that could existentially corrode the social contract on which we’ve lived for a very long time,” he said. “If I got to choose between democracy and AI, I’m choosing democracy.”

The conversation also turned to the institutions responsible for governing that technology.

On the Supreme Court, El-Sayed proposed replacing lifetime appointments with renewable ten-year terms and guaranteeing each president a fixed number of appointments. He also called for stronger ethical accountability mechanisms for justices.

“Clearly you’ve had a cozy relationship between Supreme Court justices and people who want something from the court,” he said. “And just like every other political actor, there needs to be some level of accountability.”

For El-Sayed, however, these issues ultimately return to the field in which he built his career: public health.

As director of the Detroit Health Department, he said he repeatedly confronted problems extending far beyond medicine itself — pollution, poverty, infrastructure, and political institutions.

“I kept coming up against all of the structural imbalances in the system that make people sick in the first place,” he said.

That framework also shapes how he approaches climate policy.

“Every climate-relevant gas that comes out of a smokestack gets sieved through the lungs of our babies,” he said, reflecting on his work monitoring air pollution and confronting industrial polluters in Detroit.

Throughout the conversation, El-Sayed returned to a consistent argument: climate change, artificial intelligence, public health, economic inequality, and democratic governance cannot be treated as separate problems. They are interconnected systems, shaped by political choices and economic power.

Whether discussing renewable energy, Supreme Court reform, or the governance of artificial intelligence, his position was consistent: democratic institutions must be capable of confronting the realities of the twenty-first century, or risk being overwhelmed by them.

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TRANSCRIPT:

(00:00:00.051):

REBEKAH: And he is here to talk to me about a few really important issues, including SCOTUS.

Today, we did not get a ruling on the CASA case that questions for right citizenship, but that is expected to come either tomorrow or later this week. I worked at CASA when we filed a lawsuit. I was in the first hearing for the national injunction, and so I’ve been following that.

(00:00:19.325):

ABDUL: Which direction do you think it’s going to go?

(00:00:21.947):

REBEKAH: You know what? They gave us a lot of softball wins today, so I’m a little concerned that they’ll hit us with a major blow, but you know, I’m also one of those people who deep down believes that there are opportunities for people to do good, and they might surprise us.

(00:00:36.220):

ABDUL: They whiff so often. It’s right there.

(00:00:39.081):

REBEKAH: It is, It is right there, and they do. But, if anybody had any reason to give up on politicians doing the right thing, it’s me and everything I went through in Florida and DeSantis. But I don’t. I’m still out here.

(00:00:55.550):

ABDUL: I appreciate that.

(00:00:56.453):

REBEKAH: Alright, so we’re going to get into the first couple questions. One, it’s very hot today. DC is set to either meet or break its heat record for July, which was set in 2011. It’s going to be 104 degrees on Friday.

(00:01:08.342):

ABDUL: Also, you can taste the air.

(00:01:11.844):

REBEKAH: It’s moist. I grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, and I’ll admit, it’s really moist out here, which is why my hair curled, despite my best efforts. On our country’s 250-year anniversary, our planet’s basically running a temperature of 101 degrees. And there, especially with this administration, but also in general, there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to address that.

So, what would you specifically do in your role as a senator to mitigate climate change?

(00:01:38.831):

ABDUL: So, we have to address the crisis. And in order to address the crisis, we have to find the points of alignment. Between the long-term crisis, not long-term, but the ongoing crisis of climate change and the short-term affordability crisis that people face in their lives. And we can make energy way more affordable by investing full-scale renewable energy in solar, in wind, in geothermal. We can bring down the cost of energy. We can also create a whole bunch of energy jobs. They’re literally taking ExxonMobil dollars to bring offline projects that would have created jobs and would have reduced your energy. So for us, we’ve got to be focused 100% on articulating the broad goal of taking on the climate crisis in the short-term goal of right now you pay too much for energy because we don’t have renewable energy opportunities and options for you. And right now, we’re taking away jobs that could be available in your community if we were to invest in this.

(00:03:03.176):

REBEKAH: All right, let’s go to the next one. So the key question everybody’s going to want answered is do you support expanding the court? Putting term limits? What is your plan to overhaul SCOTUS?

(00:03:15.771):

ABDUL: This is a bit of a back of the envelope sort of calculus here and I’m not a jurist, I’m a doctor. But here’s what I would think. I think that you should limit the term to a 10-year term with one 10-year renewal. And then you offer every president three appointments which they can use either to appoint somebody new or to renew somebody who’s already on the court.

(00:03:42.604):

REBEKAH: But does that allow them to remove someone from the court in order to do that new appointment?

(00:03:46.727):

ABDUL: No. So you would have a naturally expanding court but it would address a bunch of disincentives. The thing we hate about the court right now is you got nine, you’re limited to nine. Once you have this kind of incentive, everybody’s incentivized to like appoint the most athletic graduating from Harvard to Yale Law School, right? And they can be ideological extremists because there is no accountability down the line. And people stay way past when it’s appropriate to stay, right? And it’s Russian roulette for a president. There have been presidents who have zero appointments and there are presidents who have three, right? So this would make sure that the appointment process follows the political process. Every president gets three. It would mean that because you only have a 10-year term, your incentive is to appoint the best person for the job. And if you have an option for renewal, at least in the first 10 years, you have an incentive to adhere to the Constitution because you don’t know who’s going to be president when your term comes up, right? And so I think it addresses a lot of the disincentives we have. And then there’s the opportunity to just allow the court to grow with term.

(00:04:51.572):

REBEKAH: Would you suggest any revisions to Supreme Court confirmation process? We used to obviously have the 60 votes required before the filibuster rule change, which meant that you had to have someone that at least a couple of the opposing party had to agree on. We no longer have that. Do you support putting that back in place?

(00:05:06.282):

ABDUL: I oppose the filibuster generally, but in this particular, for confirmations, I actually think it’s more important to have more broad agreement. So that’d be interesting to abolish the filibuster, but for confirmation process. I actually think...

(00:05:21.296):

REBEKAH: Yeah, but even for the confirmation process more generally, right?

(00:05:24.437):

ABDUL: So, you know, I think it’s helpful to have some sort of bipartisan accountability around the people who operate government. And yeah, so that’s an interesting question. I hadn’t thought about it that way. That’s a really good question.

(00:05:37.743):

REBEKAH: Speaking of accountability, what do you think about possible impeachment or other accountability measures for those who obviously are taking kickbacks?

(00:05:46.986):

ABDUL: Violent basic ethics?

(00:05:48.167):

REBEKAH: Yes.

(00:05:48.987):

ABDUL: I think we need a clear ethical requirement. And I actually think we need to, like, what is, as, as, as the conservative friends always remind us, what is a law if you’re not going to enforce it? So it’s a law if you’re not going to enforce it. And when it comes to the court, they, you know, they talk about their vaunted self appoint or self, uh, enforcement process that never actually operates.

So clearly it’s not working. Clearly you’ve had a cozy relationship between Supreme Court justices and people who want something from the court. And just like every other political actor, there needs to be some level of accountability. But you know you have that job for life and nobody can take it away from you.

(00:06:24.405):

REBEKAH: Then you start to pull the shenanigans that too many in the court have pulled, which actually kind of brings me to my next one: your AI plan was released today and you in an interview said that you’re not afraid of you know the millions that might be thrown against you with you taking that position because you’ve already got, you know, APAC and other corporate PACs throwing millions. I think the article said APAC’s over $2 million against you?

(00:06:56.844):

ABDUL: APAC has done $23 million. Yeah, the reporting on that article, we probably have something about $23 million.

(00:07:02.929):

REBEKAH: Yeah, I was about to say, two sounds small. $2 million is like a rural Mississippi House case for AIPAC.

(00:07:07.792):

ABDUL: $23 million. They’ve called me the most dangerous candidate for the U.S. relationship. And they will likely spend double that in the next month.

(00:07:16.999):

REBEKAH: So how will you... because Michigan is not always a clear-cut state for Democrats. How will you overcome that targeted spending in a general?

(00:07:25.477):

ABDUL: You can remember, like, there’s a law of diminishing returns. Once they call you what they want to call you, what’s them calling it to you again?

(00:07:30.978):

REBEKAH: They could always just make something new up. I mean, they’re really good at just making up things.

(00:07:34.479):

ABDUL: But, like, the other thing about it is when they do that, they give you attention. And when they give you attention, you have the opportunity to take that attention and point it back. So, AIPAC’s already doing it. The AI packs are going to come and try to, but what’s the upside is that you actually get to speak truth about what people need and deserve and I’ll be honest with you I’ve been up and down my state I’ve done 400 plus public events I’ve done 110 different cities now and no matter where I go people ask me this same question about data centers now and I think it’s just really important for us to realize that you are talking about technology that could existentially corrode the social contract on which we’ve lived for a very long time it could cause existential doom humanity and if we’re operating allowing these to be fundamentally unaccountable to anybody. Advancing this technology, that is a very dangerous situation.

And all we’re proposing is that we need some democratic control of a technology that the AI corporations and their CEOs themselves say would take 50% of the jobs as we know them and could cause existential doom to humanity. So I’m just saying that democracy is an old technology, but it’s a pretty good one. And if I got to choose between democracy and AI, I’m choosing democracy.

(00:08:46.277):

REBEKAH: One of the things I noticed is that your AI plan focuses almost exclusively on regulatory government, not infrastructure expansion. So ways that you would have it be governed, ways that the ownership would split up. And like a previous plan from Bernie Sanders, you’re going to want to take 50% of that revenue and give it back to people. Your plan looks specifically at healthcare, small business loans.

(00:09:16.220):

ABDUL: Yeah, so healthcare, small business loans, retraining programs, but like the big picture here is that I love the Sanders proposal that takes 50% of the ownership of these corporations and puts it in a sovereign wealth fund so that you can divvy some of that back out. What we’re proposing is an additional amount of democratic control for AI that we’re going to completely control, hold, the AI hyperscale labs from existing within big tech. So forcing the Metas and the Googles and the Microsofts of the world to disinvest. Reform them as public interest corporations and then have a system of democratic appointment to boards so that the majority of your board is publicly accountable, right? And I think that changes the governance of AI itself. Then we also stipulate some of the things that AI shouldn’t be able to do

(00:10:07.588):

REBEKAH: How would you do things differently than the failed attempts previously to regulate social media companies?

(00:10:33.930):

ABDUL: We didn’t get there. We never got there.

(00:10:35.851):

REBEKAH: So what’s the difference now?

(00:10:37.191):

ABDUL: The difference is I’m not bought off by them. And we’re actually talking about doing it. The problem that we had with social media is that too many senators didn’t understand how social media worked in the first place. And then a lot of the ones we did were bought off by it. We can’t make the same mistake when it comes to AI. The best I can do is I’m not bought off. I don’t take corporate money. The AI super PACs are going to spend huge amounts of money likely to try and beat me. And I understand how this thing works. And so that’s what leadership is for Leadership is supposed to have a broader conversation about where we want to go and then take us there, right? And so we need like-minded folks getting elected into these bodies so that we can actually spur a conversation about the kind of regulation we need I mean, here’s the crazy thing I just want you to think about It’s been less than four years since CatGPT came out And we’re talking about leaps and bounds for what this technology can do Think about what happens in the next four years if we’re going to regulate now. We need action. We’ve needed action. And I’m not going to stand idly by and just, you know, stay quiet while I think this is the existential question of our time. Like, how do we regulate AI? So we propose a plan, hopes to have better plans they can put them out too. But I’m not afraid of the AI super PACs coming out and trying to beat us because at the end of the day, like, you know, money talks only a little bit in politics. People talk in politics. And, you know, my appeal is to the broader everyday people. So if you like the plan, if you like the idea of regulating AI, go to our website, chip us off by bucks because I’m up against the big guys.

(00:12:01.201):

REBEKAH: AI regulation is possibly one of the most popular and bipartisan positions right now because of its rapid expansion. My question about that was, you have the regulation part down, but one of the major concerns is the rapid expansion of infrastructure. Should some of that money that’s taken from these AI companies go back to remediate the environmental damage that’s done by building those facilities?

(00:12:20.862):

ABDUL: Really good point. You know, we put on terms of engagement, so that you limit the damage on the front end. You know, no touching our water resources, no increasing our ratepayer fees. You know, you’re going to have to put money up front for public interest projects that are negotiating in good faith. But you’re right, like there’s been a lot of damage done. And, you know, I believe in holding corporate polluters economically, regardless of if corporate polluters are, you know, data center operators or folks who polluted our water with free pass in Michigan.

(00:12:48.746):

REBEKAH: That brings me to pretty much my last question, which is more fun.

(00:12:54.085):

ABDUL: I’ve been having fun!

(00:12:57.926):

REBEKAH: Everybody knows me as like, the Debbie Downer. Policy can be fun. For two years the only time people saw me was when something really bad was happening And so now I’m kind of like always a bearer of bad news.

ABDUL: But this is good stuff

(00:13:11.730):

REBEKAH: So you were in public health. You were 29 or 30 years old when you were appointed to be the head of the Detroit Public Health Administration, Which requires a certain amount of grit, determination, and talent. By entering politics you feel like you’re walking away from that career because that is a hard thing to do.I was I was managerial position at 30 for a state health agency, nothing like that, so it must have taken so much work.

(00:13:37.799):

ABDUL: So you know public health is a framework for understanding how we keep people health. In that role, I kept coming up against all of the structural imbalances in the system that make people sick in the first place and keep them from being able to get the healthcare that they need when they get sick. And I was sitting in my office the day they froze federal funds trying to figure out how to keep my WIC program flow, how to keep vaccines in arms, how to keep my federally qualified health centers open. And you look at the guy who runs health for the country, the dude who works out famously in jeans, who only knows enough about science to use big words the wrong way.

(00:14:18.985):

REBEKAH: Just enough to be dangerous.

(00:14:21.166):

ABDUL: Exactly. And I think we need a public health senator. I’d be the first ever public health official to serve in the U.S. Senate. And so in some respects, it’s not that I’m walking away from public health. It’s that I hope to bring public health to the U.S. Senate where we can actually use it as a framework to pass laws and ask questions about how we keep people healthy in the first place and how we build a health care system where everybody gets the health care that they need and deserve. You know, public health, the definition, as you know, is what we as a society do collectively to ensure conditions for people to be healthy. And that starts with the laws we write. It starts with the way we enforce those laws. And I think we need that perspective in the U.S. Senate.

So I hope to be able to take that to the Senate rather than to walk away from it at all.

(00:15:01.834):

REBEKAH: Everyone knows I’m a big proponent of scientists being elected to Congress. You know, it’s my own little bias, although I’m in climate science. I segued into public health by a very strange set of circumstances. My very last final question I ask everybody is: What’s your favorite Earth phenomenon? And why?

(00:15:28.026):

ABDUL: There are so many cool ones.

(00:15:29.747):

REBEKAH: It’s got to be Earth-based, though. It can’t be people-based.

(00:15:36.610):

ABDUL: I’ve got a couple in my mind, and I’m trying to real-time run a little simulation, like which one’s cool... I think flying through clouds is one of the most inspiring things. when your flight takes off and you’re looking out the window and you’re like going, through the cloud, so like cloud formation and the fact that you know we consistently watch as the earth takes a shower and that you get to like fly through it and this is H2O that under any circumstance should likely be in liquid form, but it’s in gas form and you can fly through it without getting wet. I just think that’s really cool.

(00:16:22.465):

REBEKAH: It’s really cool. I love clouds. They’re squarely in my storm focus area. So if there’s anything else you want to add, things that people should know, my following is very climate-based, so they’re going to want to hear about that, but also democracy, save it.

(00:16:34.068):

ABDUL: Yeah, climate is a public health issue. But public health is also an earth justice issue You know, I spent a lot of my time in Detroit taking on corporate polluters for a reason because every climate-relevant gas that comes out of a smokestack gets sieved through the lungs of our babies. So we put air quality monitors all over our county and we took on some of the biggest polluters in our communities And if we’re serious about taking on the climate crisis, we’ve got to be serious about situating in the lives of real people. As for a lot of people, we’ll have this debate about 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees. We’ll have this debate about the melting of the ice caps, but that’s not real for a lot of people. I think we just got to make it really real. And then I think we need people who are going to go out and be champions and fight on these issues in spaces and places and in communities where these things aren’t talked about all that often. So I hope I can earn your support. I am running for US Senate. Go to abdulforsenate.com/donate to chip in a couple of bucks. You know who I’m up against. AIPAC, all the corporate PACs. I’ve never taken a dime of corporate money in my life. I never will. And if you want to volunteer with us, we’ve got five weeks left to go. I hope you’ll sign up to volunteer.

(00:17:46.109):

REBEKAH: Well, thank you guys for tuning in. And thank you, doctor.