AI transcript
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0:00:59 Are we shaping AI or is AI shaping us? There’s a number of existential risks that confront
0:01:06 human beings. I think AI just being developed reduces the overall existential risk characteristics.
0:01:14 I’m Preet Bharara, and this week, Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Super Agency,
0:01:20 What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future, joins me on my podcast Stay Tuned With Preet.
0:01:26 The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned With Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:35 Welcome to Raging Moderates. I’m Scott Galloway. And I’m Jessica Tarlev.
0:01:38 Jess, did you watch the Super Bowl? I did. It was so boring.
0:01:42 Yeah, it wasn’t a good one. We would do for a bad one. Did you stay up?
0:01:47 You know, I wasn’t planning to. I’m not into sports, and it started at 11.30 p.m. and I made
0:01:54 this big to-do about, I was basically this axis of evil between shitty fatty food and the diabetes
0:01:59 industrial complex and that the game is boring and CET. And then, of course, my 14-year-old said,
0:02:05 “Dad, you want to watch Super Bowl?” I’m like, “Yep, let’s do it.” And so I stayed awake until
0:02:09 the halftime show, which I thought was awful, by the way. And I get I’m not Kendrick Lamar’s
0:02:14 audience, but I thought the whole thing was just a giant snooze. What did you think?
0:02:20 The game itself, I wasn’t much interested. I’m not the biggest NFL enthusiast. I was like the
0:02:25 side stories. So, you know, I want as much Taylor and Travis as possible. I thought that, you know,
0:02:30 Trump was the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, which kind of surprised me.
0:02:34 I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened before. So, you know, there were side stories going on
0:02:41 that were kind of interesting, but the game not so good. The halftime show, I wasn’t wild about.
0:02:48 You know, it wasn’t Bruno Mars for me was such a good halftime show, which I’m sure is a very
0:02:52 lame pick in all of this, or Janna Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Actually, a friend who was
0:03:00 over was at that show and got to see the nipple. So, we talked about that for a while. But overall,
0:03:04 not great. We had a lot of little kids in the house. We cooked a lot. My husband made a great
0:03:11 pasta carbonara, rigatoni carbonara, or no, lumaki carbonara. I’m trying to get my noodles
0:03:18 straight. All in all, whatever, I guess, but raw, raw America. There was one fantastic moment when,
0:03:23 of course, Taylor Swift got booed. That made me happy. Why is that? Is that wrong? Yeah.
0:03:27 Is that wrong? I thought that was hilarious. Why? I thought that, I don’t know. It’s like,
0:03:31 it’s like the Roman Coliseum, except lions. We have Taylor Swift. So, occasionally,
0:03:37 I think he’d boo against the lions. I don’t know. I found the whole thing. It’s like America,
0:03:42 where we sell boner pills and opioid-induced contemplation medication while giving young
0:03:49 men CET, you know, America. I just find the whole thing. I don’t know. I’m too cynical.
0:03:54 So, when are you moving home? I’m not sure. 17 months, three weeks, and four days is what is
0:03:58 on my calendar. Not that I’m thinking about it, but I’m looking forward to getting back
0:04:00 to the States, because, you know, things are going so well.
0:04:06 Totally. Yeah. I would be desperate to come back at this particular moment. Though,
0:04:11 I think about moving back to London, and then I think I’ll definitely want to, if we do it,
0:04:15 that I’ll want to come back to America as well. So, it’s like…
0:04:18 I don’t think anything makes you feel more… The abuse of relationship, you can’t quit, right?
0:04:23 Well, I mean, the reality is, if you didn’t know what was going on, I think the reality for most
0:04:28 Americans, unless you’re a veteran or a beneficiary of SNAP or Head Start, which is a lot of Americans,
0:04:34 but quite frankly, if you’re in our economic weight class, you can shield yourself from this
0:04:40 nonsense. And I would argue you’re probably in a beneficiary of it, and not in a good way.
0:04:45 But what I recognize moving to London, which is in my opinion, the second best city in the world,
0:04:51 is it is really hard to beat America. And that is, if you like opportunity, if you like a crush
0:04:59 and a collision of culture, grit, creativity, there’s just nothing like America. And my reductive
0:05:04 analysis after I say this and it triggers some people molesting the earth for the last 30 years
0:05:10 is that America is still the best place to make money, and Europe’s the best place to spend it.
0:05:16 So, when you’re going into your spending years, absolutely spend time in Europe and go to Madrid
0:05:22 and get a great bottle of wine for 10 bucks, not 80. Check out Munich, which is an amazing city,
0:05:29 Milan, go to, you know, PSG game in Paris. It’s just, but if you’re looking to advance your career,
0:05:34 your influence, your impact on the world professionally, everything here, I would
0:05:40 argue is a kind of medium or second gear. It just can’t get out of second gear. But
0:05:44 I gotta be honest, I can’t wait to get back. I can’t wait to get back to America.
0:05:50 Yeah, well, we’ll be thrilled to have you. No, I’m done with that part. But I did notice that
0:05:58 when I was in grad school, that all of the top performers in my PhD class, all desperate for
0:06:04 American positions, like couldn’t wait to be able to do it, even with all of the problems with academia.
0:06:09 But yeah, well, that’s, that’s the joke about Scotland, that some of the finest minds in the
0:06:13 world, and they all have the same thing in common they left. Anyways, all right, enough of that.
0:06:17 Today, we’re discussing Elon Musk’s increasing government influence. I don’t know if you’ve
0:06:22 heard, he’s this very wealthy individual who puts rockets into space but doesn’t live with any of his
0:06:30 children. He’s this former South African slash Canadian slash naturalized American. Anyways,
0:06:34 interesting cat, we’re going to talk about him. Reminds me of this very popular guy in the middle
0:06:38 of the last century, who some people really loved. We’re coming in hot, I guess, right?
0:06:44 But most people, you know, most people over time found that, found that, well,
0:06:47 they, it’s interesting, they have the same hand gesture. It appears that they say they have the
0:06:52 same body language. Anyways, we’re going to talk about Elon Musk’s increasing government influence,
0:06:57 Trump’s buyout offer to federal workers, and the latest Democrats’ effort to fight back. All right,
0:07:03 let’s get into it, Joss. I think we’re already in, so go. Go, yeah. I’ve already, I’ve already
0:07:08 dived in the shallow. You gave away the game already. We’ve already talked about 1930s, so yep.
0:07:14 Elon Musk’s grip on the executive branch keeps tightening. His Doja crew has been popping up
0:07:19 at federal agencies, snooping around sensitive systems. And until last week, when a federal
0:07:23 judge blocked his team from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system, my understanding
0:07:28 is every time they run up against a judge, they get blocked. Trump defended Musk’s efforts calling
0:07:34 it part of his plan to cut wasteful spending and praise Musk for his work. But the AFL-CIO and
0:07:40 the Department of Justice are hitting back with multiple lawsuits. And Elon got also a new provocative
0:07:46 time magazine cover that puts him behind Trump’s desk. Interestingly, Republican support from
0:07:52 us all in the Trump administration is cooling off. An economist you got pulled shows only 26%
0:07:58 now want him to have a significant influence. That’s down from earlier numbers, Joss. Musk also
0:08:05 tweeted at me and Kara, funny. Barely noticed my pivot co-host over the weekend accusing us of
0:08:12 threatening his engineers just for calling out the harm they’re causing. So, look, before I’m
0:08:17 not going to, I don’t want to get into a back and forth here. What I would say is that the comments
0:08:22 made were made by me, not by Kara. And I find it sort of telling that he puts Kara’s name first and
0:08:29 goes after Kara instead of just going after the person who he has or should have a grievance
0:08:37 with. And that’s me. And anyways, I’ll let you go first. Any thoughts on what’s going on with
0:08:44 Elon, Joss? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on what’s going on with Elon. I assumed that Kara
0:08:48 came first in that because she has long covered him. And last week she had a big interview with
0:08:55 Ezra Klein, which I thought was very impressive talking about her years of covering him and
0:08:59 being close to him. So that was my assumption as to why that happened. But yes, I have a lot of
0:09:04 thoughts. I don’t want to steal. If you have things to say about the tweet stuff or maybe you’re
0:09:08 saving for pivot when you too can talk about it more in depth, but I don’t want to cut you off
0:09:12 if you’ve got more on that because mine is not about the tweets necessarily. You know, I don’t
0:09:18 have a lot. At first, I started, this is what happens whenever Elon tweets at me or gets angry
0:09:23 at me. And that is my phone starts blowing up with, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” And I’m
0:09:27 not on Twitter. So I’m shielded from most of the toxicity. And someone sent me a screenshot
0:09:33 of the tweet and that it had 11,000 comments. And I’m like, “Well, I bet those comments aren’t
0:09:39 fun to read.” But, I mean, essentially, I start to get worried and I start to get panicked and I
0:09:44 start to, you know, I start to get anxious. And then I realize, okay, whatever you say about Kara
0:09:49 and me is we live with our children. We don’t sleep with a loaded gun next to us. We’re not
0:09:56 severely addicted to a disassociative substance. We’re not making Nazi gestures. And he’s acting
0:10:02 like these engineers are in Quantanimal Bay when the reality is that probably the most serious thing
0:10:06 they’re doing other than denying children and veterans their payments, trying to figure out if
0:10:14 the meme further for Doge should be wearing sunglasses. And just this notion of these billionaire
0:10:20 tears where he can’t decide if it’s his struggling engineers or just proper grammar, like pick a
0:10:25 struggle boss. It’s like, well, you don’t have auto correct. I just, I start to read this thing.
0:10:30 I start to get upset. I start to think about responding. And then I think I don’t want to
0:10:36 create a sideshow. I want to focus on what I think is important. And that is highlighting
0:10:42 that we have somebody who was not cleared or approved by government or Congress,
0:10:49 who is basically hacking into our federal systems. If China did this, it would be an
0:10:57 act of war without the permission of Congress and shutting off funds to veterans and children
0:11:04 and the neediest. And I think that’s where we have to remain our focus. So Musk saying mean
0:11:09 things about me, that’s a sideshow and it really doesn’t matter. It’s not important.
0:11:14 And I’m not going to, other than I want to stay focused on, you know, when you go into an emergency
0:11:20 room, there’s a staying called stop the bleeding. And that is if someone comes in with a gunshot
0:11:24 and they are hemorrhaging blood, they don’t take their PSA or their cholesterol level.
0:11:31 So my ego and me being butthurt or responding or getting into it with him on Twitter,
0:11:36 that’s a distraction. We need to stay focused on the fact that we are now in a position where
0:11:41 we’ve created a series of incentives where when we convict the president of being a felon and he
0:11:47 gets reelected, he has learned that the American public, as long as they control all three branches
0:11:53 of government, will not hold him accountable for trespassing or hacking into our most sensitive
0:11:58 federal systems. Now, if it gets to a judge, it gets pushed back, but they’re kind of in this
0:12:03 Blitzkrieg moment of let’s ask for forgiveness as opposed to permission. That’s what I want to
0:12:07 stay focused on. So I’m trying as hard as I can. And this isn’t easy for me, as you know, Jess.
0:12:15 Yeah. To put my ego aside and focus what limited audience and bandwidth I have on stopping the
0:12:20 bleeding, if you will, your thoughts. I applaud your maturity. It wasn’t what I expected.
0:12:26 I had a daunting walk down here this morning. I was like, how do I avoid
0:12:30 what I was going to happen in the conversation about the tweet? I don’t want to get involved.
0:12:36 That’s your bag, but I like this attitude. And I think it’s honestly where the American
0:12:40 public is going to be best served, A, because podcasts are the most important thing in the
0:12:47 entire world and we can save them all, but B, because the American electorate has basically
0:12:54 told us that they’re not interested in a lot of the side shows. They voted kind of singularly
0:13:00 focused either on the economy or on an immigration. And that’s what they deserve to have in their
0:13:04 conversations. That’s what they deserve to have delivered for them in terms of policy.
0:13:10 None of those things have happened thus far in the first, I can’t, it’s only three weeks.
0:13:17 So that’s what’s so crazy that this has only been three weeks since Trump was inaugurated.
0:13:23 But I think that’s a very mature outlook on this. And I look forward to listening to pivot,
0:13:28 where I’m sure you two devolve into the immaturity. I’m just going to unshane Kara.
0:13:33 Just let her loose. Well, she’s better. She’s better at counter punching than me.
0:13:41 She does have good insults. Yeah. She’s fearless. And I did, I mean,
0:13:45 it’s interesting, I’m thinking a lot about men emasculated. It is interesting that the Doge
0:13:52 team is all young men. Yeah. And I do think that at the end of the day, the people responsible for
0:13:57 this are the president and Elon Musk. And I think these, I’m going to call them kids,
0:14:02 but these young men, young men are more risk aggressive. Biologically, the prefrontal cortex
0:14:07 doesn’t catch up until they’re the age of 25 to a woman. It is interesting that there are no women
0:14:13 as part of this group. But isn’t this what you predicted to some degree in talking about how
0:14:21 disenfranchised and out of kind of mainstream society, young men were being pushed. So they’re
0:14:28 looking for community. They’re looking for fun and adventure and that high, wherever they can
0:14:33 find it. And they’ve spent a lot of time on their computers and they’re really fucking good, right?
0:14:38 They’re the ones who are going to be able to hack into our system. So it does seem,
0:14:43 I think calling them hackers is probably wrong. Hackers in a past life and some of them have even
0:14:52 been fired from past internships or jobs for hacking or working at places where convicted
0:14:57 hackers have been employed. I mean, this is a motley crew in terms of resumes. And there are a
0:15:02 lot of FBI agents, former FBI agents who have been speaking out saying, these are not people that
0:15:07 could pass a conventional clearance, which seems like a problem to me when you’re talking about
0:15:13 the treasury payment system. But I do think that what we’re seeing in the Doge team is very much
0:15:18 linked to the world that you have been talking about for the last few years and will be the
0:15:24 subject of your forthcoming book if you would like to plug that. Thanks for that. So I think
0:15:29 they should be held accountable if a law has been broken here and that anyone who goes after
0:15:35 the president or must for laws broken, which I believe they’re trespassing. I believe that they
0:15:40 have purposely circumvented Congress. We’re in uncharted territory because you don’t know if
0:15:46 that’s an actual, if that is a civil or criminal offense when the president approves of it. I think
0:15:53 that’s for courts to decide. But I do think it’s a side show to a certain extent to focus on these
0:15:57 young men, to be clear, the people accountable for this, the people who are orchestrating this are
0:16:03 the president and Elon Musk. And to a certain extent, the Democrats, I don’t want to say who
0:16:06 are enabling it, but have been caught flat-footed and have to figure out a way to strike back.
0:16:12 And we’re going to talk about that later in the show. But it is interesting. And just to be
0:16:18 real here about these young men, I was thinking about it. I’ve said a lot. If I was born in 1920
0:16:23 Germany, I’d probably be wearing a Nazi uniform and probably would have died on a Russian field
0:16:29 somewhere thinking that I was serving the fatherland. You are a function of where you grow up and in
0:16:34 what time. And you can see with a lot of young men, these are really talented young men with a lot
0:16:39 of opportunities. So I don’t feel comfortable grouping them into the bigger swath of young men
0:16:45 in America who have a lack of on-ramps to a good living, a lack of financial security, a lack of
0:16:51 prospects, a lack of an ability to meet a potential mate and start a family. These guys are all
0:16:57 incredibly talented and have a lot of opportunities. And the only lesson someone called me, a
0:17:00 readership called me, I didn’t go on and I said, “What would your advice be to these young men?”
0:17:04 And I’m like, “Again, it’s a side show.” But what I would tell any young man is that we’re in a
0:17:10 high pressure situation. Do what I didn’t do. And that is assemble a kitchen cabinet of people to
0:17:15 advise you say, “This is what’s going on. Do you have any thoughts for me, whether it’s your parents,
0:17:21 whether it’s your parents’ friends, whether it’s just friends?” Because I saw being a young man,
0:17:26 trying to express my manhood is quickly assessing the situation and then making a snap decision and
0:17:33 trying to talk everybody into me being right, whatever that decision was. It is very hard to
0:17:38 read the label, especially as a young man when you’re more risk aggressive and quite friendly,
0:17:42 don’t have incredibly good judgment or reason. You’re not that thoughtful. You’re not that measured
0:17:48 yet. It is really hard, if not impossible to read the label from inside of the bottle. So the larger
0:17:54 learning I would want to communicate to all young men is do what I didn’t do. I would have saved
0:18:00 myself a lot of heartache, a lot of professional missteps, a lot of broken relationships. Had I
0:18:05 just reached out to people and said, “This is the situation. Do you have any thoughts or advice for
0:18:11 me?” And you might decide not to change your mind about what you’re doing. But this is, you know,
0:18:16 when you find yourself in kind of uncharted territory, it’s just a really good idea to check
0:18:21 in with people from different backgrounds and say, “This is what’s going on. It’s pretty intense. Do
0:18:27 you have any thoughts?” And I didn’t learn that until I was much older. And I think men have a much
0:18:34 more difficult time because we conflate strength and masculinity with being decisive as opposed
0:18:39 to being thoughtful and listening. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think Democrats really suffered
0:18:45 from a very effective smear campaign of us being the feminine party because we were talking about
0:18:52 issues that, God forbid, affected women. And men by extension, when someone is pregnant and there’s
0:18:58 someone who got her pregnant and is sticking around, then it affects you too. So I totally
0:19:04 agree with that. And I didn’t mean to paint with such a broad brush, but I do think that there’s
0:19:10 the widest group of young men that you were talking about who are lacking in opportunity and
0:19:15 lacking in mobility and the chance to make meaningful relationships and to live a full and
0:19:23 loving and beautiful life that we all want. But then there is also a large contingent of
0:19:29 these bro types who feel, even though they have been afforded, tons of opportunities
0:19:33 have had the best education and probably aren’t facing any student debt at the end of this,
0:19:39 getting internships at places like Palantir at 19 years old who still feel aggrieved.
0:19:44 And a lot of that is rooted in the fact that they don’t see a ramp to the level of success that
0:19:50 their boomer parents or late Gen X boomer parents had by their age. I mean, thinking back to how
0:19:58 enormous it felt if a parent could earn a million dollars in a year and then how stifled people
0:20:03 who see themselves as upwardly mobile and are living in these big cities and maybe are at a
0:20:09 big law firm or in banking, when you say, oh, earn a million dollars a year, I’m not going to have
0:20:13 anywhere close to the life my parents have. My kids are not going to go to private school,
0:20:21 which is now 55 to $65,000 a year versus the 25,000 when I was growing up as an elder millennial.
0:20:27 So I wanted to add that. But something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and this is shifting gears
0:20:33 a little bit, but still about what’s going on with Musk and Co is how much this moment feels to me
0:20:41 like it did when Trump and the array of lawyers that were fanned out across the country after
0:20:47 the 2020 election were getting to work to essentially poison pill as big of a swath of the
0:20:53 population as they possibly could to not believe that Joe Biden had won a free and fair election.
0:20:59 They did it with vaccine skepticism. Their power is strongest when their supporters are separated
0:21:05 from the rest of society. And I feel like we’re seeing that moment again. And J.D. Vance tweeted
0:21:10 over the weekend after the judge ruled about the treasury payments. Not that Scott Besin
0:21:14 couldn’t access the treasury payment system, but that you couldn’t have individuals that weren’t
0:21:19 fully vetted having access. And we’ll see what happens. I think today there’ll be an addendum
0:21:23 to that. But he’s tweeting saying that they’re trying to control the executive’s quote unquote
0:21:28 legitimate power. And a lot of that as a reference back to the Supreme Court case where they basically
0:21:34 gave Trump immunity from anything or future presidents, but it was really about Trump.
0:21:37 And then you had, I don’t know if you saw Christine Noem, the Homeland Security
0:21:43 Secretary was on with Dana Bash this weekend. People don’t trust the government.
0:21:47 Right. And then Dana says to her, sorry, I shouldn’t have said Dana, it’s Dana,
0:21:55 says to her, well, you are the government. And then she’s driveled for 58 seconds after
0:21:58 that and shows she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. But she actually did say the
0:22:04 important part out loud, which is they are creating an environment and have fostered for years now,
0:22:08 an environment in which people don’t feel that they can trust the government.
0:22:13 And one of the first things Trump said when he started running for president was I alone
0:22:20 can fix it. And now it’s I alone plus Elon and JD and whoever is on board for all of this.
0:22:28 And I’m scared to see society perhaps even further breaking apart along these new lines of
0:22:33 who thinks that the government does anything good for me and who thinks that there is absolutely
0:22:42 nothing that of positive note that the government delivers. And that’s hugely dangerous. And I
0:22:48 don’t know, that’s been the most disturbing part for me that I feel like I’m back in November and
0:22:52 December of 2020. And I worry we’re not going to get these people back.
0:22:56 Well, this is a serious issue. And I want to apologize for my Nazi references because they’re
0:23:02 not funny. Although it is clear that Musk and Trump have made a hard right turn. And also the,
0:23:07 I don’t know if you’ve driven the new model SS from Tesla. And I saw on Twitter.
0:23:09 Are you coming up with these on the fly? Or do you have a list of
0:23:14 Musk Nazi jokes that you like to make? Well, you know, he’s changed his pronouns
0:23:19 to he and Himmler. But anyways, there’s a lot in there. And I think that
0:23:26 potentially you have, unfortunately, everything reverse engineers to one key statistic in my view.
0:23:32 And if we don’t fix it, we’re going to have some form of revolution, famine or war.
0:23:37 And that happens in every society. And it’s the following. The ultimate social compact is that
0:23:42 my kids will do better than me. If I work hard, I play by the rules, my kids will do better than
0:23:48 me. The definition, I used to think the definition of love was caring more about someone than you
0:23:53 care about yourself. And I’ve broadened that to, you know, you give witness and notice to people’s
0:23:59 lives. But the people who irrationally love are your children. They’re, you know, I always say
0:24:02 to my sons, you’re the only people in the world that I want to be more successful than me. And
0:24:08 I’m embarrassed to say that, but it’s true. And when your kids aren’t doing as well as you are,
0:24:13 we’re at 30 for the first time in the nation’s history, it’s just a breakdown in the social compact.
0:24:19 And people want chaos. There’s also because we’ve had what I would argue is the best functioning
0:24:24 organization. And let me go, I think the most impressive organization in history is a wing
0:24:28 of the US government. And that’s our military. And I think in the top five is the US government.
0:24:35 And Mel Robbins, who I think is going to probably displace Joe Rogan, if Stephen Barton doesn’t,
0:24:42 has this new book out called Let Them. And I’m sort of at the point right now where the people who
0:24:46 are under the illusion that Trump represents them, the genius of the Republican party is they represent
0:24:53 the top 1% in corporations. And they’ve convinced the bottom 99 that you should endorse us because
0:24:57 once you get into the top 1%, you’re going to love it here. And you have more of a chance
0:25:04 with us. And when Democrats keep spewing out this elitist dribble, and we continue to move
0:25:09 towards a 30 year old not doing as well as his or her parents, then the parents and the people
0:25:14 under the age of 30 just want chaos. And what I say around some of this stuff, I’m at the point now
0:25:21 where it’s like, let them, the states that went for Trump are the states that are the biggest
0:25:28 takers of federal assistance. So just see what happens when veterans and fairers benefits when
0:25:34 we disrupt and shut down those people you can’t trust. Okay, let’s see what happens to you and
0:25:42 dad and your neighbors. And what happens in these rural dark red communities when there is no head
0:25:49 start. See what happens when you shut down DEI and there is no job opportunity for veterans. Like,
0:25:54 I’m at the point where it’s like, you got, you know what, you broke it, you own it, you’re going
0:26:02 to get to find out just how quote unquote incompetent government is, you’re going to find out that
0:26:06 government is a lot more competent than you had originally thought. And you’re going to get a
0:26:12 very ugly awakening in my view. And I’m sort of at the point of, all right, it’s time. You really
0:26:17 want to see what life is like in these red states, the people who are most rapidly for
0:26:24 Trump who tend to be, who tend to be in rural areas tend to be quite frankly have a larger
0:26:30 body mass index are more dependent upon Medicare or more dependent on government services. The
0:26:35 biggest takers from a state perspective are the ones that went hardest towards Trump, which means
0:26:40 when these payments in these programs get shut down, they’re beginning, this isn’t going to hurt
0:26:45 us. Yes, I mean, we’re upset about this because I’d like to think we have some fidelity to America
0:26:50 and the Constitution and want to pay back based on the prosperity we’ve recognized because of this
0:26:55 incredible system and rule of law and democracy, but quite frankly, this isn’t going to really hurt
0:27:00 you or me. We’re not, our kids aren’t in snap. We’re not getting veterans a fair payments. We’re
0:27:06 not getting social security payments, right? We’re not, we’re not dying a malaria in Malawi or
0:27:11 wherever, right? This won’t affect us. It’s just fascinating though that the people who I think
0:27:17 are about to get the biggest dose of like, wow, be careful what you ask for are the ones that are
0:27:22 most rapidly pro-Trump. So my sense is at this point, you know, as Mel Robbins would say, let
0:27:30 them have at it. You ask for it, you’ve got it, Toyota. That’s definitely the big debate, I think,
0:27:38 amongst people who voted the way that we did, that balance between wanting to live in a society
0:27:43 that uplifts everybody, which I feel like is so core to the Democratic Party, and then thinking
0:27:49 we are never going to have a reversal of these kinds of electoral outcomes unless there is real
0:27:55 suffering. And that feels like a terrible place to be. I don’t want to be someone
0:28:02 that wishes a bad economic outcome on anyone. I would love a world in which everyone can succeed
0:28:08 to the utmost level. But it does seem like there has already been a bit of this. I don’t want to
0:28:12 go as far as saying buyer’s remorse, but you’re seeing these videos coming up on TikTok. I don’t
0:28:19 know. There’s a farmer who relies on this cost sharing program that gets funded through the
0:28:24 Inflation Reduction Act that has been frozen and gone away, and he’s talking about potentially
0:28:30 losing his farm. He was someone who voted for Trump. Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama,
0:28:36 is out there talking about how we can’t have the NIH go away, the new policy of getting
0:28:41 indirect costs down to 15%, which will basically mean that we have to shutter labs that are
0:28:47 saving us from every disease under the sun and our huge economic boon for the country. I was
0:28:54 astounded to see that for every dollar that we put into society from the NIH that we get
0:29:02 $2.46 back, and it generates nearly $93 billion in economic activity in the U.S.,
0:29:08 and also is what keeps us, the leader of the PAC, our competitiveness. It’s so funny to hear
0:29:12 Republicans bemoaning how far we’re falling behind all the time, and then they’re like,
0:29:17 “You know what we’ll do? We’ll get rid of, we’ll slash NIH funding.” That’ll be the way that we’ll
0:29:24 really show the rest of the world. But in a more personal level, I talked about two or three months
0:29:30 ago to a college student from the Midwest. He reached out, he watches the Five, is thinking
0:29:34 about a career in politics, and really interested in political communication. We got on the phone,
0:29:40 and he emailed me last week, and he said, and he said that I could share this. I’ve really
0:29:46 appreciated hearing what you have had to say the past week on the Five and your podcast with Scott.
0:29:50 So, yeah, Scott, you’ve really opened my mind on certain things that are currently going on as
0:29:54 someone who voted for Trump, and you have been communicating a lot of frustrations I’ve been
0:29:59 feeling alongside some family and friends who didn’t expect all the chaos. And then he puts in
0:30:04 parentheses not to mention the tariffs, as our family owns a small business where all our products
0:30:11 are made in China. So, this is a 20-year-old bro, right, from the middle of the country,
0:30:17 comes from a conservative family. They love Trump, and it only took, I got this a week ago,
0:30:23 so it only took two weeks of this level of chaos for him to feel strongly enough that
0:30:28 he would write that down, right? That’s not a casual comment, and he told me that I could talk
0:30:32 about it, that I could put that out on air. So, it’s obviously something that’s very emblematic
0:30:38 of not only what’s going on in his life, but what’s going on in his orbit. Elon Musk’s popularity
0:30:45 has gone from in 2016, it was plus 29 when he was the SpaceX guy, down to negative 11. So,
0:30:51 something is happening. There is pushback out there and the realization that, yeah,
0:30:57 maybe there are cuts we should be making, but this wholesale approach to just move fast and
0:31:02 break things is not something that works for the public sector. Well, you’re already starting to
0:31:07 see it, and it kind of goes to, and we’ll talk about this in a bit, potential solutions, but
0:31:14 basically sales of Tesla cars are diving in the EU. Electric vehicle market declined by 6%
0:31:23 overall in January. So, there is a structural decline, but sales of Tesla are down 63% in
0:31:31 France, 44% in Sweden, 38% in Norway, 42% in the Netherlands, and 12% in the UK. And as someone
0:31:37 who has worked with automobile companies, they measure share in sales and basis points. And
0:31:43 that is, if year-on-year, you’re down a half a percent, the person running that country is
0:31:52 sweating. I mean, these are, I mean, these literally are kind of implosions of sales. So,
0:31:57 it does appear that finally, what, you know, everyone’s been outraged, the lack of outrage on
0:32:02 the left. It does appear that people, that the bloom is off the road here. People no longer seem
0:32:08 as a, you know, kind of this provocateur and innovator, but as someone who is a threat and
0:32:14 that they just don’t need to own his car. I’m curious, with all of these lawsuits and a DOJ
0:32:20 investigation piling up, how serious do you think the legal threat is to Musk and Doge and what could
0:32:26 the long-term fallout be other than, obviously, his popularity is going down. But I’ll put forward
0:32:32 a thesis. When you tell someone you can be a convicted felon and then reelect them,
0:32:37 he’s essentially decided the incentives and disincentives no longer apply to me that I can
0:32:43 break the law with impunity. Do you think there is a bridge too far here around these court cases?
0:32:49 Well, so far, like you mentioned earlier on, the courts have gone against them in all of these
0:32:55 instances. But the problem is, is that the courts move slower than 20-year-old kids that are in the
0:33:00 Treasury payment system to some degree, right? It’s already disrupted people’s lives. Funding
0:33:04 has been cut off, even if it is then getting reinstated. There are all these lawsuits with
0:33:10 harrowing testimony from people who work for USAID and are stationed abroad and are saying,
0:33:14 you’re sending me back to America. I haven’t lived there in 15 years. We have no infrastructure.
0:33:20 We have no family. We have kids with special needs. And if there is a disruption in their care,
0:33:24 I have notes from their doctors about the long-term suffering that they will endure.
0:33:30 Nobody in the government seems to care at all about that. So the courts are great. And we’re
0:33:34 going to have Mark Elias on the podcast in a few weeks. And I’m really interested to talk to him
0:33:41 about the legal approach to all of this. But they’re moving to some degree too quickly. And I think
0:33:47 on the fundamental level, what’s most disturbing about all of this is that they are going for
0:33:52 a two-branch approach to government. I think they don’t care at all about Congress because
0:33:57 appropriated money means nothing to them. And we should note as well that the government is only
0:34:03 funded through March 14th. So they’re offering buyouts to people. They have no cash to pay them
0:34:08 for the next eight months. So Democrats actually have a lot of power in that respect. And some
0:34:13 of them are already talking about shutting down the government to be able to shut down Elon Musk.
0:34:18 So I think that they are looking at a world of essentially one and a half branches of government.
0:34:23 So they want the most powerful presidency or executive that you’ve ever seen in your life.
0:34:28 And then they want about half of the judiciary. They want the good judges. Which is always how
0:34:32 Trump talks about things. He says, “Well, of course we want immigration. We just want the good
0:34:36 immigrants. And of course we want this, but we just want the good ones.” So he wants the judges
0:34:41 probably that he picks. So he wants Eileen Cannon and the Supreme Court. And the rest of it can
0:34:49 kind of go to hell. And that’s really new territory for us. Looking at a world in which the executive
0:34:56 has no interest in having checks and balances with the Congress and who may openly flout
0:35:04 these judicial decisions. We’ll have to wait and see in terms of how they approach it. Even this
0:35:10 week will be an interesting incubator for that. But I think that they are so far emboldened even
0:35:14 from where they were in 2020 when they were getting bad rulings that we could see something
0:35:15 completely unprecedented.
0:35:21 Bill O’Reilly recently said that he doesn’t believe Musk has as much power as we think.
0:35:26 And then Time Magazine in the same week puts him on the cover behind the president’s desk.
0:35:29 Do you think we’re overestimating Musk’s influence or underestimating it?
0:35:34 I’m not sure. Listen, Time Magazine wants a good cover. It was a good cover. It definitely pissed
0:35:39 Trump off even though he said like, “Oh, are they still in business? Who reads that anymore?”
0:35:43 But he definitely, when he got Time Person of the Year just a month ago was super psyched about
0:35:49 Time Magazine. I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the middle. I think you don’t want to be the
0:35:54 person that went out there and took a big swing like Elon Musk actually doesn’t have that much
0:35:59 power. You can even see from the level of disruption that we’ve had that he has that power and also
0:36:05 that he swayed the election like this, you know, $290 million, whatever algorithmic changes
0:36:11 to social media that will probably never understand the true impact of that or the gravity of that
0:36:17 impact when, I mean, you’re not on Twitter anymore. I still am. I need to be there for work.
0:36:26 It’s A, assess pool. But B, I can barely find content that I need to be able to do my job.
0:36:32 Reporters that I follow are not showing up even in the, you know, the for you column.
0:36:37 It pales in comparison to what it used to be, which was I thought the best news gathering
0:36:42 site you could always find what you needed right away when you logged on to Twitter. And it’s not
0:36:46 like that anymore at all. So I’m in the middle on it. What do you think? Are you a Bill O’Reilly
0:36:51 or Time Magazine? You know, I don’t know. I know that the staff in the White House is more worried
0:36:57 about trying to calm Trump down when he’s angry because he doesn’t drink or do drugs whereas with
0:37:04 Musk, you just give him a ketamine infused juice box. There goes the bigger man. That bigger
0:37:09 man part of the show is over. He’s back. That’s right. Anyways, with that, let’s take a quick
0:37:19 break. Stay with us. The Republicans have been saying lots of things. Just yesterday,
0:37:25 their leader said he wants to own Gaza. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a
0:37:32 job with it too. We’ll own it. On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency
0:37:36 was insubordinate. USAID in particular, they refuse to tell us anything. We won’t tell you what
0:37:42 the money’s going to, where the money’s for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk,
0:37:47 the richest man on earth, tweeted about the same agency that, you know, gives money to the poorest
0:37:53 people on earth. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some
0:38:00 great parties, did that instead. But what have the Democrats been saying? People are aroused. I
0:38:05 haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time. Huh. That’s a weird way to put it,
0:38:12 Senator. We’re going to ask what exactly is the Democrat’s strategy to push back on Republicans
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0:39:26 Grammarly.com/podcast. That’s Grammarly.com/podcast. Hey, this is Peter Kafka. I’m the host of
0:39:32 Channels, a podcast about technology and media. And maybe you’ve noticed that a lot of people are
0:39:38 investing a lot of money trying to encourage you to bet on sports right now, right from your phone.
0:39:44 That is a huge change. And it’s happened so fast that most of us haven’t spent much time thinking
0:39:49 about what it means and if it’s a good thing. But Michael Lewis, that’s the guy who wrote
0:39:54 Moneyball on the Big Shore and Liars Poker, has been thinking a lot about it. And he tells me
0:40:00 that he’s pretty worried. I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient
0:40:05 as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It’s like the world has created less and less
0:40:09 friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more. You can hear my chat with Michael
0:40:18 Lewis right now on Channels wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Over the weekend,
0:40:22 Trump made history as the first sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl. He also said
0:40:28 he planned on announcing a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States.
0:40:32 Meanwhile, Trump raised eyebrows last week by suggesting he could turn Gaza into the
0:40:38 Riviera of the Middle East during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
0:40:43 He floated the idea of U.S. owning Gaza and hit it at relocating 2 million Palestinians
0:40:49 before walking back comments about deploying U.S. troops. And back home, a federal judge
0:40:53 temporarily blocked Trump’s federal workers’ bio plan delaying a decision for the 2 million
0:41:01 eligible employees 65,000 have opted in so far. Trump’s recent comments about the U.S.
0:41:06 taking over Gaza have sparked a media backlash. I would argue, Jess, that this is another
0:41:12 just weapon of mass distraction and that it’s just so ridiculous. I don’t know. It’s just sucking
0:41:19 oxygen out of the room of the real issue, which is this digital coup, if you will. But how might
0:41:24 this negatively affect the ongoing, in your view, ceasefire between Hamas and Israel or doesn’t have
0:41:31 any impact on the conflict or the tension in the Middle East? Well, the thing that it does in the
0:41:36 immediate term, even if he says it’s not something that he was completely serious about and you saw
0:41:41 that Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, had to walk back his openness to boots on the ground
0:41:47 the next day in the briefing because that was something that freaked even the biggest warmongers
0:41:53 out there. They were like, “No, actually, we are not putting boots on the ground in the Middle East,
0:41:58 but this helps B.B. in the immediate term ensuring up his right flank, which he definitely
0:42:04 needs if he’s going to be able to stay in power.” And Trump always just has that side door available
0:42:11 to him where he says, “Well, it was a negotiating tactic. We just needed to see what Egypt and
0:42:16 Jordan were really made of.” The former deputy prime minister of Jordan said that this was a
0:42:21 declaration of war on the Arab people. That doesn’t sound good, even if that is the place that you
0:42:28 were starting at, that you can even think of a world in which you’re going to move two million
0:42:34 people out of the place that they live. And this is not about defending Hamas, staying in charge,
0:42:38 or anything of that sort. But just Egypt and Jordan have been very clear about this. Saudi
0:42:42 got involved and said, “We’re not doing this either.” The Arab world has not been open to
0:42:48 taking Palestinians for a very long time, which is one of the endemic problems with this conflict.
0:42:52 And I don’t know what the solution is. We all wish that there was going to be able to be
0:42:56 a two-state solution with a neat bow and we can’t get there. There are people who have
0:43:01 dedicated their lives to it, like Tony Blair, for instance, and we have not been able to get there.
0:43:08 But I think that it’s a little too easy to just say that it’s a distraction or it’s a sideshow
0:43:13 because it is forcing people to have to deal with it, first of all, which makes a big difference.
0:43:18 Like Marco Rubio is going to have to say something about it, right? And people like Tom Cotton are
0:43:22 going to have to say something about it. The administration is going to have Pete Hegseth
0:43:29 over at Defense. People are going to have to prepare themselves for the fact that his mercurial
0:43:35 or herky-jerky approach to foreign policy might not go your way all the time. And we did talk about
0:43:40 it as maybe it’s one of the advantages that our enemies have no idea what he’s actually going to
0:43:47 do. But there are real implications for this and his words matter as much as we’d like to
0:43:50 pretend that they don’t. And he says a lot of shit and he throws stuff against the wall and sees
0:43:58 whether it sticks or not. You cannot, with a serious face, say at this point that Trump is
0:44:06 not interested in being a modern-day imperialist, at least to some degree. The amount of times
0:44:10 that he’s talked about, Greenland, he’s talking about the Panama Canal. Now he’s talking about
0:44:14 whatever he wants to do in the Middle East, which is Jared Kushner’s vision. Jared Kushner said
0:44:18 there’s a lot of waterfront property that’d be available. And it was interesting, my colleague
0:44:22 on the five, Jesse Waters, said something about, well, Albania has said that they’ll take people.
0:44:28 And a couple weeks ago, there was a story in the New York Times about how Albania gave the go-ahead
0:44:38 for a $1.4 billion luxury hotel investment for Jared Kushner. So it always comes back to money.
0:44:44 It always comes back to business prospects in all of this. And I don’t think this is something
0:44:48 that’s going to happen. But I don’t think it behooves us to just kind of push it under
0:44:52 the carpet or the rug and just say, oh, it’s a complete impossibility.
0:44:58 So to your point, the premise, it starts from what I think is a legitimate premise. And that is
0:45:06 the path we’re on now, like, okay, the way I would see right now, the Middle East or the problem
0:45:12 in Gaza is there’s no moral clarity. And that is when World War II ended,
0:45:19 we had the Nuremberg trials. And we basically said, this was genocide. And we’re shaming you and
0:45:24 punishing you. And the world came to some sort of moral clarity. We don’t have that coming out of
0:45:30 this conflict. And it feels as if all we’re doing is just setting up the exact same thing to happen
0:45:36 again in two, five or 10 years. That Hamas will rearm, there’ll be people sympathetic, they will
0:45:45 use aid and their popularity with their domestic population who are feel, you know, understandably
0:45:52 agreed. And the same thing is going to happen. So the notion that we need to be creative around
0:45:57 doing something different, that the status quo, the wash, rinse and repeat, we are going to see
0:46:05 the mother of all shampoo effect here. It’s just going to happen again. The current construct just
0:46:10 does not work. Now, but this notion of a two-state solution where the two states are either Egypt
0:46:16 or Jordan, neither, I mean, here’s the problem of relocating these two million residents,
0:46:20 whether you want to call it ethnic cleansing or some sort of a part, whatever you want to
0:46:27 term you or relocation or, or condo development or a creative solution. The problem is
0:46:33 these two million people don’t want to leave. And even more, nobody wants to take them. Albania,
0:46:39 what’s the population of Albania? I don’t look at the border. You want to see a fortified border?
0:46:46 Look at the border between Egypt and Gaza. Albania is 2.7 million. And we’re talking about
0:46:52 two million people who need to go somewhere. What Egypt and Jordan have decided is that
0:46:57 the elements of this population that they cannot risk incorporating is chaos and violence.
0:47:06 So this just doesn’t seem like what I’d call a viable solution for anybody. So until we have,
0:47:14 do we need to be creative? Yes. But I find this, most of those just sort of kind of ridiculous
0:47:20 that, okay, you’re going to relocate two million people and then put up a bunch of
0:47:27 residence inns and, and Trump towers and, you know, Western hotels and then invite the rich
0:47:34 ones back? I don’t, it’s like, okay, walk me through how this logistically actually makes
0:47:41 any sense. So I don’t see any viable path here. What do you think is the significance of the
0:47:44 Judge blocking Trump’s federal work or buyout plan and how could this play out in the coming
0:47:50 weeks? What I think it’s significant, and I already mentioned this, that I know this is Elon’s
0:47:56 playbook and he does it all the time. He did it with Twitter in 2022 as well, but the cash isn’t
0:48:00 there to do it. So it is pretty significant. I think there’s a pretty strong case for saying,
0:48:04 you know, you’re not even talking about money that’s been appropriated. Are you paying out of
0:48:09 pocket? He’s a very rich guy versus man on the planet. Maybe that’s what he intends to do,
0:48:13 but going out to people and saying, you can go on that trip you’ve always wanted to take.
0:48:18 I don’t know. Actually, you have no salary to be able to do that. It’s pretty duplicitous.
0:48:25 The big question is what orders are they going to abide by and what orders, frankly,
0:48:32 are they going to be using the younger dogeys to get around? You know, what will be authorized?
0:48:40 What will the actions from the top level that look pretty normal, right? Post rulings be and
0:48:49 then what are 20-year-old kids that can hack into anything able to actually do? And I know that it’s
0:48:55 not necessarily to turn us into a technocratic state. Maybe that is for some people’s vision who
0:49:02 are involved in this, but I think that because Trump is a lame duck, we have four years essentially
0:49:08 to break as much as possible that they will be looking to push boundaries in ways we haven’t
0:49:12 seen before. So while they might have abided by some of these rulings before, they’re going to
0:49:18 push the envelope even further is my feeling. I mean, I guess the question is their attitude is
0:49:23 it doesn’t matter if it’s legal or illegal. If we make an offer and people accept it,
0:49:28 then it’s done. So before you can get caught robbing the bank, just spend the money and enjoy
0:49:33 yourself. And then if you get caught, okay, we’ll give the money back. There is definitely a kind
0:49:39 of like a move fast and break things kind of element here and have no regard for institutions
0:49:44 or process. Just see if you can get away with it. Whenever I see Republicans, I feel like they’re
0:49:48 sort of like, I can’t believe we’re getting away with this shit. Totally. And it’s like tickling
0:49:52 their sensors. Isn’t this amazing? And I even, I don’t know if I’m imagining this, but I’m wondering
0:49:56 if they’re even getting a little bit nervous like, Jesus Christ, I didn’t realize it would be this
0:50:01 easy. But they are getting upset about things that matter to them. Like I already mentioned,
0:50:09 Senator Katie Britt, Jerry Moran, Senator Wicker, who are big proponents of USAID programs had to
0:50:16 go to Rubio and plead with him. Rubio was a fan. Rubio was a fan last year. He was pushing Biden
0:50:19 to allocate more money. And that links to the problem. And I know we’re going to talk about
0:50:24 the Democrats next. Well, let’s do that. But first, we have to take one more quick break. Stay with us.
0:50:32 All right. So here’s the deal. Take a former world number one. That’s me, Andy Roddick,
0:50:36 adding the journalist who knows everything about tennis and a producer who’s still figuring out
0:50:40 how to spell tennis. You get served with Andy Roddick, a weekly podcast where we break down
0:50:45 the game we all love. We cover the biggest stories, talk to the sports biggest stars,
0:50:48 and highlight the people changing tennis in ways you might not even realize.
0:50:53 Whether it’s grand slam predictions, coaching changes, off-court drama,
0:50:58 or the moves shaping the future of the sport, we’ve got it all. This podcast is about having fun,
0:51:02 sharing insights, and giving fans a real look at what makes tennis so great.
0:51:08 Catch serve with Andy Roddick on Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you listen. Or watch us on
0:51:20 YouTube. Like, subscribe, follow, all that good stuff. Let’s get started. Welcome back. Before
0:51:25 we wrap, Democrats are stepping up their strategy. Rallies are gaining momentum. Schumer is calling
0:51:30 for opposition to every Trump nominee, and Jefferies is making his stance clear in negotiation
0:51:34 letters. Jess, do you think this is the right approach? Do you think it’ll be effective?
0:51:40 No. Have you seen these rallies? It’s horrible. So you have, John Stuart did a great
0:51:47 impression of Schumer of them, where, you know, you have a guy in his 70s who’s not the most
0:51:54 charismatic. I’m being generous here. Screaming we will win after we just lost everything.
0:52:01 And then you have Congressman Al Green shaking his cane in the front of the frame. So it’s just
0:52:07 Schumer’s face with a cane going back and forth. Or Maxine Waters, you know, trying to barge into
0:52:16 the Department of Education. And I’ve noticed that all of the key speakers at these rallies are
0:52:23 safe seat Democrats. And that’s really the wrong approach to all of this. I almost want to see
0:52:29 exclusively people who have run tight competitive races out there talking about what they think
0:52:34 is the right thing for us to do. Because it’s, you know, it’s all well and good and people are
0:52:39 great communicators and you be on your social feeds and everyone should be amplifying as much
0:52:45 of the bad shit that Republicans are doing as possible. But I feel like it just sends the
0:52:52 message that we haven’t learned that much from the election and that frankly, we’re proliferating
0:52:58 more hysteria than the average voter is interested in hearing at this point. So it has to be so much
0:53:04 more targeted. I know how came Jefferies put out a 10 point communications plan. But everyone has
0:53:10 to, you know, see what their constituents are interested in and what their temperature is
0:53:15 in terms of Trump versus Elon. There seems to be a big dichotomy there. Jared Golden,
0:53:22 who is a Democratic Congressman who won in a competitive district, a Trump very rural
0:53:27 district in Maine, said that all the calls that he’s getting to his office are about Musk.
0:53:32 People aren’t upset about Trump. They’re upset about Musk. And that’s what he’s leaning into.
0:53:37 And people have to find kind of their North Star for all of this. But the thing that was driving
0:53:43 me crazy in terms of the messaging is, I don’t know if you watched after the election, Tony
0:53:48 Fabrizio, who was Trump’s pollster and Chrysla Savita, who was one of his campaign managers,
0:53:54 participated in a panel with the Democratic campaign managers as well. And they were talking about,
0:54:00 you know, what worked, what didn’t work. And they said that Project 2025 was destroying them
0:54:06 up until a couple months before the election. So it had a 57% negative approval rating.
0:54:12 And that we were doing a great job hammering it. That all of those, even if we kind of had
0:54:15 rolled our eyes at it, it had been hugely effective that every time we said, well,
0:54:20 this is the Trump 2025 playbook. This is what they want. This is what they’re going to do.
0:54:27 And that has disappeared even as people who wrote Project 2025 are in charge of OMB,
0:54:34 Brendan Carr at the FCC. And I want that messaging back on mass. I want everyone talking about this
0:54:41 to say Time Magazine did an analysis. Two thirds of the executive orders that Trump has already
0:54:47 implemented are out of Project 2025 already. I mean, I was happy to see those Democratic
0:54:52 Congress people walk over. I think at least, I think they need to be seen doing anything,
0:54:58 but the optics here, I agree with you. It felt like a senior’s home when they found out water
0:55:04 aerobics were canceled or jello night had been switched to Thursday. I mean, it just felt, oh,
0:55:08 God, that’s, that’s how we’re going to win this fight. That’s the army we’re sending in.
0:55:14 You know, as we try and process this, there’s, I want to move to like, okay, what do we do?
0:55:18 And there’s, I would argue, and I want to put forward some potential ideas and have you respond to
0:55:22 them. There’s short-term and there’s long-term. And the first thing you got to do in any sort of
0:55:27 strategies, you got to determine where’s the soft tissue, what’s the leverage, what are our assets,
0:55:32 what can be exploited. And he King Jefferies, I thought was actually quite eloquent and honest
0:55:36 when he said, they control all three branches of government. There’s just not a lot we can do
0:55:42 from kind of a legislative level. And when the stuff gets to judges, it gets pushed back, but
0:55:48 they’re, you know, they’re moving at this Blitzkrieg speed. And my view is, okay, I think you go after
0:55:55 the money, like what they’re doing by hacking and turning off these payment systems or intervening,
0:56:00 I don’t know what the right term would be. And I think you go after, I think you go after musks,
0:56:05 financial interests. So it’s already happening in Europe, as I previously mentioned, Tesla sales
0:56:11 are going down. I think that our congressional representatives and people who think what’s
0:56:17 going on here is a total subversion of our democracy to make it known that you probably
0:56:22 shouldn’t sign up for T-Mobile right now, because T-Mobile has just struck a deal with Starlink.
0:56:28 You probably shouldn’t be thinking about any advertiser on Twitter. That’s an obvious one.
0:56:34 You should be thinking about, okay, United Airlines has just announced a big deal with Starlink.
0:56:39 How do you go after the pocketbook? I think that’s really what Musk cares about. It’s already
0:56:44 happening with Tesla. I don’t see any reason. Should the department, should veterans groups
0:56:51 be doing anything around Tesla, Starlink, any of his economic interests? I think you go after the
0:56:57 purse, because that’s what I think these people care about. Over the medium and the long term,
0:57:03 I think you draft resolutions and say, okay, if this unelected group of people can go in and start
0:57:11 turning off payments, we’re going to propose turning off payments or anything related to Starlink.
0:57:18 To a certain extent is a huge beneficiary, and I even wrote a post titled, “Welfare Queen.”
0:57:22 The notion that he’s trying to cut off payments and claim the government is too big and that
0:57:26 its large S is wasted. Meanwhile, he’s one of the biggest beneficiaries from this large S.
0:57:30 Should we be thinking about, one, how do we go after the economic interests
0:57:36 of Elon Musk to say, we’re not down with this and you circumventing democratic channels
0:57:42 to implement what you think is right, and we’re going to punish you and your companies? There’s
0:57:47 nothing illegal. You don’t have to sign up for T-Mobile that’s introducing Starlink. You don’t
0:57:54 have to fly United Airlines, which is signed a contract with Starlink. Then over the medium
0:58:00 and long term, I think you just have to tell Republicans, okay, you realize that if you can
0:58:07 do this, then we can shut off Starlink. We have our own programmers and we’ll find out if a judge
0:58:13 thinks that’s legal or not. I do think, though, the nuclear option is now on the table, and that is,
0:58:21 I believe that the Democrats should credibly threaten to get in the way of blocking the extension
0:58:28 on our debt ceiling such that the next Treasury auction fails, because at the end of the day,
0:58:33 the reason why the tariffs were rolled back is the leverage in the people that Trump listens to
0:58:40 are corporations and shareholders, and they called him around these ridiculous Canadian and Mexican
0:58:45 tariffs and said, do not do this. This will have an immediate impact on the stock market. The adult
0:58:55 in the room is the stock market and the 10-year bond, and he basically got these illusory symbolic
0:59:02 concessions and then walked them back. I think if the Democrats say, okay, you want to play
0:59:10 Russian roulette, we’re going to load the chamber around the upcoming Treasury auction.
0:59:14 If you want to call all your buddies and tell them that interest rates are about to spike,
0:59:19 which will take the stock market down, and I’m still trying to figure out if that hurts the
0:59:26 1%, 1% of America’s population owns 90% of the stocks. I think that the real leverage here is
0:59:31 around money and is around, you want to shut down the economy, you don’t believe in a democratic
0:59:36 process, fine, we’re going to shut down the economy, and you’re not going to be able to make the
0:59:40 interest, the upcoming interest payments, and you’re going to be the president who, for the first time,
0:59:46 was so offensive, was so non-democratic that we felt we had no choice, but to get in the
0:59:51 way that you’re about to be the first president where a Treasury auction where America did not
0:59:57 pay its debts, and let’s see what happens, boss. But I’m trying to think of where we have leverage,
1:00:01 and those are the only places I can think of because per what Hakeem Jeffery said, us just
1:00:08 screaming outrage and waving our cane in front of a federal building. That’s not working, right?
1:00:13 We need to go after the money, and we need to say you’re going to be the president that takes
1:00:19 the stock market down 8% or 10% on the opening bell next Wednesday after a failed Treasury auction.
1:00:25 Your thoughts? I love that idea, and I’m sure they’re considering that alongside the negotiations
1:00:31 that are going to come up in March because the Republicans had these high hopes for one massive
1:00:36 bill, which seems like a really stupid way to be funding the government anyway. But if you
1:00:41 put those two things together, that’d be very difficult for Trump to weather, and he will be
1:00:48 the person in charge if we fail at auction, or if the government shuts down in general,
1:00:54 though it seems like he does want to furlough employees anyway. But I have an idea that maybe
1:01:01 could be used as a compliment to this, and I’m hoping that Democrats, I’m loosely calling this
1:01:05 the Democratic Disruption Plan, because everyone loves this term disruption. It’s become very chic,
1:01:08 right? And that’s what the Republicans have run on, that we’re just trying to disrupt things. You
1:01:13 got to shake it up because there’s all of this waste in there that we can cut. And I think that
1:01:20 we need to counter program with our own doge. And you can go back to the ’90s, and the Clinton
1:01:24 administration did this. They called it the National Performance Review. I didn’t realize it was as
1:01:32 successful as it was. It made a 426,000 cuts to the federal workforce going agency by agency,
1:01:36 and they did it with a lot of precision. They said, “Are there offices that would
1:01:40 can be closed? Regulations that we can cut? Are there programs that actually don’t need to be
1:01:47 funded within USAID of the $44 billion that goes out there?” I’m sure there are cuts that we can
1:01:52 make, but we should be the ones to propose them. So just take all the crap that they’ve been spewing
1:01:58 and throw it back in their faces. And I think that that would be really effective and show to the
1:02:02 American public that we are serious about governing, that we do know that there is a huge
1:02:09 waste, fraud, and abuse problem, but that 66% of US spending is untouchable. And that’s the most
1:02:14 important part, that we have to be the party out there saying they’re lying to you about cuts that
1:02:20 they can make. The stuff that they’re talking about are tiny. They’re trimming like a dollar
1:02:25 off of the budget, but we will never let them touch your social security, your Medicare,
1:02:31 your Medicaid. And I think that that is a place where we can run and win. And I want to say as
1:02:36 well, on the Department of Education front, I don’t know if you saw this, the national report
1:02:46 card test results came out. And it breaks your heart to see stuff like this. And I just…
1:02:51 So just reference all time low for eighth grade reading levels, is that right?
1:02:58 Well, since testing began, so 1992. And when the Republicans come out and they say, “I want to
1:03:03 abolish the Department of Education,” which by the way is in Project 2025, and you look at those
1:03:12 test results, you understand how average American parents who don’t have optionality to go to a fancy
1:03:17 private school alternative are being denied vouchers to maybe take a few thousand dollars and put
1:03:22 their kids in religious schools, which in general have been performing better than the average public
1:03:27 school, that they say, “You know what? Yeah, burn it all down.” Trump had a great line where he said
1:03:32 about Linda McMahon, “You know, I don’t want you to have a job for that long,
1:03:37 because I want you to destroy the Department of Education.” And what they want in the end is for
1:03:42 private equity to own our education system. That’s what’s already happening. They have been making
1:03:48 tons of money off of these schools, specifically in the charter school space. But if we are going
1:03:54 to have public schools under attack at this level and believe strongly in making them better than
1:03:59 they are certainly, and hopefully taking them into some sort of golden age, we have to play ball
1:04:03 on the education front. And we have to say, “Abolishing the Department of Education isn’t
1:04:08 the answer necessarily, but these are our real reform policies.” And that includes going after
1:04:15 the teachers unions and saying to Randy Weingarten, “No, this all is imperfect. You know, we haven’t
1:04:20 certainly recovered from the lows of the COVID era and all the damage that was done to those kids,
1:04:25 not only as academic learners, but as social emotional beings.” But that Democrats aren’t
1:04:30 going to be afraid to touch that third rail anymore. Someone like Josh Shapiro has done that. He said
1:04:35 before that he’s for school vouchers, “Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where we have better
1:04:40 public schools and some kids have the optionality to go to religious schools or private schools
1:04:44 with the help of the government so that we can save the public school education system?”
1:04:51 So a lot there. I felt that I got into it a little bit. Is it Ronit Weinberg, the head
1:04:57 of the National Teachers Union? Randy Weingarten. I got that one close. Yeah. Randy Weingarten.
1:05:05 You were in the Jewish realm. Something. I was circling the white fish. Anyways,
1:05:10 I said that I thought that the union she represented was using the kids’ drug meals.
1:05:16 During COVID. I’m sure she loved that. Well, during COVID, she decided that we have to protect the
1:05:21 teachers. And she was basically saying, “You’ve got to pay us more and give us a ton of time off.”
1:05:27 And the reality was that the population of teachers in America is the least vulnerable. It was the
1:05:32 least vulnerable to COVID. They were young, primarily female, primarily thin. These were
1:05:38 the least at-risk people in America. And she was using basically kids and their mental health,
1:05:44 which we found were severely impacted by being out of school, such that she could try and find
1:05:49 a moment of leverage to get more money for her dues-paying members. I think teachers’ unions,
1:05:53 and I’m casting a broad brush across all of them, but we have a tendency to
1:05:58 sanctify all of them, not recognize them. Some of these unions are just bottom line corrupt
1:06:03 and really don’t seem to care that much about kids, despite their hush, grandmotherly tones.
1:06:07 Where I would depart a little bit with you, and it sounds like also Governor Shapiro,
1:06:15 is I am very wary of vouchers, because I think effectively what vouchers do is like everything
1:06:21 else in our society, the kind of the narrative of let’s shut down the Department of Education and
1:06:26 let’s take money and just give people choice and give them vouchers. I think theoretically,
1:06:29 it makes a lot of sense. There are instances where someone would say, “I’d rather take the money,
1:06:34 put them in a religious school, or I want more choice.” I get it, but effectively on the ground,
1:06:39 I think what happens is what always happens in our government the last 40 or 50 years,
1:06:45 it is nothing but a naked transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, because the reality is the
1:06:52 majority of rural areas or poor areas don’t have a private school option where they can use the
1:06:58 voucher. The only reason they have a school is because of federal mandated legislation that they
1:07:02 have to have transportation, and they have to have a school, and the school has to be funded.
1:07:08 And all you are doing when you give, say, people a $10,000 voucher, and I was on the
1:07:13 board of my kid’s school, there would be probably some people who are middle-class who would rather
1:07:18 have the choice. We charge $22,000, they come up with the $12,000, it would provide access to a
1:07:24 private school, it’d be good for them. But really what it would be is a $2 million giveaway to the
1:07:30 other 200 families that can’t afford it, and it would just take income and desperately needed
1:07:36 resources out of the public schools in that area. So I get it theoretically, but I think on the ground
1:07:42 all vouchers end up doing is again transfer money from the poorest people in the districts that need
1:07:49 mandated head start in schools and transportation and food programs to wealthy people who would just
1:07:54 get, that would be, you know what, that would be just, you have two kids, that would be a $40,000
1:07:59 gift to you and me. My guess is, I don’t know if you said, do you send your kids to private or public?
1:08:05 One isn’t in school and one is in a private pre-K. There isn’t public school for her yet.
1:08:12 So this is what a voucher program would be. It’d be a $30,000 gift from government to you and me.
1:08:16 I totally understand what you’re saying and I, maybe I got a little ahead of my,
1:08:22 ahead of my skis or I didn’t mean to say that I want to turn into the party of vouchers. What I
1:08:28 wanted to say is that if we continue to look so detached from reality that we can, we are telling
1:08:34 people that these scores are okay with us and we’re going to do nothing about it, which is
1:08:38 essentially what we’re doing without having our own reform policies, that we’re going to lose people
1:08:43 forever because there’s nothing that is more valued in society than our children. We have
1:08:48 Governor Glenn Yonkin in Virginia because Terry McCall have got up there and said,
1:08:54 you know, the kids, the kids aren’t yours, right? They belong to the teachers when they go. So I,
1:08:58 I just want to have the conversation about it. I think it can be perhaps done in some sort of
1:09:06 targeted way, but we look so silly if we just keep saying we’re going to, we’re going to do it the
1:09:10 same way. We’re just going to keep going down this path. That’s what I meant. But I, I would
1:09:15 like to see, you want to talk about a way to save government tens, if not hundreds of billions of
1:09:21 dollars over the next 30 or 50 years, do what Japan does. America has a 40% of its population is
1:09:26 obese. That is an enormous strain on the well-being, the mental health and our financial system. And
1:09:32 one of the reasons healthcare costs $13,000 a year here per person at 6,500 in Japan. You know what
1:09:37 the, we have 40%, 70% of America’s obese are overweight, 40% obese. Do you know what the
1:09:45 percentage of obese pop, of the population in Japan is obese? 12, four. And here’s where it
1:09:50 starts. If you wanted, if you wanted to increase the well-being of children in America, you would
1:09:55 do what Japan does. And that is you’d find the extra money to have a chef at every school. And
1:10:01 the chef has one mandate. Everything has to be fresh. There are absolutely no processed foods
1:10:06 allowed in school because this is what we do. We give these kids shitty, sugary, cheap food.
1:10:10 They get obese because the deal is, okay, we can get them addicted to the food industrial complex
1:10:15 who basically ran every fucking app last night on the Super Bowl and then hand them over to the
1:10:20 diabetes pharmaceutical complex. And that’s the axis of evil. North Korea and Iran are nothing
1:10:24 compared to the food industrial and the diabetes industrial complex in this nation.
1:10:28 And in Japan, they say, we’re going to spend the monies. Have you seen those interviews with the
1:10:35 kids coming out of school? What’s your favorite food? Broccoli. Yeah. Right? And they say, your job,
1:10:40 at three in the morning, these chefs get up at every school, not hugely paid, but a lot of them do it.
1:10:45 Former chefs, they go to the fresh fish market, they go to fresh, and they have to find fresh food
1:10:50 every goddamn day. And these kids grow up with a different sense of nutrition. I love the
1:10:55 idea of thinking out of the box and thinking longterm, but corporate interests get involved.
1:11:01 And again, this is our school system and our children. What I have found is that America is
1:11:07 nothing but a platform to transfer money to companies and shareholders who trade and traffic
1:11:13 in addiction, addiction to food, addiction to opiates, addiction to sex, addiction to Dopa.
1:11:20 And we use the kids as basically body bags or Dopa bags. I have gotten so far off track,
1:11:26 Jess. No. Bring me back. Reel me back, Jess. I would just reel you back by saying, as we
1:11:32 are on the precipice of probably an RFK junior health and human services secretary, that the case
1:11:37 that you just made is why they should have carved out a role for him at like USDA and had somebody
1:11:42 who believes in vaccines. He’s great on this. Yeah. He’s great on this. Yeah. I agree. There,
1:11:46 did I bring you back? I don’t know. Read us out. We got to go. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let’s
1:11:50 leave it there. That’s it for the episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates, our producers,
1:11:56 our David Toledo and Cheninye Onike, our technical directors, true boroughs. You can find Raging
1:12:02 Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That’s right. Raging Moderates on its own feed. If you
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1:12:21 favor. That’s right. That’s right. The hit of the show, the one on Fox. That’s what’s coming next,
1:12:27 and who is the one? That’s right. It’s just Harloff. We are immune. We are super power fucking
1:12:31 fearless from tweets from the wealthiest man in the world. I’m not going to read any of those
1:12:37 11,000 comments. You’ve definitely read them all. I have not. I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on X. I’m
1:12:42 still calling it Twitter. Anyways, and by the way, who sold his Tesla two years ago and before
1:12:48 he sold it, took a big fat fucking dump in the passenger seat. That’s right. That’s your man.
1:12:57 Hit subscribe now. Just have a great rest of the week. You too.
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0:00:59 Are we shaping AI or is AI shaping us? There’s a number of existential risks that confront
0:01:06 human beings. I think AI just being developed reduces the overall existential risk characteristics.
0:01:14 I’m Preet Bharara, and this week, Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Super Agency,
0:01:20 What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future, joins me on my podcast Stay Tuned With Preet.
0:01:26 The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned With Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:35 Welcome to Raging Moderates. I’m Scott Galloway. And I’m Jessica Tarlev.
0:01:38 Jess, did you watch the Super Bowl? I did. It was so boring.
0:01:42 Yeah, it wasn’t a good one. We would do for a bad one. Did you stay up?
0:01:47 You know, I wasn’t planning to. I’m not into sports, and it started at 11.30 p.m. and I made
0:01:54 this big to-do about, I was basically this axis of evil between shitty fatty food and the diabetes
0:01:59 industrial complex and that the game is boring and CET. And then, of course, my 14-year-old said,
0:02:05 “Dad, you want to watch Super Bowl?” I’m like, “Yep, let’s do it.” And so I stayed awake until
0:02:09 the halftime show, which I thought was awful, by the way. And I get I’m not Kendrick Lamar’s
0:02:14 audience, but I thought the whole thing was just a giant snooze. What did you think?
0:02:20 The game itself, I wasn’t much interested. I’m not the biggest NFL enthusiast. I was like the
0:02:25 side stories. So, you know, I want as much Taylor and Travis as possible. I thought that, you know,
0:02:30 Trump was the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, which kind of surprised me.
0:02:34 I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened before. So, you know, there were side stories going on
0:02:41 that were kind of interesting, but the game not so good. The halftime show, I wasn’t wild about.
0:02:48 You know, it wasn’t Bruno Mars for me was such a good halftime show, which I’m sure is a very
0:02:52 lame pick in all of this, or Janna Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Actually, a friend who was
0:03:00 over was at that show and got to see the nipple. So, we talked about that for a while. But overall,
0:03:04 not great. We had a lot of little kids in the house. We cooked a lot. My husband made a great
0:03:11 pasta carbonara, rigatoni carbonara, or no, lumaki carbonara. I’m trying to get my noodles
0:03:18 straight. All in all, whatever, I guess, but raw, raw America. There was one fantastic moment when,
0:03:23 of course, Taylor Swift got booed. That made me happy. Why is that? Is that wrong? Yeah.
0:03:27 Is that wrong? I thought that was hilarious. Why? I thought that, I don’t know. It’s like,
0:03:31 it’s like the Roman Coliseum, except lions. We have Taylor Swift. So, occasionally,
0:03:37 I think he’d boo against the lions. I don’t know. I found the whole thing. It’s like America,
0:03:42 where we sell boner pills and opioid-induced contemplation medication while giving young
0:03:49 men CET, you know, America. I just find the whole thing. I don’t know. I’m too cynical.
0:03:54 So, when are you moving home? I’m not sure. 17 months, three weeks, and four days is what is
0:03:58 on my calendar. Not that I’m thinking about it, but I’m looking forward to getting back
0:04:00 to the States, because, you know, things are going so well.
0:04:06 Totally. Yeah. I would be desperate to come back at this particular moment. Though,
0:04:11 I think about moving back to London, and then I think I’ll definitely want to, if we do it,
0:04:15 that I’ll want to come back to America as well. So, it’s like…
0:04:18 I don’t think anything makes you feel more… The abuse of relationship, you can’t quit, right?
0:04:23 Well, I mean, the reality is, if you didn’t know what was going on, I think the reality for most
0:04:28 Americans, unless you’re a veteran or a beneficiary of SNAP or Head Start, which is a lot of Americans,
0:04:34 but quite frankly, if you’re in our economic weight class, you can shield yourself from this
0:04:40 nonsense. And I would argue you’re probably in a beneficiary of it, and not in a good way.
0:04:45 But what I recognize moving to London, which is in my opinion, the second best city in the world,
0:04:51 is it is really hard to beat America. And that is, if you like opportunity, if you like a crush
0:04:59 and a collision of culture, grit, creativity, there’s just nothing like America. And my reductive
0:05:04 analysis after I say this and it triggers some people molesting the earth for the last 30 years
0:05:10 is that America is still the best place to make money, and Europe’s the best place to spend it.
0:05:16 So, when you’re going into your spending years, absolutely spend time in Europe and go to Madrid
0:05:22 and get a great bottle of wine for 10 bucks, not 80. Check out Munich, which is an amazing city,
0:05:29 Milan, go to, you know, PSG game in Paris. It’s just, but if you’re looking to advance your career,
0:05:34 your influence, your impact on the world professionally, everything here, I would
0:05:40 argue is a kind of medium or second gear. It just can’t get out of second gear. But
0:05:44 I gotta be honest, I can’t wait to get back. I can’t wait to get back to America.
0:05:50 Yeah, well, we’ll be thrilled to have you. No, I’m done with that part. But I did notice that
0:05:58 when I was in grad school, that all of the top performers in my PhD class, all desperate for
0:06:04 American positions, like couldn’t wait to be able to do it, even with all of the problems with academia.
0:06:09 But yeah, well, that’s, that’s the joke about Scotland, that some of the finest minds in the
0:06:13 world, and they all have the same thing in common they left. Anyways, all right, enough of that.
0:06:17 Today, we’re discussing Elon Musk’s increasing government influence. I don’t know if you’ve
0:06:22 heard, he’s this very wealthy individual who puts rockets into space but doesn’t live with any of his
0:06:30 children. He’s this former South African slash Canadian slash naturalized American. Anyways,
0:06:34 interesting cat, we’re going to talk about him. Reminds me of this very popular guy in the middle
0:06:38 of the last century, who some people really loved. We’re coming in hot, I guess, right?
0:06:44 But most people, you know, most people over time found that, found that, well,
0:06:47 they, it’s interesting, they have the same hand gesture. It appears that they say they have the
0:06:52 same body language. Anyways, we’re going to talk about Elon Musk’s increasing government influence,
0:06:57 Trump’s buyout offer to federal workers, and the latest Democrats’ effort to fight back. All right,
0:07:03 let’s get into it, Joss. I think we’re already in, so go. Go, yeah. I’ve already, I’ve already
0:07:08 dived in the shallow. You gave away the game already. We’ve already talked about 1930s, so yep.
0:07:14 Elon Musk’s grip on the executive branch keeps tightening. His Doja crew has been popping up
0:07:19 at federal agencies, snooping around sensitive systems. And until last week, when a federal
0:07:23 judge blocked his team from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system, my understanding
0:07:28 is every time they run up against a judge, they get blocked. Trump defended Musk’s efforts calling
0:07:34 it part of his plan to cut wasteful spending and praise Musk for his work. But the AFL-CIO and
0:07:40 the Department of Justice are hitting back with multiple lawsuits. And Elon got also a new provocative
0:07:46 time magazine cover that puts him behind Trump’s desk. Interestingly, Republican support from
0:07:52 us all in the Trump administration is cooling off. An economist you got pulled shows only 26%
0:07:58 now want him to have a significant influence. That’s down from earlier numbers, Joss. Musk also
0:08:05 tweeted at me and Kara, funny. Barely noticed my pivot co-host over the weekend accusing us of
0:08:12 threatening his engineers just for calling out the harm they’re causing. So, look, before I’m
0:08:17 not going to, I don’t want to get into a back and forth here. What I would say is that the comments
0:08:22 made were made by me, not by Kara. And I find it sort of telling that he puts Kara’s name first and
0:08:29 goes after Kara instead of just going after the person who he has or should have a grievance
0:08:37 with. And that’s me. And anyways, I’ll let you go first. Any thoughts on what’s going on with
0:08:44 Elon, Joss? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on what’s going on with Elon. I assumed that Kara
0:08:48 came first in that because she has long covered him. And last week she had a big interview with
0:08:55 Ezra Klein, which I thought was very impressive talking about her years of covering him and
0:08:59 being close to him. So that was my assumption as to why that happened. But yes, I have a lot of
0:09:04 thoughts. I don’t want to steal. If you have things to say about the tweet stuff or maybe you’re
0:09:08 saving for pivot when you too can talk about it more in depth, but I don’t want to cut you off
0:09:12 if you’ve got more on that because mine is not about the tweets necessarily. You know, I don’t
0:09:18 have a lot. At first, I started, this is what happens whenever Elon tweets at me or gets angry
0:09:23 at me. And that is my phone starts blowing up with, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” And I’m
0:09:27 not on Twitter. So I’m shielded from most of the toxicity. And someone sent me a screenshot
0:09:33 of the tweet and that it had 11,000 comments. And I’m like, “Well, I bet those comments aren’t
0:09:39 fun to read.” But, I mean, essentially, I start to get worried and I start to get panicked and I
0:09:44 start to, you know, I start to get anxious. And then I realize, okay, whatever you say about Kara
0:09:49 and me is we live with our children. We don’t sleep with a loaded gun next to us. We’re not
0:09:56 severely addicted to a disassociative substance. We’re not making Nazi gestures. And he’s acting
0:10:02 like these engineers are in Quantanimal Bay when the reality is that probably the most serious thing
0:10:06 they’re doing other than denying children and veterans their payments, trying to figure out if
0:10:14 the meme further for Doge should be wearing sunglasses. And just this notion of these billionaire
0:10:20 tears where he can’t decide if it’s his struggling engineers or just proper grammar, like pick a
0:10:25 struggle boss. It’s like, well, you don’t have auto correct. I just, I start to read this thing.
0:10:30 I start to get upset. I start to think about responding. And then I think I don’t want to
0:10:36 create a sideshow. I want to focus on what I think is important. And that is highlighting
0:10:42 that we have somebody who was not cleared or approved by government or Congress,
0:10:49 who is basically hacking into our federal systems. If China did this, it would be an
0:10:57 act of war without the permission of Congress and shutting off funds to veterans and children
0:11:04 and the neediest. And I think that’s where we have to remain our focus. So Musk saying mean
0:11:09 things about me, that’s a sideshow and it really doesn’t matter. It’s not important.
0:11:14 And I’m not going to, other than I want to stay focused on, you know, when you go into an emergency
0:11:20 room, there’s a staying called stop the bleeding. And that is if someone comes in with a gunshot
0:11:24 and they are hemorrhaging blood, they don’t take their PSA or their cholesterol level.
0:11:31 So my ego and me being butthurt or responding or getting into it with him on Twitter,
0:11:36 that’s a distraction. We need to stay focused on the fact that we are now in a position where
0:11:41 we’ve created a series of incentives where when we convict the president of being a felon and he
0:11:47 gets reelected, he has learned that the American public, as long as they control all three branches
0:11:53 of government, will not hold him accountable for trespassing or hacking into our most sensitive
0:11:58 federal systems. Now, if it gets to a judge, it gets pushed back, but they’re kind of in this
0:12:03 Blitzkrieg moment of let’s ask for forgiveness as opposed to permission. That’s what I want to
0:12:07 stay focused on. So I’m trying as hard as I can. And this isn’t easy for me, as you know, Jess.
0:12:15 Yeah. To put my ego aside and focus what limited audience and bandwidth I have on stopping the
0:12:20 bleeding, if you will, your thoughts. I applaud your maturity. It wasn’t what I expected.
0:12:26 I had a daunting walk down here this morning. I was like, how do I avoid
0:12:30 what I was going to happen in the conversation about the tweet? I don’t want to get involved.
0:12:36 That’s your bag, but I like this attitude. And I think it’s honestly where the American
0:12:40 public is going to be best served, A, because podcasts are the most important thing in the
0:12:47 entire world and we can save them all, but B, because the American electorate has basically
0:12:54 told us that they’re not interested in a lot of the side shows. They voted kind of singularly
0:13:00 focused either on the economy or on an immigration. And that’s what they deserve to have in their
0:13:04 conversations. That’s what they deserve to have delivered for them in terms of policy.
0:13:10 None of those things have happened thus far in the first, I can’t, it’s only three weeks.
0:13:17 So that’s what’s so crazy that this has only been three weeks since Trump was inaugurated.
0:13:23 But I think that’s a very mature outlook on this. And I look forward to listening to pivot,
0:13:28 where I’m sure you two devolve into the immaturity. I’m just going to unshane Kara.
0:13:33 Just let her loose. Well, she’s better. She’s better at counter punching than me.
0:13:41 She does have good insults. Yeah. She’s fearless. And I did, I mean,
0:13:45 it’s interesting, I’m thinking a lot about men emasculated. It is interesting that the Doge
0:13:52 team is all young men. Yeah. And I do think that at the end of the day, the people responsible for
0:13:57 this are the president and Elon Musk. And I think these, I’m going to call them kids,
0:14:02 but these young men, young men are more risk aggressive. Biologically, the prefrontal cortex
0:14:07 doesn’t catch up until they’re the age of 25 to a woman. It is interesting that there are no women
0:14:13 as part of this group. But isn’t this what you predicted to some degree in talking about how
0:14:21 disenfranchised and out of kind of mainstream society, young men were being pushed. So they’re
0:14:28 looking for community. They’re looking for fun and adventure and that high, wherever they can
0:14:33 find it. And they’ve spent a lot of time on their computers and they’re really fucking good, right?
0:14:38 They’re the ones who are going to be able to hack into our system. So it does seem,
0:14:43 I think calling them hackers is probably wrong. Hackers in a past life and some of them have even
0:14:52 been fired from past internships or jobs for hacking or working at places where convicted
0:14:57 hackers have been employed. I mean, this is a motley crew in terms of resumes. And there are a
0:15:02 lot of FBI agents, former FBI agents who have been speaking out saying, these are not people that
0:15:07 could pass a conventional clearance, which seems like a problem to me when you’re talking about
0:15:13 the treasury payment system. But I do think that what we’re seeing in the Doge team is very much
0:15:18 linked to the world that you have been talking about for the last few years and will be the
0:15:24 subject of your forthcoming book if you would like to plug that. Thanks for that. So I think
0:15:29 they should be held accountable if a law has been broken here and that anyone who goes after
0:15:35 the president or must for laws broken, which I believe they’re trespassing. I believe that they
0:15:40 have purposely circumvented Congress. We’re in uncharted territory because you don’t know if
0:15:46 that’s an actual, if that is a civil or criminal offense when the president approves of it. I think
0:15:53 that’s for courts to decide. But I do think it’s a side show to a certain extent to focus on these
0:15:57 young men, to be clear, the people accountable for this, the people who are orchestrating this are
0:16:03 the president and Elon Musk. And to a certain extent, the Democrats, I don’t want to say who
0:16:06 are enabling it, but have been caught flat-footed and have to figure out a way to strike back.
0:16:12 And we’re going to talk about that later in the show. But it is interesting. And just to be
0:16:18 real here about these young men, I was thinking about it. I’ve said a lot. If I was born in 1920
0:16:23 Germany, I’d probably be wearing a Nazi uniform and probably would have died on a Russian field
0:16:29 somewhere thinking that I was serving the fatherland. You are a function of where you grow up and in
0:16:34 what time. And you can see with a lot of young men, these are really talented young men with a lot
0:16:39 of opportunities. So I don’t feel comfortable grouping them into the bigger swath of young men
0:16:45 in America who have a lack of on-ramps to a good living, a lack of financial security, a lack of
0:16:51 prospects, a lack of an ability to meet a potential mate and start a family. These guys are all
0:16:57 incredibly talented and have a lot of opportunities. And the only lesson someone called me, a
0:17:00 readership called me, I didn’t go on and I said, “What would your advice be to these young men?”
0:17:04 And I’m like, “Again, it’s a side show.” But what I would tell any young man is that we’re in a
0:17:10 high pressure situation. Do what I didn’t do. And that is assemble a kitchen cabinet of people to
0:17:15 advise you say, “This is what’s going on. Do you have any thoughts for me, whether it’s your parents,
0:17:21 whether it’s your parents’ friends, whether it’s just friends?” Because I saw being a young man,
0:17:26 trying to express my manhood is quickly assessing the situation and then making a snap decision and
0:17:33 trying to talk everybody into me being right, whatever that decision was. It is very hard to
0:17:38 read the label, especially as a young man when you’re more risk aggressive and quite friendly,
0:17:42 don’t have incredibly good judgment or reason. You’re not that thoughtful. You’re not that measured
0:17:48 yet. It is really hard, if not impossible to read the label from inside of the bottle. So the larger
0:17:54 learning I would want to communicate to all young men is do what I didn’t do. I would have saved
0:18:00 myself a lot of heartache, a lot of professional missteps, a lot of broken relationships. Had I
0:18:05 just reached out to people and said, “This is the situation. Do you have any thoughts or advice for
0:18:11 me?” And you might decide not to change your mind about what you’re doing. But this is, you know,
0:18:16 when you find yourself in kind of uncharted territory, it’s just a really good idea to check
0:18:21 in with people from different backgrounds and say, “This is what’s going on. It’s pretty intense. Do
0:18:27 you have any thoughts?” And I didn’t learn that until I was much older. And I think men have a much
0:18:34 more difficult time because we conflate strength and masculinity with being decisive as opposed
0:18:39 to being thoughtful and listening. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think Democrats really suffered
0:18:45 from a very effective smear campaign of us being the feminine party because we were talking about
0:18:52 issues that, God forbid, affected women. And men by extension, when someone is pregnant and there’s
0:18:58 someone who got her pregnant and is sticking around, then it affects you too. So I totally
0:19:04 agree with that. And I didn’t mean to paint with such a broad brush, but I do think that there’s
0:19:10 the widest group of young men that you were talking about who are lacking in opportunity and
0:19:15 lacking in mobility and the chance to make meaningful relationships and to live a full and
0:19:23 loving and beautiful life that we all want. But then there is also a large contingent of
0:19:29 these bro types who feel, even though they have been afforded, tons of opportunities
0:19:33 have had the best education and probably aren’t facing any student debt at the end of this,
0:19:39 getting internships at places like Palantir at 19 years old who still feel aggrieved.
0:19:44 And a lot of that is rooted in the fact that they don’t see a ramp to the level of success that
0:19:50 their boomer parents or late Gen X boomer parents had by their age. I mean, thinking back to how
0:19:58 enormous it felt if a parent could earn a million dollars in a year and then how stifled people
0:20:03 who see themselves as upwardly mobile and are living in these big cities and maybe are at a
0:20:09 big law firm or in banking, when you say, oh, earn a million dollars a year, I’m not going to have
0:20:13 anywhere close to the life my parents have. My kids are not going to go to private school,
0:20:21 which is now 55 to $65,000 a year versus the 25,000 when I was growing up as an elder millennial.
0:20:27 So I wanted to add that. But something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and this is shifting gears
0:20:33 a little bit, but still about what’s going on with Musk and Co is how much this moment feels to me
0:20:41 like it did when Trump and the array of lawyers that were fanned out across the country after
0:20:47 the 2020 election were getting to work to essentially poison pill as big of a swath of the
0:20:53 population as they possibly could to not believe that Joe Biden had won a free and fair election.
0:20:59 They did it with vaccine skepticism. Their power is strongest when their supporters are separated
0:21:05 from the rest of society. And I feel like we’re seeing that moment again. And J.D. Vance tweeted
0:21:10 over the weekend after the judge ruled about the treasury payments. Not that Scott Besin
0:21:14 couldn’t access the treasury payment system, but that you couldn’t have individuals that weren’t
0:21:19 fully vetted having access. And we’ll see what happens. I think today there’ll be an addendum
0:21:23 to that. But he’s tweeting saying that they’re trying to control the executive’s quote unquote
0:21:28 legitimate power. And a lot of that as a reference back to the Supreme Court case where they basically
0:21:34 gave Trump immunity from anything or future presidents, but it was really about Trump.
0:21:37 And then you had, I don’t know if you saw Christine Noem, the Homeland Security
0:21:43 Secretary was on with Dana Bash this weekend. People don’t trust the government.
0:21:47 Right. And then Dana says to her, sorry, I shouldn’t have said Dana, it’s Dana,
0:21:55 says to her, well, you are the government. And then she’s driveled for 58 seconds after
0:21:58 that and shows she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. But she actually did say the
0:22:04 important part out loud, which is they are creating an environment and have fostered for years now,
0:22:08 an environment in which people don’t feel that they can trust the government.
0:22:13 And one of the first things Trump said when he started running for president was I alone
0:22:20 can fix it. And now it’s I alone plus Elon and JD and whoever is on board for all of this.
0:22:28 And I’m scared to see society perhaps even further breaking apart along these new lines of
0:22:33 who thinks that the government does anything good for me and who thinks that there is absolutely
0:22:42 nothing that of positive note that the government delivers. And that’s hugely dangerous. And I
0:22:48 don’t know, that’s been the most disturbing part for me that I feel like I’m back in November and
0:22:52 December of 2020. And I worry we’re not going to get these people back.
0:22:56 Well, this is a serious issue. And I want to apologize for my Nazi references because they’re
0:23:02 not funny. Although it is clear that Musk and Trump have made a hard right turn. And also the,
0:23:07 I don’t know if you’ve driven the new model SS from Tesla. And I saw on Twitter.
0:23:09 Are you coming up with these on the fly? Or do you have a list of
0:23:14 Musk Nazi jokes that you like to make? Well, you know, he’s changed his pronouns
0:23:19 to he and Himmler. But anyways, there’s a lot in there. And I think that
0:23:26 potentially you have, unfortunately, everything reverse engineers to one key statistic in my view.
0:23:32 And if we don’t fix it, we’re going to have some form of revolution, famine or war.
0:23:37 And that happens in every society. And it’s the following. The ultimate social compact is that
0:23:42 my kids will do better than me. If I work hard, I play by the rules, my kids will do better than
0:23:48 me. The definition, I used to think the definition of love was caring more about someone than you
0:23:53 care about yourself. And I’ve broadened that to, you know, you give witness and notice to people’s
0:23:59 lives. But the people who irrationally love are your children. They’re, you know, I always say
0:24:02 to my sons, you’re the only people in the world that I want to be more successful than me. And
0:24:08 I’m embarrassed to say that, but it’s true. And when your kids aren’t doing as well as you are,
0:24:13 we’re at 30 for the first time in the nation’s history, it’s just a breakdown in the social compact.
0:24:19 And people want chaos. There’s also because we’ve had what I would argue is the best functioning
0:24:24 organization. And let me go, I think the most impressive organization in history is a wing
0:24:28 of the US government. And that’s our military. And I think in the top five is the US government.
0:24:35 And Mel Robbins, who I think is going to probably displace Joe Rogan, if Stephen Barton doesn’t,
0:24:42 has this new book out called Let Them. And I’m sort of at the point right now where the people who
0:24:46 are under the illusion that Trump represents them, the genius of the Republican party is they represent
0:24:53 the top 1% in corporations. And they’ve convinced the bottom 99 that you should endorse us because
0:24:57 once you get into the top 1%, you’re going to love it here. And you have more of a chance
0:25:04 with us. And when Democrats keep spewing out this elitist dribble, and we continue to move
0:25:09 towards a 30 year old not doing as well as his or her parents, then the parents and the people
0:25:14 under the age of 30 just want chaos. And what I say around some of this stuff, I’m at the point now
0:25:21 where it’s like, let them, the states that went for Trump are the states that are the biggest
0:25:28 takers of federal assistance. So just see what happens when veterans and fairers benefits when
0:25:34 we disrupt and shut down those people you can’t trust. Okay, let’s see what happens to you and
0:25:42 dad and your neighbors. And what happens in these rural dark red communities when there is no head
0:25:49 start. See what happens when you shut down DEI and there is no job opportunity for veterans. Like,
0:25:54 I’m at the point where it’s like, you got, you know what, you broke it, you own it, you’re going
0:26:02 to get to find out just how quote unquote incompetent government is, you’re going to find out that
0:26:06 government is a lot more competent than you had originally thought. And you’re going to get a
0:26:12 very ugly awakening in my view. And I’m sort of at the point of, all right, it’s time. You really
0:26:17 want to see what life is like in these red states, the people who are most rapidly for
0:26:24 Trump who tend to be, who tend to be in rural areas tend to be quite frankly have a larger
0:26:30 body mass index are more dependent upon Medicare or more dependent on government services. The
0:26:35 biggest takers from a state perspective are the ones that went hardest towards Trump, which means
0:26:40 when these payments in these programs get shut down, they’re beginning, this isn’t going to hurt
0:26:45 us. Yes, I mean, we’re upset about this because I’d like to think we have some fidelity to America
0:26:50 and the Constitution and want to pay back based on the prosperity we’ve recognized because of this
0:26:55 incredible system and rule of law and democracy, but quite frankly, this isn’t going to really hurt
0:27:00 you or me. We’re not, our kids aren’t in snap. We’re not getting veterans a fair payments. We’re
0:27:06 not getting social security payments, right? We’re not, we’re not dying a malaria in Malawi or
0:27:11 wherever, right? This won’t affect us. It’s just fascinating though that the people who I think
0:27:17 are about to get the biggest dose of like, wow, be careful what you ask for are the ones that are
0:27:22 most rapidly pro-Trump. So my sense is at this point, you know, as Mel Robbins would say, let
0:27:30 them have at it. You ask for it, you’ve got it, Toyota. That’s definitely the big debate, I think,
0:27:38 amongst people who voted the way that we did, that balance between wanting to live in a society
0:27:43 that uplifts everybody, which I feel like is so core to the Democratic Party, and then thinking
0:27:49 we are never going to have a reversal of these kinds of electoral outcomes unless there is real
0:27:55 suffering. And that feels like a terrible place to be. I don’t want to be someone
0:28:02 that wishes a bad economic outcome on anyone. I would love a world in which everyone can succeed
0:28:08 to the utmost level. But it does seem like there has already been a bit of this. I don’t want to
0:28:12 go as far as saying buyer’s remorse, but you’re seeing these videos coming up on TikTok. I don’t
0:28:19 know. There’s a farmer who relies on this cost sharing program that gets funded through the
0:28:24 Inflation Reduction Act that has been frozen and gone away, and he’s talking about potentially
0:28:30 losing his farm. He was someone who voted for Trump. Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama,
0:28:36 is out there talking about how we can’t have the NIH go away, the new policy of getting
0:28:41 indirect costs down to 15%, which will basically mean that we have to shutter labs that are
0:28:47 saving us from every disease under the sun and our huge economic boon for the country. I was
0:28:54 astounded to see that for every dollar that we put into society from the NIH that we get
0:29:02 $2.46 back, and it generates nearly $93 billion in economic activity in the U.S.,
0:29:08 and also is what keeps us, the leader of the PAC, our competitiveness. It’s so funny to hear
0:29:12 Republicans bemoaning how far we’re falling behind all the time, and then they’re like,
0:29:17 “You know what we’ll do? We’ll get rid of, we’ll slash NIH funding.” That’ll be the way that we’ll
0:29:24 really show the rest of the world. But in a more personal level, I talked about two or three months
0:29:30 ago to a college student from the Midwest. He reached out, he watches the Five, is thinking
0:29:34 about a career in politics, and really interested in political communication. We got on the phone,
0:29:40 and he emailed me last week, and he said, and he said that I could share this. I’ve really
0:29:46 appreciated hearing what you have had to say the past week on the Five and your podcast with Scott.
0:29:50 So, yeah, Scott, you’ve really opened my mind on certain things that are currently going on as
0:29:54 someone who voted for Trump, and you have been communicating a lot of frustrations I’ve been
0:29:59 feeling alongside some family and friends who didn’t expect all the chaos. And then he puts in
0:30:04 parentheses not to mention the tariffs, as our family owns a small business where all our products
0:30:11 are made in China. So, this is a 20-year-old bro, right, from the middle of the country,
0:30:17 comes from a conservative family. They love Trump, and it only took, I got this a week ago,
0:30:23 so it only took two weeks of this level of chaos for him to feel strongly enough that
0:30:28 he would write that down, right? That’s not a casual comment, and he told me that I could talk
0:30:32 about it, that I could put that out on air. So, it’s obviously something that’s very emblematic
0:30:38 of not only what’s going on in his life, but what’s going on in his orbit. Elon Musk’s popularity
0:30:45 has gone from in 2016, it was plus 29 when he was the SpaceX guy, down to negative 11. So,
0:30:51 something is happening. There is pushback out there and the realization that, yeah,
0:30:57 maybe there are cuts we should be making, but this wholesale approach to just move fast and
0:31:02 break things is not something that works for the public sector. Well, you’re already starting to
0:31:07 see it, and it kind of goes to, and we’ll talk about this in a bit, potential solutions, but
0:31:14 basically sales of Tesla cars are diving in the EU. Electric vehicle market declined by 6%
0:31:23 overall in January. So, there is a structural decline, but sales of Tesla are down 63% in
0:31:31 France, 44% in Sweden, 38% in Norway, 42% in the Netherlands, and 12% in the UK. And as someone
0:31:37 who has worked with automobile companies, they measure share in sales and basis points. And
0:31:43 that is, if year-on-year, you’re down a half a percent, the person running that country is
0:31:52 sweating. I mean, these are, I mean, these literally are kind of implosions of sales. So,
0:31:57 it does appear that finally, what, you know, everyone’s been outraged, the lack of outrage on
0:32:02 the left. It does appear that people, that the bloom is off the road here. People no longer seem
0:32:08 as a, you know, kind of this provocateur and innovator, but as someone who is a threat and
0:32:14 that they just don’t need to own his car. I’m curious, with all of these lawsuits and a DOJ
0:32:20 investigation piling up, how serious do you think the legal threat is to Musk and Doge and what could
0:32:26 the long-term fallout be other than, obviously, his popularity is going down. But I’ll put forward
0:32:32 a thesis. When you tell someone you can be a convicted felon and then reelect them,
0:32:37 he’s essentially decided the incentives and disincentives no longer apply to me that I can
0:32:43 break the law with impunity. Do you think there is a bridge too far here around these court cases?
0:32:49 Well, so far, like you mentioned earlier on, the courts have gone against them in all of these
0:32:55 instances. But the problem is, is that the courts move slower than 20-year-old kids that are in the
0:33:00 Treasury payment system to some degree, right? It’s already disrupted people’s lives. Funding
0:33:04 has been cut off, even if it is then getting reinstated. There are all these lawsuits with
0:33:10 harrowing testimony from people who work for USAID and are stationed abroad and are saying,
0:33:14 you’re sending me back to America. I haven’t lived there in 15 years. We have no infrastructure.
0:33:20 We have no family. We have kids with special needs. And if there is a disruption in their care,
0:33:24 I have notes from their doctors about the long-term suffering that they will endure.
0:33:30 Nobody in the government seems to care at all about that. So the courts are great. And we’re
0:33:34 going to have Mark Elias on the podcast in a few weeks. And I’m really interested to talk to him
0:33:41 about the legal approach to all of this. But they’re moving to some degree too quickly. And I think
0:33:47 on the fundamental level, what’s most disturbing about all of this is that they are going for
0:33:52 a two-branch approach to government. I think they don’t care at all about Congress because
0:33:57 appropriated money means nothing to them. And we should note as well that the government is only
0:34:03 funded through March 14th. So they’re offering buyouts to people. They have no cash to pay them
0:34:08 for the next eight months. So Democrats actually have a lot of power in that respect. And some
0:34:13 of them are already talking about shutting down the government to be able to shut down Elon Musk.
0:34:18 So I think that they are looking at a world of essentially one and a half branches of government.
0:34:23 So they want the most powerful presidency or executive that you’ve ever seen in your life.
0:34:28 And then they want about half of the judiciary. They want the good judges. Which is always how
0:34:32 Trump talks about things. He says, “Well, of course we want immigration. We just want the good
0:34:36 immigrants. And of course we want this, but we just want the good ones.” So he wants the judges
0:34:41 probably that he picks. So he wants Eileen Cannon and the Supreme Court. And the rest of it can
0:34:49 kind of go to hell. And that’s really new territory for us. Looking at a world in which the executive
0:34:56 has no interest in having checks and balances with the Congress and who may openly flout
0:35:04 these judicial decisions. We’ll have to wait and see in terms of how they approach it. Even this
0:35:10 week will be an interesting incubator for that. But I think that they are so far emboldened even
0:35:14 from where they were in 2020 when they were getting bad rulings that we could see something
0:35:15 completely unprecedented.
0:35:21 Bill O’Reilly recently said that he doesn’t believe Musk has as much power as we think.
0:35:26 And then Time Magazine in the same week puts him on the cover behind the president’s desk.
0:35:29 Do you think we’re overestimating Musk’s influence or underestimating it?
0:35:34 I’m not sure. Listen, Time Magazine wants a good cover. It was a good cover. It definitely pissed
0:35:39 Trump off even though he said like, “Oh, are they still in business? Who reads that anymore?”
0:35:43 But he definitely, when he got Time Person of the Year just a month ago was super psyched about
0:35:49 Time Magazine. I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the middle. I think you don’t want to be the
0:35:54 person that went out there and took a big swing like Elon Musk actually doesn’t have that much
0:35:59 power. You can even see from the level of disruption that we’ve had that he has that power and also
0:36:05 that he swayed the election like this, you know, $290 million, whatever algorithmic changes
0:36:11 to social media that will probably never understand the true impact of that or the gravity of that
0:36:17 impact when, I mean, you’re not on Twitter anymore. I still am. I need to be there for work.
0:36:26 It’s A, assess pool. But B, I can barely find content that I need to be able to do my job.
0:36:32 Reporters that I follow are not showing up even in the, you know, the for you column.
0:36:37 It pales in comparison to what it used to be, which was I thought the best news gathering
0:36:42 site you could always find what you needed right away when you logged on to Twitter. And it’s not
0:36:46 like that anymore at all. So I’m in the middle on it. What do you think? Are you a Bill O’Reilly
0:36:51 or Time Magazine? You know, I don’t know. I know that the staff in the White House is more worried
0:36:57 about trying to calm Trump down when he’s angry because he doesn’t drink or do drugs whereas with
0:37:04 Musk, you just give him a ketamine infused juice box. There goes the bigger man. That bigger
0:37:09 man part of the show is over. He’s back. That’s right. Anyways, with that, let’s take a quick
0:37:19 break. Stay with us. The Republicans have been saying lots of things. Just yesterday,
0:37:25 their leader said he wants to own Gaza. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a
0:37:32 job with it too. We’ll own it. On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency
0:37:36 was insubordinate. USAID in particular, they refuse to tell us anything. We won’t tell you what
0:37:42 the money’s going to, where the money’s for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk,
0:37:47 the richest man on earth, tweeted about the same agency that, you know, gives money to the poorest
0:37:53 people on earth. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some
0:38:00 great parties, did that instead. But what have the Democrats been saying? People are aroused. I
0:38:05 haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time. Huh. That’s a weird way to put it,
0:38:12 Senator. We’re going to ask what exactly is the Democrat’s strategy to push back on Republicans
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0:39:26 Grammarly.com/podcast. That’s Grammarly.com/podcast. Hey, this is Peter Kafka. I’m the host of
0:39:32 Channels, a podcast about technology and media. And maybe you’ve noticed that a lot of people are
0:39:38 investing a lot of money trying to encourage you to bet on sports right now, right from your phone.
0:39:44 That is a huge change. And it’s happened so fast that most of us haven’t spent much time thinking
0:39:49 about what it means and if it’s a good thing. But Michael Lewis, that’s the guy who wrote
0:39:54 Moneyball on the Big Shore and Liars Poker, has been thinking a lot about it. And he tells me
0:40:00 that he’s pretty worried. I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient
0:40:05 as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It’s like the world has created less and less
0:40:09 friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more. You can hear my chat with Michael
0:40:18 Lewis right now on Channels wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Over the weekend,
0:40:22 Trump made history as the first sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl. He also said
0:40:28 he planned on announcing a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States.
0:40:32 Meanwhile, Trump raised eyebrows last week by suggesting he could turn Gaza into the
0:40:38 Riviera of the Middle East during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
0:40:43 He floated the idea of U.S. owning Gaza and hit it at relocating 2 million Palestinians
0:40:49 before walking back comments about deploying U.S. troops. And back home, a federal judge
0:40:53 temporarily blocked Trump’s federal workers’ bio plan delaying a decision for the 2 million
0:41:01 eligible employees 65,000 have opted in so far. Trump’s recent comments about the U.S.
0:41:06 taking over Gaza have sparked a media backlash. I would argue, Jess, that this is another
0:41:12 just weapon of mass distraction and that it’s just so ridiculous. I don’t know. It’s just sucking
0:41:19 oxygen out of the room of the real issue, which is this digital coup, if you will. But how might
0:41:24 this negatively affect the ongoing, in your view, ceasefire between Hamas and Israel or doesn’t have
0:41:31 any impact on the conflict or the tension in the Middle East? Well, the thing that it does in the
0:41:36 immediate term, even if he says it’s not something that he was completely serious about and you saw
0:41:41 that Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, had to walk back his openness to boots on the ground
0:41:47 the next day in the briefing because that was something that freaked even the biggest warmongers
0:41:53 out there. They were like, “No, actually, we are not putting boots on the ground in the Middle East,
0:41:58 but this helps B.B. in the immediate term ensuring up his right flank, which he definitely
0:42:04 needs if he’s going to be able to stay in power.” And Trump always just has that side door available
0:42:11 to him where he says, “Well, it was a negotiating tactic. We just needed to see what Egypt and
0:42:16 Jordan were really made of.” The former deputy prime minister of Jordan said that this was a
0:42:21 declaration of war on the Arab people. That doesn’t sound good, even if that is the place that you
0:42:28 were starting at, that you can even think of a world in which you’re going to move two million
0:42:34 people out of the place that they live. And this is not about defending Hamas, staying in charge,
0:42:38 or anything of that sort. But just Egypt and Jordan have been very clear about this. Saudi
0:42:42 got involved and said, “We’re not doing this either.” The Arab world has not been open to
0:42:48 taking Palestinians for a very long time, which is one of the endemic problems with this conflict.
0:42:52 And I don’t know what the solution is. We all wish that there was going to be able to be
0:42:56 a two-state solution with a neat bow and we can’t get there. There are people who have
0:43:01 dedicated their lives to it, like Tony Blair, for instance, and we have not been able to get there.
0:43:08 But I think that it’s a little too easy to just say that it’s a distraction or it’s a sideshow
0:43:13 because it is forcing people to have to deal with it, first of all, which makes a big difference.
0:43:18 Like Marco Rubio is going to have to say something about it, right? And people like Tom Cotton are
0:43:22 going to have to say something about it. The administration is going to have Pete Hegseth
0:43:29 over at Defense. People are going to have to prepare themselves for the fact that his mercurial
0:43:35 or herky-jerky approach to foreign policy might not go your way all the time. And we did talk about
0:43:40 it as maybe it’s one of the advantages that our enemies have no idea what he’s actually going to
0:43:47 do. But there are real implications for this and his words matter as much as we’d like to
0:43:50 pretend that they don’t. And he says a lot of shit and he throws stuff against the wall and sees
0:43:58 whether it sticks or not. You cannot, with a serious face, say at this point that Trump is
0:44:06 not interested in being a modern-day imperialist, at least to some degree. The amount of times
0:44:10 that he’s talked about, Greenland, he’s talking about the Panama Canal. Now he’s talking about
0:44:14 whatever he wants to do in the Middle East, which is Jared Kushner’s vision. Jared Kushner said
0:44:18 there’s a lot of waterfront property that’d be available. And it was interesting, my colleague
0:44:22 on the five, Jesse Waters, said something about, well, Albania has said that they’ll take people.
0:44:28 And a couple weeks ago, there was a story in the New York Times about how Albania gave the go-ahead
0:44:38 for a $1.4 billion luxury hotel investment for Jared Kushner. So it always comes back to money.
0:44:44 It always comes back to business prospects in all of this. And I don’t think this is something
0:44:48 that’s going to happen. But I don’t think it behooves us to just kind of push it under
0:44:52 the carpet or the rug and just say, oh, it’s a complete impossibility.
0:44:58 So to your point, the premise, it starts from what I think is a legitimate premise. And that is
0:45:06 the path we’re on now, like, okay, the way I would see right now, the Middle East or the problem
0:45:12 in Gaza is there’s no moral clarity. And that is when World War II ended,
0:45:19 we had the Nuremberg trials. And we basically said, this was genocide. And we’re shaming you and
0:45:24 punishing you. And the world came to some sort of moral clarity. We don’t have that coming out of
0:45:30 this conflict. And it feels as if all we’re doing is just setting up the exact same thing to happen
0:45:36 again in two, five or 10 years. That Hamas will rearm, there’ll be people sympathetic, they will
0:45:45 use aid and their popularity with their domestic population who are feel, you know, understandably
0:45:52 agreed. And the same thing is going to happen. So the notion that we need to be creative around
0:45:57 doing something different, that the status quo, the wash, rinse and repeat, we are going to see
0:46:05 the mother of all shampoo effect here. It’s just going to happen again. The current construct just
0:46:10 does not work. Now, but this notion of a two-state solution where the two states are either Egypt
0:46:16 or Jordan, neither, I mean, here’s the problem of relocating these two million residents,
0:46:20 whether you want to call it ethnic cleansing or some sort of a part, whatever you want to
0:46:27 term you or relocation or, or condo development or a creative solution. The problem is
0:46:33 these two million people don’t want to leave. And even more, nobody wants to take them. Albania,
0:46:39 what’s the population of Albania? I don’t look at the border. You want to see a fortified border?
0:46:46 Look at the border between Egypt and Gaza. Albania is 2.7 million. And we’re talking about
0:46:52 two million people who need to go somewhere. What Egypt and Jordan have decided is that
0:46:57 the elements of this population that they cannot risk incorporating is chaos and violence.
0:47:06 So this just doesn’t seem like what I’d call a viable solution for anybody. So until we have,
0:47:14 do we need to be creative? Yes. But I find this, most of those just sort of kind of ridiculous
0:47:20 that, okay, you’re going to relocate two million people and then put up a bunch of
0:47:27 residence inns and, and Trump towers and, you know, Western hotels and then invite the rich
0:47:34 ones back? I don’t, it’s like, okay, walk me through how this logistically actually makes
0:47:41 any sense. So I don’t see any viable path here. What do you think is the significance of the
0:47:44 Judge blocking Trump’s federal work or buyout plan and how could this play out in the coming
0:47:50 weeks? What I think it’s significant, and I already mentioned this, that I know this is Elon’s
0:47:56 playbook and he does it all the time. He did it with Twitter in 2022 as well, but the cash isn’t
0:48:00 there to do it. So it is pretty significant. I think there’s a pretty strong case for saying,
0:48:04 you know, you’re not even talking about money that’s been appropriated. Are you paying out of
0:48:09 pocket? He’s a very rich guy versus man on the planet. Maybe that’s what he intends to do,
0:48:13 but going out to people and saying, you can go on that trip you’ve always wanted to take.
0:48:18 I don’t know. Actually, you have no salary to be able to do that. It’s pretty duplicitous.
0:48:25 The big question is what orders are they going to abide by and what orders, frankly,
0:48:32 are they going to be using the younger dogeys to get around? You know, what will be authorized?
0:48:40 What will the actions from the top level that look pretty normal, right? Post rulings be and
0:48:49 then what are 20-year-old kids that can hack into anything able to actually do? And I know that it’s
0:48:55 not necessarily to turn us into a technocratic state. Maybe that is for some people’s vision who
0:49:02 are involved in this, but I think that because Trump is a lame duck, we have four years essentially
0:49:08 to break as much as possible that they will be looking to push boundaries in ways we haven’t
0:49:12 seen before. So while they might have abided by some of these rulings before, they’re going to
0:49:18 push the envelope even further is my feeling. I mean, I guess the question is their attitude is
0:49:23 it doesn’t matter if it’s legal or illegal. If we make an offer and people accept it,
0:49:28 then it’s done. So before you can get caught robbing the bank, just spend the money and enjoy
0:49:33 yourself. And then if you get caught, okay, we’ll give the money back. There is definitely a kind
0:49:39 of like a move fast and break things kind of element here and have no regard for institutions
0:49:44 or process. Just see if you can get away with it. Whenever I see Republicans, I feel like they’re
0:49:48 sort of like, I can’t believe we’re getting away with this shit. Totally. And it’s like tickling
0:49:52 their sensors. Isn’t this amazing? And I even, I don’t know if I’m imagining this, but I’m wondering
0:49:56 if they’re even getting a little bit nervous like, Jesus Christ, I didn’t realize it would be this
0:50:01 easy. But they are getting upset about things that matter to them. Like I already mentioned,
0:50:09 Senator Katie Britt, Jerry Moran, Senator Wicker, who are big proponents of USAID programs had to
0:50:16 go to Rubio and plead with him. Rubio was a fan. Rubio was a fan last year. He was pushing Biden
0:50:19 to allocate more money. And that links to the problem. And I know we’re going to talk about
0:50:24 the Democrats next. Well, let’s do that. But first, we have to take one more quick break. Stay with us.
0:50:32 All right. So here’s the deal. Take a former world number one. That’s me, Andy Roddick,
0:50:36 adding the journalist who knows everything about tennis and a producer who’s still figuring out
0:50:40 how to spell tennis. You get served with Andy Roddick, a weekly podcast where we break down
0:50:45 the game we all love. We cover the biggest stories, talk to the sports biggest stars,
0:50:48 and highlight the people changing tennis in ways you might not even realize.
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0:51:08 Catch serve with Andy Roddick on Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you listen. Or watch us on
0:51:20 YouTube. Like, subscribe, follow, all that good stuff. Let’s get started. Welcome back. Before
0:51:25 we wrap, Democrats are stepping up their strategy. Rallies are gaining momentum. Schumer is calling
0:51:30 for opposition to every Trump nominee, and Jefferies is making his stance clear in negotiation
0:51:34 letters. Jess, do you think this is the right approach? Do you think it’ll be effective?
0:51:40 No. Have you seen these rallies? It’s horrible. So you have, John Stuart did a great
0:51:47 impression of Schumer of them, where, you know, you have a guy in his 70s who’s not the most
0:51:54 charismatic. I’m being generous here. Screaming we will win after we just lost everything.
0:52:01 And then you have Congressman Al Green shaking his cane in the front of the frame. So it’s just
0:52:07 Schumer’s face with a cane going back and forth. Or Maxine Waters, you know, trying to barge into
0:52:16 the Department of Education. And I’ve noticed that all of the key speakers at these rallies are
0:52:23 safe seat Democrats. And that’s really the wrong approach to all of this. I almost want to see
0:52:29 exclusively people who have run tight competitive races out there talking about what they think
0:52:34 is the right thing for us to do. Because it’s, you know, it’s all well and good and people are
0:52:39 great communicators and you be on your social feeds and everyone should be amplifying as much
0:52:45 of the bad shit that Republicans are doing as possible. But I feel like it just sends the
0:52:52 message that we haven’t learned that much from the election and that frankly, we’re proliferating
0:52:58 more hysteria than the average voter is interested in hearing at this point. So it has to be so much
0:53:04 more targeted. I know how came Jefferies put out a 10 point communications plan. But everyone has
0:53:10 to, you know, see what their constituents are interested in and what their temperature is
0:53:15 in terms of Trump versus Elon. There seems to be a big dichotomy there. Jared Golden,
0:53:22 who is a Democratic Congressman who won in a competitive district, a Trump very rural
0:53:27 district in Maine, said that all the calls that he’s getting to his office are about Musk.
0:53:32 People aren’t upset about Trump. They’re upset about Musk. And that’s what he’s leaning into.
0:53:37 And people have to find kind of their North Star for all of this. But the thing that was driving
0:53:43 me crazy in terms of the messaging is, I don’t know if you watched after the election, Tony
0:53:48 Fabrizio, who was Trump’s pollster and Chrysla Savita, who was one of his campaign managers,
0:53:54 participated in a panel with the Democratic campaign managers as well. And they were talking about,
0:54:00 you know, what worked, what didn’t work. And they said that Project 2025 was destroying them
0:54:06 up until a couple months before the election. So it had a 57% negative approval rating.
0:54:12 And that we were doing a great job hammering it. That all of those, even if we kind of had
0:54:15 rolled our eyes at it, it had been hugely effective that every time we said, well,
0:54:20 this is the Trump 2025 playbook. This is what they want. This is what they’re going to do.
0:54:27 And that has disappeared even as people who wrote Project 2025 are in charge of OMB,
0:54:34 Brendan Carr at the FCC. And I want that messaging back on mass. I want everyone talking about this
0:54:41 to say Time Magazine did an analysis. Two thirds of the executive orders that Trump has already
0:54:47 implemented are out of Project 2025 already. I mean, I was happy to see those Democratic
0:54:52 Congress people walk over. I think at least, I think they need to be seen doing anything,
0:54:58 but the optics here, I agree with you. It felt like a senior’s home when they found out water
0:55:04 aerobics were canceled or jello night had been switched to Thursday. I mean, it just felt, oh,
0:55:08 God, that’s, that’s how we’re going to win this fight. That’s the army we’re sending in.
0:55:14 You know, as we try and process this, there’s, I want to move to like, okay, what do we do?
0:55:18 And there’s, I would argue, and I want to put forward some potential ideas and have you respond to
0:55:22 them. There’s short-term and there’s long-term. And the first thing you got to do in any sort of
0:55:27 strategies, you got to determine where’s the soft tissue, what’s the leverage, what are our assets,
0:55:32 what can be exploited. And he King Jefferies, I thought was actually quite eloquent and honest
0:55:36 when he said, they control all three branches of government. There’s just not a lot we can do
0:55:42 from kind of a legislative level. And when the stuff gets to judges, it gets pushed back, but
0:55:48 they’re, you know, they’re moving at this Blitzkrieg speed. And my view is, okay, I think you go after
0:55:55 the money, like what they’re doing by hacking and turning off these payment systems or intervening,
0:56:00 I don’t know what the right term would be. And I think you go after, I think you go after musks,
0:56:05 financial interests. So it’s already happening in Europe, as I previously mentioned, Tesla sales
0:56:11 are going down. I think that our congressional representatives and people who think what’s
0:56:17 going on here is a total subversion of our democracy to make it known that you probably
0:56:22 shouldn’t sign up for T-Mobile right now, because T-Mobile has just struck a deal with Starlink.
0:56:28 You probably shouldn’t be thinking about any advertiser on Twitter. That’s an obvious one.
0:56:34 You should be thinking about, okay, United Airlines has just announced a big deal with Starlink.
0:56:39 How do you go after the pocketbook? I think that’s really what Musk cares about. It’s already
0:56:44 happening with Tesla. I don’t see any reason. Should the department, should veterans groups
0:56:51 be doing anything around Tesla, Starlink, any of his economic interests? I think you go after the
0:56:57 purse, because that’s what I think these people care about. Over the medium and the long term,
0:57:03 I think you draft resolutions and say, okay, if this unelected group of people can go in and start
0:57:11 turning off payments, we’re going to propose turning off payments or anything related to Starlink.
0:57:18 To a certain extent is a huge beneficiary, and I even wrote a post titled, “Welfare Queen.”
0:57:22 The notion that he’s trying to cut off payments and claim the government is too big and that
0:57:26 its large S is wasted. Meanwhile, he’s one of the biggest beneficiaries from this large S.
0:57:30 Should we be thinking about, one, how do we go after the economic interests
0:57:36 of Elon Musk to say, we’re not down with this and you circumventing democratic channels
0:57:42 to implement what you think is right, and we’re going to punish you and your companies? There’s
0:57:47 nothing illegal. You don’t have to sign up for T-Mobile that’s introducing Starlink. You don’t
0:57:54 have to fly United Airlines, which is signed a contract with Starlink. Then over the medium
0:58:00 and long term, I think you just have to tell Republicans, okay, you realize that if you can
0:58:07 do this, then we can shut off Starlink. We have our own programmers and we’ll find out if a judge
0:58:13 thinks that’s legal or not. I do think, though, the nuclear option is now on the table, and that is,
0:58:21 I believe that the Democrats should credibly threaten to get in the way of blocking the extension
0:58:28 on our debt ceiling such that the next Treasury auction fails, because at the end of the day,
0:58:33 the reason why the tariffs were rolled back is the leverage in the people that Trump listens to
0:58:40 are corporations and shareholders, and they called him around these ridiculous Canadian and Mexican
0:58:45 tariffs and said, do not do this. This will have an immediate impact on the stock market. The adult
0:58:55 in the room is the stock market and the 10-year bond, and he basically got these illusory symbolic
0:59:02 concessions and then walked them back. I think if the Democrats say, okay, you want to play
0:59:10 Russian roulette, we’re going to load the chamber around the upcoming Treasury auction.
0:59:14 If you want to call all your buddies and tell them that interest rates are about to spike,
0:59:19 which will take the stock market down, and I’m still trying to figure out if that hurts the
0:59:26 1%, 1% of America’s population owns 90% of the stocks. I think that the real leverage here is
0:59:31 around money and is around, you want to shut down the economy, you don’t believe in a democratic
0:59:36 process, fine, we’re going to shut down the economy, and you’re not going to be able to make the
0:59:40 interest, the upcoming interest payments, and you’re going to be the president who, for the first time,
0:59:46 was so offensive, was so non-democratic that we felt we had no choice, but to get in the
0:59:51 way that you’re about to be the first president where a Treasury auction where America did not
0:59:57 pay its debts, and let’s see what happens, boss. But I’m trying to think of where we have leverage,
1:00:01 and those are the only places I can think of because per what Hakeem Jeffery said, us just
1:00:08 screaming outrage and waving our cane in front of a federal building. That’s not working, right?
1:00:13 We need to go after the money, and we need to say you’re going to be the president that takes
1:00:19 the stock market down 8% or 10% on the opening bell next Wednesday after a failed Treasury auction.
1:00:25 Your thoughts? I love that idea, and I’m sure they’re considering that alongside the negotiations
1:00:31 that are going to come up in March because the Republicans had these high hopes for one massive
1:00:36 bill, which seems like a really stupid way to be funding the government anyway. But if you
1:00:41 put those two things together, that’d be very difficult for Trump to weather, and he will be
1:00:48 the person in charge if we fail at auction, or if the government shuts down in general,
1:00:54 though it seems like he does want to furlough employees anyway. But I have an idea that maybe
1:01:01 could be used as a compliment to this, and I’m hoping that Democrats, I’m loosely calling this
1:01:05 the Democratic Disruption Plan, because everyone loves this term disruption. It’s become very chic,
1:01:08 right? And that’s what the Republicans have run on, that we’re just trying to disrupt things. You
1:01:13 got to shake it up because there’s all of this waste in there that we can cut. And I think that
1:01:20 we need to counter program with our own doge. And you can go back to the ’90s, and the Clinton
1:01:24 administration did this. They called it the National Performance Review. I didn’t realize it was as
1:01:32 successful as it was. It made a 426,000 cuts to the federal workforce going agency by agency,
1:01:36 and they did it with a lot of precision. They said, “Are there offices that would
1:01:40 can be closed? Regulations that we can cut? Are there programs that actually don’t need to be
1:01:47 funded within USAID of the $44 billion that goes out there?” I’m sure there are cuts that we can
1:01:52 make, but we should be the ones to propose them. So just take all the crap that they’ve been spewing
1:01:58 and throw it back in their faces. And I think that that would be really effective and show to the
1:02:02 American public that we are serious about governing, that we do know that there is a huge
1:02:09 waste, fraud, and abuse problem, but that 66% of US spending is untouchable. And that’s the most
1:02:14 important part, that we have to be the party out there saying they’re lying to you about cuts that
1:02:20 they can make. The stuff that they’re talking about are tiny. They’re trimming like a dollar
1:02:25 off of the budget, but we will never let them touch your social security, your Medicare,
1:02:31 your Medicaid. And I think that that is a place where we can run and win. And I want to say as
1:02:36 well, on the Department of Education front, I don’t know if you saw this, the national report
1:02:46 card test results came out. And it breaks your heart to see stuff like this. And I just…
1:02:51 So just reference all time low for eighth grade reading levels, is that right?
1:02:58 Well, since testing began, so 1992. And when the Republicans come out and they say, “I want to
1:03:03 abolish the Department of Education,” which by the way is in Project 2025, and you look at those
1:03:12 test results, you understand how average American parents who don’t have optionality to go to a fancy
1:03:17 private school alternative are being denied vouchers to maybe take a few thousand dollars and put
1:03:22 their kids in religious schools, which in general have been performing better than the average public
1:03:27 school, that they say, “You know what? Yeah, burn it all down.” Trump had a great line where he said
1:03:32 about Linda McMahon, “You know, I don’t want you to have a job for that long,
1:03:37 because I want you to destroy the Department of Education.” And what they want in the end is for
1:03:42 private equity to own our education system. That’s what’s already happening. They have been making
1:03:48 tons of money off of these schools, specifically in the charter school space. But if we are going
1:03:54 to have public schools under attack at this level and believe strongly in making them better than
1:03:59 they are certainly, and hopefully taking them into some sort of golden age, we have to play ball
1:04:03 on the education front. And we have to say, “Abolishing the Department of Education isn’t
1:04:08 the answer necessarily, but these are our real reform policies.” And that includes going after
1:04:15 the teachers unions and saying to Randy Weingarten, “No, this all is imperfect. You know, we haven’t
1:04:20 certainly recovered from the lows of the COVID era and all the damage that was done to those kids,
1:04:25 not only as academic learners, but as social emotional beings.” But that Democrats aren’t
1:04:30 going to be afraid to touch that third rail anymore. Someone like Josh Shapiro has done that. He said
1:04:35 before that he’s for school vouchers, “Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where we have better
1:04:40 public schools and some kids have the optionality to go to religious schools or private schools
1:04:44 with the help of the government so that we can save the public school education system?”
1:04:51 So a lot there. I felt that I got into it a little bit. Is it Ronit Weinberg, the head
1:04:57 of the National Teachers Union? Randy Weingarten. I got that one close. Yeah. Randy Weingarten.
1:05:05 You were in the Jewish realm. Something. I was circling the white fish. Anyways,
1:05:10 I said that I thought that the union she represented was using the kids’ drug meals.
1:05:16 During COVID. I’m sure she loved that. Well, during COVID, she decided that we have to protect the
1:05:21 teachers. And she was basically saying, “You’ve got to pay us more and give us a ton of time off.”
1:05:27 And the reality was that the population of teachers in America is the least vulnerable. It was the
1:05:32 least vulnerable to COVID. They were young, primarily female, primarily thin. These were
1:05:38 the least at-risk people in America. And she was using basically kids and their mental health,
1:05:44 which we found were severely impacted by being out of school, such that she could try and find
1:05:49 a moment of leverage to get more money for her dues-paying members. I think teachers’ unions,
1:05:53 and I’m casting a broad brush across all of them, but we have a tendency to
1:05:58 sanctify all of them, not recognize them. Some of these unions are just bottom line corrupt
1:06:03 and really don’t seem to care that much about kids, despite their hush, grandmotherly tones.
1:06:07 Where I would depart a little bit with you, and it sounds like also Governor Shapiro,
1:06:15 is I am very wary of vouchers, because I think effectively what vouchers do is like everything
1:06:21 else in our society, the kind of the narrative of let’s shut down the Department of Education and
1:06:26 let’s take money and just give people choice and give them vouchers. I think theoretically,
1:06:29 it makes a lot of sense. There are instances where someone would say, “I’d rather take the money,
1:06:34 put them in a religious school, or I want more choice.” I get it, but effectively on the ground,
1:06:39 I think what happens is what always happens in our government the last 40 or 50 years,
1:06:45 it is nothing but a naked transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, because the reality is the
1:06:52 majority of rural areas or poor areas don’t have a private school option where they can use the
1:06:58 voucher. The only reason they have a school is because of federal mandated legislation that they
1:07:02 have to have transportation, and they have to have a school, and the school has to be funded.
1:07:08 And all you are doing when you give, say, people a $10,000 voucher, and I was on the
1:07:13 board of my kid’s school, there would be probably some people who are middle-class who would rather
1:07:18 have the choice. We charge $22,000, they come up with the $12,000, it would provide access to a
1:07:24 private school, it’d be good for them. But really what it would be is a $2 million giveaway to the
1:07:30 other 200 families that can’t afford it, and it would just take income and desperately needed
1:07:36 resources out of the public schools in that area. So I get it theoretically, but I think on the ground
1:07:42 all vouchers end up doing is again transfer money from the poorest people in the districts that need
1:07:49 mandated head start in schools and transportation and food programs to wealthy people who would just
1:07:54 get, that would be, you know what, that would be just, you have two kids, that would be a $40,000
1:07:59 gift to you and me. My guess is, I don’t know if you said, do you send your kids to private or public?
1:08:05 One isn’t in school and one is in a private pre-K. There isn’t public school for her yet.
1:08:12 So this is what a voucher program would be. It’d be a $30,000 gift from government to you and me.
1:08:16 I totally understand what you’re saying and I, maybe I got a little ahead of my,
1:08:22 ahead of my skis or I didn’t mean to say that I want to turn into the party of vouchers. What I
1:08:28 wanted to say is that if we continue to look so detached from reality that we can, we are telling
1:08:34 people that these scores are okay with us and we’re going to do nothing about it, which is
1:08:38 essentially what we’re doing without having our own reform policies, that we’re going to lose people
1:08:43 forever because there’s nothing that is more valued in society than our children. We have
1:08:48 Governor Glenn Yonkin in Virginia because Terry McCall have got up there and said,
1:08:54 you know, the kids, the kids aren’t yours, right? They belong to the teachers when they go. So I,
1:08:58 I just want to have the conversation about it. I think it can be perhaps done in some sort of
1:09:06 targeted way, but we look so silly if we just keep saying we’re going to, we’re going to do it the
1:09:10 same way. We’re just going to keep going down this path. That’s what I meant. But I, I would
1:09:15 like to see, you want to talk about a way to save government tens, if not hundreds of billions of
1:09:21 dollars over the next 30 or 50 years, do what Japan does. America has a 40% of its population is
1:09:26 obese. That is an enormous strain on the well-being, the mental health and our financial system. And
1:09:32 one of the reasons healthcare costs $13,000 a year here per person at 6,500 in Japan. You know what
1:09:37 the, we have 40%, 70% of America’s obese are overweight, 40% obese. Do you know what the
1:09:45 percentage of obese pop, of the population in Japan is obese? 12, four. And here’s where it
1:09:50 starts. If you wanted, if you wanted to increase the well-being of children in America, you would
1:09:55 do what Japan does. And that is you’d find the extra money to have a chef at every school. And
1:10:01 the chef has one mandate. Everything has to be fresh. There are absolutely no processed foods
1:10:06 allowed in school because this is what we do. We give these kids shitty, sugary, cheap food.
1:10:10 They get obese because the deal is, okay, we can get them addicted to the food industrial complex
1:10:15 who basically ran every fucking app last night on the Super Bowl and then hand them over to the
1:10:20 diabetes pharmaceutical complex. And that’s the axis of evil. North Korea and Iran are nothing
1:10:24 compared to the food industrial and the diabetes industrial complex in this nation.
1:10:28 And in Japan, they say, we’re going to spend the monies. Have you seen those interviews with the
1:10:35 kids coming out of school? What’s your favorite food? Broccoli. Yeah. Right? And they say, your job,
1:10:40 at three in the morning, these chefs get up at every school, not hugely paid, but a lot of them do it.
1:10:45 Former chefs, they go to the fresh fish market, they go to fresh, and they have to find fresh food
1:10:50 every goddamn day. And these kids grow up with a different sense of nutrition. I love the
1:10:55 idea of thinking out of the box and thinking longterm, but corporate interests get involved.
1:11:01 And again, this is our school system and our children. What I have found is that America is
1:11:07 nothing but a platform to transfer money to companies and shareholders who trade and traffic
1:11:13 in addiction, addiction to food, addiction to opiates, addiction to sex, addiction to Dopa.
1:11:20 And we use the kids as basically body bags or Dopa bags. I have gotten so far off track,
1:11:26 Jess. No. Bring me back. Reel me back, Jess. I would just reel you back by saying, as we
1:11:32 are on the precipice of probably an RFK junior health and human services secretary, that the case
1:11:37 that you just made is why they should have carved out a role for him at like USDA and had somebody
1:11:42 who believes in vaccines. He’s great on this. Yeah. He’s great on this. Yeah. I agree. There,
1:11:46 did I bring you back? I don’t know. Read us out. We got to go. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let’s
1:11:50 leave it there. That’s it for the episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates, our producers,
1:11:56 our David Toledo and Cheninye Onike, our technical directors, true boroughs. You can find Raging
1:12:02 Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That’s right. Raging Moderates on its own feed. If you
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1:12:21 favor. That’s right. That’s right. The hit of the show, the one on Fox. That’s what’s coming next,
1:12:27 and who is the one? That’s right. It’s just Harloff. We are immune. We are super power fucking
1:12:31 fearless from tweets from the wealthiest man in the world. I’m not going to read any of those
1:12:37 11,000 comments. You’ve definitely read them all. I have not. I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on X. I’m
1:12:42 still calling it Twitter. Anyways, and by the way, who sold his Tesla two years ago and before
1:12:48 he sold it, took a big fat fucking dump in the passenger seat. That’s right. That’s your man.
1:12:57 Hit subscribe now. Just have a great rest of the week. You too.
1:13:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov break down Elon Musk’s growing influence in the government and the legal battles piling up against him and DOGE. They dive into Trump’s latest federal worker buyout plan, his controversial comments on Gaza, and the Democrats’ strategy to push back.
Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.
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