Bulwark Takes - WTF 2.0: Everything is Terrible (w/ JVL and Judd Legum)

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

JVL talks with an OG Substacker, Judd Legum, of Popular Information about Trump’s new tariffs, the crypto grift and more. Follow Judd Legum at Popular Information on Substack. WTF 2.0 is a pop-up show on Substack during the first 100 days of second Trump administration.

we'll just get started i'm jbl from the bulwark here with judd is it legum legum that's right leg up that's so funny in my in my again in my mind's eye as i've read you for the last six years it's always been judd legum which is funny because i we have a joke that i also always thought that it was don lamon and not don lemon and so i uh i've classed up your last name. Judd Legum from Popular Information one of the earliest substacks, maybe the first political substack and I think the most

impactful of all the substack newsletters. Like Judd's Judd's if you don't read it, Judd is the guy who actually gets results and it's been amazing to watch the growth of popular information. Judd, thanks for carving out some time on a Tuesday to sit down with me. Oh, well, thanks for having me.

That was a very kind introduction as well. So I appreciate it. Everything is terrible, as it always is when we sit down for these things. So just moments ago, the American president started bleeding in response to the retaliatory tariffs imposed by Justin Trudeau, that there will then be reciprocal tariffs, he says. So the idea is, well, they're going to, we're going to put tariffs on them. They're going to put tariffs on, well, we'll put more tariffs on them. And, uh, I guess this is just the world we live in now. Um, but the, the Judd question I have for you is, uh, cause your sort of specialty is corruption. I think, is that fair to say? It's one of my core interests. I would say that's accurate.

So I've always been very skeptical of Trump and tariffs. Skeptical meaning that I tend to think that he doesn't really mean it. Like he doesn't really believe in anything. And I viewed tariffs as a way for him to weaponize corruption. Because once you impose tariffs, you can then grant waivers. Is this what do you think? I mean, is it like is he a true believer on this stuff or is this just another way to get his hooks into everything? I guess it depends on what your definition of a believer is.

You know, does he believe that this is sound economic policy? I'm not sure Trump thinks that way. accelerated in the second term is there is a constant exploration of how can we maximize the power of the president as an individual, cutting out Congress, even cutting out, in some cases, his own cabinet officials, you know, because we sort of have a lot, Elon sort of lordied over all of them and kind of giddy did all of their business. And I think tariff spits really clearly into that because it's something that the president can impose unilaterally. And then and it puts him at the center. It gives him the, you know, makes him sort of the power center, especially when you're wielding essentially the

U.S. consumer over all of these countries. So now they have to, the countries that Trump is targeting have to come to him and then they have to cut a deal. And I think obviously that's something he likes to do. You know, let's cut a deal. And in the interim, there will be, you know, I think as soon as this week from what I've been reading, obviously it kind of depends on what your mix of products are at an individual store and where everything is sourced from, but there's very few things that don't have a connection to China, Mexico, or Kim. I mean, just in the global, that's going to be a lot of stuff. And you're going to start to see prices go up. And the question is, is what moves Trump off of this? Is it the deal? How much pain is he

willing to inflict? But in the meantime, that's how I view it. I think it's a centering of Trump, making him even more powerful and having tariffs, extra tariffs imposed, puts him at the center of the conversation. Well, let me see if I can convert you on my corruption theory of this. Trump really has been a true innovator in corruption. And the thing which I've been most impressed, this is like my, my anchorman. I'm not even mad. You ate the whole wheel of cheese.

I'm impressed. Um, turning libel lawsuits into vehicles for, for bribery, which is basically what she's done with, with, uh, CBS and,

uh, the ABC, right. He filed, filed defamation suits against the two news outlets for the purpose of being able to allow their parent companies to settle with him as a way of funneling money to him so that he could then, you know, give them what they want.

That is truly innovative in its own way, I guess. And shows a lot of foresight, by the way, that he anticipated that we would come to a time and it's really a sad time when these companies would stop fighting these rather frivolous lawsuits. There really is no there's no defamation. Nothing has happened here other than people did some very anodyne reporting on things that were true, suing them and then anticipating that, yeah, at some point down the line, they may just give up and want to send him $10 million or view it as an opportunity to send him $10 million or $25 million or whatever the going rate is now. It's a way to monetize the presidency, right? That is ultimately what it is.

It's a way to monetize the presidency. I have the power of the presidency, and so I'm going to file this suit against you. You'll have to settle because you're going to have if you're a big enough place, you'll have business before the government. And and also, by the way, the whole thing gets wrapped up in an NDA. You can never talk about The Republicans control the Congress. And I didn't have much faith that they were going to exercise oversight. That turned out to be true, at least at this point. You really can only expect Trump to follow through and do the things that he said that he was going to do. He's doing that. But the capitulation by not every major media organization, but a number of major media organizations, both in terms of these settlements and just kind of skewing news coverage to be more favorable to Trump, the editorial pages, etc. I mean, that is that's something that we didn't really see in the first term, not that the coverage was great or perfect or anything like that. But you had more of an independent spirit, I think, to the press overall. And you really don't see that consistently anymore.

Let's talk about that a little bit, because it's of interest to the two of us as local DC. I'm not in DC anymore, but you're a local boy and you're a DC guy. What are your thoughts on what's going down at The Washington Post? It's really, it's saddening because the fact is there are a lot of great reporters who still work there. And every day there's a lot of great, important stories about the Trump administration that continue to be published. So it's not something that I really take any pleasure in. Nobody should, by the way. Nobody should take any pleasure in this. It's all very bad. But I think that what we're seeing is if you look at what happened in the first term, you know, Bezos was suing the Trump administration by saying that they're retaliating

against him for, because he owned the Washington Post, not giving him Blue Origin, these contracts, and this was all laid out in legal papers. And I think there's just been a decision, and whether this reflects his personal ideology or maybe the evolution of his ideology or what I think is more likely a raw economic decision, which is that this time it's going to be different. into an ally. And I don't care what impact it has on the paper. And I don't care what impact it has on my reputation. I'm going to do what's in my economic interest. I mean, you saw NPR has done great reporting on this. 250,000 people, I think, left when he canceled the endorsement of Harris. I think the last I saw was another 75,000 who left after this last decision to sort of take over the editorial page or the op-ed page. And I think it's really a decision almost like Musk has done with, with X it's saying, okay, we kind of give up on the idea of making money on this. So we're going to turn this into a public relations. We're going to weaponize it. It's a loss later.

Yeah. For, for political purposes and get Trump, um, on, on our side. And I think you can say, okay, well, now it's limited to the op-ed page. Well, first it was limited to everything. I mean, when he took over, he was going to be hands off everything. Then he sort of says, okay, well, now I'm going to get involved in just the editorial board. So I'm going to say no Harris endorsements, no presidential endorsements, by the way. And now he's saying, well, now it's not just the end. Well, now it's all opinion pieces and they all have to meet my ideology. And so I think that the thing that's upsetting to me is it's clearly just another half step away to say, now it's everything. Now it's the whole paper.

And I think a lot of their very talented reporters are seeing the writing on the wall and moving to other places, moving to the Washington Post, moving to Substack, moving wherever they can, so they can continue doing their work. And at the end of the day, you're going to have one less really robust outlet that's holding power to account. That's what I think is going on. Yeah, I think I agree. And the problem is if you're the post, I think you're in an untenable position. And it's just a question of finding yourself a lifeboat to get out as fast as you can. I just don't think in the the medium term the paper is is viable

in that way uh and i don't know it's all very sad to me um can we talk a little bit about crypto which is the other the other big vector for corruption here so i mean everybody just forget that the trump coin was launched uh what, what the Friday before his inauguration, um, that would have been in any other, in any other timeline, a presidency ending scandal. And, uh, now nobody even really remembers it. And he is, he started a strategic crypto reserve, which I think is, again, funny because one of the things that was spread by Russian disinfo about Biden was like, oh, Biden's going to take the American economy and turn all money into crypto, which was always just crazy. Like it was just, but yeah. And you've written a little bit about Justin Sun already. You've got more. Can you tell me what...

The crypto thing is all just scam, right? I think... Wealth transfer? I think you could actually maybe... I'm very skeptical of all of it. I think you could separate something like Bitcoin, which, for better or for worse, at least is decentralized. It's like a thing that exists and it's not under the control of like one or two crypto bros, right? So put that

to one side, you could sort of argue, what is this speculative asset? What's it really doing? It's been around for a while. There's not many- Is it a security? Is it an asset? Is it a currency? But it's not. I don't think it's as corrupt as some of these other newer coins that are centrally controlled. The Trump coins are probably one of the best examples. He owns almost all of them. The money is all flowing to him. He's taking advantage of his celebrity to make a profit. The interesting thing about this strategic crypto reserve is no one has bothered to explain. I'd love for anyone to explain what the strategic purpose

of this would ever be for the United States and the public. You have a strategic oil reserve, and you can say, okay, yeah, there's a war by Saudi Arabia, the tankers can't get over. And so you need some extra oil to counteract that. Okay, we can see that there's a possibility. What's the scenario when you say, oh, well, we really need this Ripple token that doesn't really have much of a use case of anything, you know, instead of dollars, even though dollars are the world's reserve currency can be used and are used to buy and sell every possible thing. These coins are extremely expensive to use, are very widely in valuation. What's the scenario? I mean, what's even the hypothetical scenario where we're going to use this? The only people that benefit are the people who own these assets.

And many of them are huge financial donors to Trump, the guys, the executives at Ripple. Ripple donated. And by the way, in Trump, actually, the new thing was he expanded and said, it's not just going to be Bitcoin. It's going to be all of these very specific, somewhat obscure tokens are also going to be in there. They donated, the company behind one of those tokens, Ripple, donated $5 million to the inauguration. Also is funded on the scale of tens of millions of dollars, this pro-Trump super PAC that supported a lot of the candidates and bunch of money into this or are really invested in the idea that these crypto coins are going to be the future. So if you don't own one of these coins, this is not – I can't imagine how this would benefit anyone. And yeah, it's an amazing scam. And the Trump coin itself, just the fact that it's out there, not only was it a scandal on the day that it was announced, it continues to be a scandal.

Because at any point, anyone can transfer a virtually, anonymously, transfer virtually unlimited cash to Trump by buying up these tokens. It's really, as someone who has at least kind of been involved for a couple of decades and kind of kept track of what counts as a scandal, I mean, this is unbelievable amount of corruption, just basically unlimited anonymous transfers of money to the President of the United States. Yeah, and there's so many, once you start thinking about the details of the strategic crypto reserve, it gets even crazier, right? So, well, who knows when the purchasers are being made, right? Because if you know when the purchasers are being made right because if you know when the purchase is going to be made then you know when to buy right and then when to sell because

the purchasing is going to you know spike the price um you know you have don jr out there tweeting buy the dip and stuff and telling people that i mean the whole thing is yeah it's just a gigantic pump and dump scam, but now run by the federal government itself. Yes, but it's astonishing. One of the things that I thought about, and I think this. To me, may explain because I think I think a lot of people are kind of confused about, well, why is Trump allowing Elon Musk to share so much of the spotlight? Like, why is he okay with how prominent he is? Why is he okay with him essentially presiding over

the first cabinet meeting? I mean, being the dominant speaker at the first cabinet meeting. And I think that if you look at Trump's actual wealth prior to getting involved in these crypto scams, it has really been exponentially increased as a result of these new ventures, the Trump coin, the World Liberty Financial, which is another thing. I mean, he has made more money. You know, a lot of it is on paper now. But, you know, once you get the, I mean, as Elon Musk has shown, once you have that wealth on paper, it's easy enough to convert it to actual tangible things. You just borrow against it or do whatever you want.

Yeah, you borrow against it. This is what they all do. And he's made more money off this than he has in his entire real estate career. Right. So he, that's why I think he is so loyal to this crypto group is that they are doing what he always wanted. They're making him what he's always wanted to be, which is an actual billionaire rather than someone who just claims that he

is a billionaire. God help us. Can I put a quarter of the machine about Justin's son? than someone who just claims that he is a billionaire. God help us. Can I put a cord in the machine about Justin Sun? The SEC has magically stopped investigating Justin Sun. Chinese National is behind a bunch of this stuff. I guess that's just, yeah. Like we're talking about all this other stuff and the fact that the White House is directing the SEC

to stop investigating people, kind of a big deal, kind of the type of thing it would have been. Again, we have seven scandals a day that would have ended any other presidency. And, you know, nobody. Yeah, I mean, it's all of them. I mean, it's Coinbase. It's Justin Sun. It's down the line.

Even the ones that haven't been shut down yet. I mean, you can only assume that it's down the line. Even the ones that haven't been shut down yet, I mean, you can only assume that it's coming. Ripple, one of these coins that's in the strategic reserve, they're being sued by the SEC too. And that lawsuit hasn't even been dropped yet based on the fact that they're marketing this coin illegally. And now we're announcing that we are going to, as the American people, purchase some unknown quantity of this coin as a strategic asset. But yeah, I mean, I think especially the Justin Sun thing, he was very shameless about it, just posting on X, oh, I bought this. And the interesting thing about that is this was a flop before Justin Sun came in.

Meaning Justin Sun came in, bought 30 million tokens at the outset. I think he's up to 75 million. That was more than double the number of coins that were purchased before then. And these coins, by the way, are worthless because they just give you some voting rights. You can't sell them, by the way. They're locked. Their value is locked. And they give you voting rights in a company that, as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything other than sell these tokens. This is the Liberty Financial, right? Yeah, World Liberty Financial. And Barron Trump, by the way, is their crypto visionary.

So you have that to back on. That I can believe. Yeah, that you can back on. But other than that, they're not doing anything. You have some voting stake in them. And you have Justin Sun. He's buying tens of millions of dollars. And then, oh, wouldn't you know, now he's seen this very

serious. And by the way, this was more than just a lot of these crypto companies. They got in trouble because they were selling these crypto tokens. And the SEC was arguing that they were securities and that they should have filed. It's kind of a technical argument, right? Like it's not what you normally think of as a crime. I think there's good reasons why you'd want them to register so that they don't mix up the assets and things like that. Like you said- So they don't defraud investors. I mean, that's the reason for that. So they don't defraud investors, right. That's what the SEC is there for. But it was more of it, there some legal argument about what what are these things

how should you really consider these things justin's son was controlling all of these companies and was buying up these coins to boost up their value with one company and then selling them and and pocketing the profits with another one. It was essentially a pump and dump scheme. There were lots of victims. This was, appeared to be from the allegations, clearly fraudulent activity. I mean, this was someone who was committing crimes and now through giving up, you know, through giving them enough money was then, was then let off, or we don't know if he's going to be let off yet, but all of the prosecution has been paused on request by the SEC, and they're going to come to some sort of resolution that Justin Sun seems very happy about. So you can kind of guess exactly what's coming next. But yes, this is an all-time corruption scandal just from A to Z, watching it play out. I mean, I wrote about it initially with the first purchase and you sort of think, oh, well, let's keep an eye on this and see what

happens because this seems very fishy that you would allow someone. But then within a month, it's done. I mean, it's brazen. There's. There's no there's no there's not even a cover up. We used to at least have a cover up part of these scandals. The cover up is what used to get you in trouble. And now we're we've advanced the point where people feel like they don't even need to bother covering it up and just do it. Yes. God help us. All right. So I want to do a little AMA game since I don't know you. I want to ask you, how did you realize that Substack was the future of journalism? So for people who don't know, Judd used to be ThinkProgress. He was an OG blogger. I think you founded ThinkProgress. So isn't that your baby? Yeah. So you were early to blogs and then you left ThinkProgress. You stood up Popular Information, one of the very first Substacks. I don't know that I was a day one subscriber, but I was probably a week one subscriber to you. And the reason I watched you so closely is in addition to the content, I was Substack curious for the

bulwark because we were not on Substack and I wanted to see what happened to you. And I wanted to see if you were able to make a go of it. And when you did, your success was a large part of what made me think, huh, maybe the Bulwark could be a good fit for Substack too. So what did, what did you see at the time? It was 2018, I guess, that made you think, yeah, the marketplace is

ready for this to be able to work. I wish I could say that I saw it all laid out in front of me, but I really didn't. But I did, from my experience with ThinkProgress, which was partially supported by, through a nonprofit, Center for American Progress, Progressive Think Tank. But also we had to kind of make our own revenue too. So we were involved in advertising. And I saw just what a horrendous kind of business model that was. Like, you know, the money would come in one month and then the next thing it would be gone and you didn't know why. There were all these middlemen and folks who were taking cuts of your money. Uh, there was just

no, uh, no way really to run a newsroom off of it. Cause I didn't know how much money you would have from one month to another. Um, so I became, I knew that that wasn't the direction we wanted to go. So I was really became interested in the, um, subscription model. I started offering just not just very kind of quietly, like a membership model for Think Progress to kind of help support it. We were getting like a little bit of traction. I was sort of seeing I saw a path there that we could we could account for like a lot of our revenue through this member. But people seem to be into it.

There were enough people who were into it. At the same time, that newsroom had grown. It was 40 people. And I just wasn't doing any reporting or writing. And I was thinking, I got to move on from this because I need to get back to doing what I like to do. I don't want to spend all my time managing people. I was getting exhausted with that. And actually, I just saw a, I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was one of the first articles about

Substack. And it mentioned that Bill Bishop, who writes cynicism. I love Bill Bishop. So I had, and that he moved his China newsletter over to Substack and, you know, made like six figures the first day, or it was a success of some sort. And I had met Bill once, you know, and he seemed like a smart, he just struck me as a smart guy, you know, he definitely knew a lot about China. And I just thought, well, you know, if Bill is doing it, you know, it must be, he must, there must be something there. Like he would have done it just so I kind of then just started fooling around with it and got in touch with, with Hamish, you know, one of the founders. And it took me probably another six or seven months. I mean, I had convinced myself for months, actually, that it would be a bad idea that

it might work for Bill because people would pay for this kind of, you know, very specific content about China because there's, you know, there's economic value in knowing what's going on in China. There's a million other political newsletters, most of them are free, maybe it won't work. But then I was like, you know what, I'm just going to give it a shot for for a year. So yeah, so that's, that's basically, that's basically how it happened. Just finding a place where I could the combination of this is set up for sort of a one person. I mean, I have three people who, who work with me now, but at the time for the first couple of years, I just did it myself. And, um, and then also I like, I really liked the subscription model. I, I thought to me, I thought I see how this could work.

And it appealed to me. Yeah, it's a thousand true fans, right? Yeah. You get a thousand people who are willing to support you, and then you can do everything else for free. Right? That's the other thing. If you have a bunch of people who are willing to support you, it also then allows you, this is what we do,

anybody who wants to belong to the bulwark and just can't swing it because, you know, life is expensive. There are people on fixed incomes that are they just email us and we take care of them because we have all these people who volunteer to pay. All right. Your turn. Your question. Yeah, I guess maybe along the same lines. I know that I guess I don't remember exactly, but I think at a certain point, the bulwark was kind of half on sub stack, half not on sub stack. And then I know that a certain point you transferred everything over. What was it that motivated you to do that? So when we first came to subscription product, All Work Plus,

we decided to do that on Substack. But I am, it's funny. So I'm not like politically conservative, but temperamentally, I am the most conservative person you've ever met. You know, I just like all change is bad. Anything new is likely to result in doom. And so I wanted to go real slow with Substack.

And so I essentially used them as MailChimp. You know, like we moved the email newsletter product onto Substack, but like held onto WordPress with both hands. And we figured out an integration on the backend to make it look to the world like it was all seamless, but it wasn't. And it wasn't until like it had really proved that it was going to work. And then they, you know, Substack proved like it was viable for us. And once we knew it was viable and we saw that it was growing as an ecosystem,

I mean, Substack now has real platform network effects you know for creators i mean i i see that i'm sure you see it i think everybody on substack sees it and that's real and once we saw indications that that tipping point was coming that's when we were comfortable enough to go over yeah um and uh but again know, it's been great for us, but I always, you know, I walk into a room and I look up to see what can fall on my head. And so that's, you know, I'm waiting for the issue. I think that's right. All of these platforms, I've been burned by a number of them, not Substack yet, but I'm definitely aware that it's possible. I guess, let me, I'm going to jump, I know that you, I have one more that I was thinking about that I wanted to ask you, was that politics has changed fairly dramatically over the course of the bulwark's existence.

And I guess I'm just curious from your perspective, and certainly I think maybe the outside perception of the bulwark has changed as well. Um, but I'm wondering if, I don't know, I think, I think maybe, I think I, to me, I feel like that maybe it's seen as more, um, kind of unapologetically, uh, critical of, you know, elements of the right that it might have been at the very beginning. But that might just be a perception thing. But I guess what I'm really curious about is, do you think that kind of the political grounding, sort of the base point for the reporting and everything else, has changed at the Bulwark, or is it just the outside environment that's changed? I mean, I think both have changed. So, I mean, the Bulwark did not do very much reporting at all.

I mean, it was originally just sort of opinion and analysis. We slowly started adding reporting. And again, it was just conservative, right? What we were doing was working economically. It was a good product market fit. I was willing to dip our toe a little bit more into reporting to see if that made sense. And as it did, and we got good feedback from the market on this, like people liked it and were willing to support it. We have been doing more of it. And so we, we have been bringing in, we just brought in this week,

Lauren Egan, a great reporter from Politico, who was going to write a newsletter, uh, called the opposition for us, which is going to just focus like a laser on like what's actually happening inside the Democratic Party. And this is going to be heavily reported. We've got Joe Perticone, who covers Congress for us. And so again, it's all been very slowly. It's like, you know, one step, make sure the market is there for it, then take another step. It's gratifying to say, to hear you say that you think the public perception of the bulwark has changed. I don't feel that way, but maybe that's my neuroses. I feel like we're going to be described as the never-Trump conservative media outlet, the bulwark, for the

rest of our lives, which isn't really true. I think it has changed. I think that, you know, coming from a, coming from sort of the, you know, my popular information says it on the about page, it's a progressive publication. You know, I've always sort of identified as a progressive. I really just like stories. So I'm going to tell this, I'm going to tell the stories that I find. But, but's you know, that's my that's my politics. But I think among progressives, I think to me, I feel like maybe three years ago, two or three years ago, there might have been sort of a dismissal, maybe of the bulwark stuff to some degree saying, oh, yeah, it just is the never Trump conservatives. But I feel like that has changed. I feel like now people are just like, oh, there's this, you know, there's a good story for the board. I mean, that's just my, you know, for my little kind of quarter of the world. That's the change. That's very nice to hear. My aspiration for it has always been that I want us to be the junior varsity for the Atlantic. Like, you know, I'm I'm I don't know know, I don't know if you're a magazine, like I'm a magazine guy in my bones.

Like I love magazines. I love the history of magazines. You know, like the old Michael Kinsley, New Republic is a thing that I would read and really cherish. I've read histories of the New Yorker, like, you know, what it was like back in the Wallace Shawn days and stuff. And so I really, really, I've long been a partisan New Yorker. I think what Jeff Goldberg

has done at the Atlantic over the last decade has been like the most important thing to happen in American magazines, probably in my lifetime. And he's turned The Atlantic into the indispensable American magazine for this moment. And so I, you know, like, I know we can't do that just because of resources. And so, you know, we're different, but I like to think of us as a JV version of it. All right. So here's a, here's sort of a slightly depressing question for you. You, as I said from the top, like, popular information is all about impact journalism. You do stories, and then people actually change their behavior in the real world because of it, which is amazing. And I love watching it.

I became a paying subscriber to you before you started locking anything just because I am a subscriber junkie. And I just want to support everybody. I spend $5,000 a year on magazine subscriptions and stuff. But for instance, after January 6th, you went very hard at the corporations who had ties to Republicans, and you got them to change their behavior, which was amazing. And then four years later, all these people buckled back under, and they did it because the American people actually don't care. How do you deal with this? There's a question like, well, what's the problem? Is the problem the corporations or the people? And the answer is both, but ultimately the people, isn't it? Uh, yes. I mean, I think that's right in that. And I think just the, the evolution of this kind of shows, I mean, people were upset about January 6th for a while. Uh, and, and that,

and people were, and people were responding and people were responding to that. And then now kind of the vibes have changed and the corporate behavior has changed. I think I am not, when it comes to politics, I don't think I'm overly optimistic about where we're heading. You know, if you ask me, like, what's going to happen in the next four years? I mean, I'm not really a predictions person, but I really wouldn't have long term that good things can happen and that behavior can change. And so I think the way I look at that, I knew immediately, even as it was very, it was kind of exciting as a reporter, when you start reporting it and then one company does it, I think there were over 100 companies or whatever ended up changing their policies. So it was pretty exciting.

I don't know if people listening to the stream realized, Judd made that happen. He was the big guy on the beat, and it was amazing. It was amazing to watch. Oh, I appreciate that. But I think even at the time, I knew this is not the end of this story. We have to

track this. And we actually maintained on Substack a tracker. We did it for a full two years, updating it monthly for a full two years, keeping track of every corporation who made that pledge. And there was a lot of backsliding well before, you know before Trump kind of reemerged from the ashes here. And the way I look at it is that I think it is, in some sense, disappointing that more corporations didn't kind of stick to their principles. There are a handful. I think we actually did that a few months ago. We're like, well, are there any left? Yeah, there's a few left. But it's good to get them down on record saying these are the things we say we care about, now we know that they said that and that this is a,

this is a violation of their pro their promises. And I don't know what that means for the future, but I think it's when you know more about how a organization or a company acts, I think that can be important in the future. Certainly we're going to, I think everyone is going to be more skeptical if this current kind of tide turns and all of a sudden people care about racism again or they care about misogyny again. it is okay again, that we're going to, people may want to demand more than just the statement from these companies and that that over time can be important. So I sort of, I kind of take the long view of it. And I also recognize as a reporter, you're not, you don't have much, you don't have control over 99.999% of things. So all you can do

is just try to chip away and maybe get things out there, get things out there that are true. You hope that people take that seriously and act, but then there's all sorts of stuff that's going on that you don't have control, but you just keep on churning away and obviously like you don't do it just yourself but the whole as a as a group of people as a whole society if enough people kind of are caring about trying to get the real story out there that over time that's gonna maybe create a slightly better world than it would have been had it all remained under darkness and that's what's kind of i think to me that's going to maybe create a slightly better world than it would have been had it all remained under darkness. And that's what's kind of, I think to me, that's what's the one thing that's really invigorating about this time is there is so much going on that is behind the shadows that it's, I mean, it's overwhelming to me just how many messages I

get on a daily basis of people are saying, oh, you need to look into this. You need to look into this. Here's an email. Here's a document. I mean, so much is going on. And I do think it's important. You know, I'm not able to even deal with 10% of these things, but I do think it's important that as much as possible,

that that's important gets out there. Sorry, I'll give you my last question since you did it in a row. Who's more dangerous right now, Trump or Musk? It's Musk. I mean, to me... Tell me more. One, I think that, I mean, we'll see what happens, but I do think that Trump is pretty old. So that's one thing that's a time limiter on him. And he's also, I think, I hesitate to say this definitively, but he is term limited. So he does have only a few years left. I mean, obviously you never know what's going to happen and I'm not predicting it, but I think that chances are better than not that this is his last term.

And as a result, he's limited. He also... Ah! We lost Judd. Well, that's too bad. Guys, we went in really long. These things were originally supposed to be 20 minutes, and they just keep expanding. So good show, long show. Thanks to Judd for being here. If you're not on to popular information, go and hit subscribe on this hub stack. He really does do the Lord's work.

It's original reporting, and it's holding power to account. It's great stuff. Guys, we'll be back next week with another one of these. I think I have Noah Smith next week. No promises. Catch you then. Bye.