Panic World - BONUS: One month of DOGE shit

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Ryan and Grant discuss what we've seen one month into the second Trump Administration, and what it means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What was your favorite part of Musk's press conference with his son at the White House, where his son told Trump to hush and then wiped his bugger on the desk? Did you like the bugger or telling Trump to hush? I enjoyed my extremely complicated feelings of, you know, I think Trump is a despicable person. And I felt really sad because I thought I was watching elder abuse. And I felt a really weird feeling. of like pity and also like yeah you deserve this but it still made me profoundly uncomfortable the entire the entire thing made me feel very strange that's my fun answer wow nothing is fun i'm gran irving producer of this show joining me today Elon muff's biggest fan long-time supporter

of elder abuse host of the show Ryan Broderick welcome to your podcast hello thank you for having me on my show our listeners should absolutely pause right now and type penile implant into X.com, the everything app, to find out more about the latest. I mean, I guess everything on the site is fact-checked. I didn't see a community note. So it seems like Elon Musk is suffering from a botched penile implant. It must be true. So still feels bleak.

So Trump, too, has been happening for roughly a month. We decided that rather than record an emergency podcast twice a day when awful things seem to be happening or supposedly happening, we'd hold off and reflect on the hysteria once some time has passed and that time feels now. So before we dive in, how's your spirit? I've done some semblance of a job as a reporter for my entire adult life. And around, I think it was like during COVID, I was like, I have to have a personality that is not watching the news, which I would recommend.

to all Americans. It's a unique American pathology that I have not seen in other countries. Obviously, that includes a bit of privilege. But I think if you do not have to look at the news for a job, you shouldn't. I wish there was like a thing where like

you could get all the news updates you needed like once an evening, like before dinner, like in an easy format. You mean the nightly news like what we used to have? Or like in your car in the morning. Yeah, I wish there was just like a or like you could pick up like, I don't know, like condensed material. Like a small book, like a small thin book for a couple of cents, a couple quarters.

And in the morning, you could read all the news and then you wouldn't read the news for the rest of the day. And then maybe if you wanted, you could read another small book containing the world's news at night. I feel like that's probably a healthier way to live. But, you know, I'm just spitball. Maybe in a beautiful future we'll get there. So it feels like Elon Musk is president. Is that when you expected? Does it feel better or worse than if Trump was, if we were really in Trump, too? Had to reflection. People are acting like he's president, which is bad to me because he's not.

There was a court filing, like, released by the Trump administration this week, the week that we're recording this, February 18th, saying that he has no legal authority. He's not even a member of the administration. There's not, like, he, he isn't anything. and obviously he's like doing things right like he's saying that he's doing things and people are listening to him and that's what depresses me more than him doing it like we're all just sort of going along with this and it is making me feel genuinely crazy because doge is effectively like a bunch of contractors working for the government's IT department and everyone is just sort of being like well I guess they're saying that like it's literally like there's nothing in the rules to say a dog can't play basketball but it's like with our social

security numbers. Like, it's a crazy thing. Let's do what we do on the show. Or we'll go through some major benchmarks. Yeah, yeah. Doge and Elon are the noisiest thing. But then there's the much more insidious broad things that are happening. And we'll get there everything non-Elon eventually.

But let's go through the hysteria here where you are just constantly trying to like blow a whistle being like, this isn't real or shouldn't be real. But if we treat it as real, then it's true. Right. You said what doge is, but do you want to just give the definition and the... The Department of Government Efficiency is legally classified as a temporary organization inside of the U.S. Digital Service. They are contractors. They are not federal employees.

They are becoming federal employees, which is dangerous. Well, I mean, as of this morning, once again, like, I was reading a thing where, like, they are genuinely now beginning to appoint people because the true dangerous person here is Russell Vott. someone we've talked about on the show before. He is a genuine, he was like the genuine mastermind at the center of all this. I think, I think Musk is a clown and like is not particularly, like, Musk is, okay, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but like Doge itself as an organization is, is to me, not the scariest thing here. And I do think it is sort of like working as a bit of a sin eater inside of the organization

where all of the attention is going there, all of the ire is going there. and it is allowing much more insidious actors to carry out, like, long-term catastrophic changes to the way America functions. And if that part sounds fun, that teaser, you're going to have to give us $5. Your last $5 before we all end up in camps. It's like seven people. It's like seven, yeah. It's like it gets a bunch of teens and flunk and, like, 20-year-olds. The whole thing is kind of being like operated day-to-day, as we understand it, by Amanda Scales, who,

who is a, she was installed in the office of personnel management. She used to work at XAI, which is Elon Musk's company that makes crock. There's a bunch of teenagers like Big Balls, I forget his full name, the 19-year-old former camp counselor. But it's not all teenagers, but there are, there are a lot of young kind of edge lords in there. So it's a real who's who of guys you would bump into at a crypto convention, essentially. think back to what now feels like a million years ago when you received a tip a tip from the CDC that was a very confusing day so um and and once again like there are a bunch of outlets doing really good work trying to untangle like exactly who's doing what which i think is the real

question here like who is asking for what to happen and who is how involved is musk how involved is doge uh we received a tip uh via signal uh you can message me on signal at Ryan Broderick.69420. If you want to send me an anonymous or confidential tip, happy to keep you private or off the record. So we received a tip. We're so fucked when government officials are reaching out to somebody with 69420, and they're like, you're the source we need.

We've been receiving pretty regular tips. Some of them are hard to chase down, but this one, basically, we were told by someone working with the CDC that the entire website was going to be taken offline. And as I started to talk to them more and talked to others within the U.S. health care system, what we eventually figured out was that it was during the DEI purge. So a couple weeks ago on a Friday, every single government website was told to remove any reference to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, or risk having their entire site shut off at 5 p.m. on that Friday. And so we, we ran with it. It turned out that, like, yes, the CDC was removing stuff from their sites, as was every other

federal website. And for that weekend, most of the digital infrastructure of the country was being, you know, taken down, changed, altered, which caused a lot of hysteria and a lot of confusion. and it's a very smart ploy by Elon Musk. Let's assume this was all him. It's a very smart ploy because in 2025, if you remove a website, most people assume you've removed the department. When in reality, from what I've read,

most of what Elon Musk's team is doing is like moving columns around on a spreadsheet and claiming that it's actually doing something. Now, obviously USAID would be like the big exception here where it was genuinely paused and it is causing like incredible amounts of catastrophe around the world for U.S. workers. But for the most part, what Doge seems to be doing is superficially altering government websites, like digital documentation and hooking up like deeply insecure servers to

previously secure government databases and doing God knows what with them. But for the most part, it is it is seeming to be very superficial. In fact, even the buyouts they offered to federal employees don't seem to even be real. Like, the people who tried to take them, like couldn't take them. I was talking to a federal worker about this where there was just mass confusion because they don't really have the jurisdiction to do anything. So most of it is extremely superficial. and obviously working very well on social media

because that's, in my opinion, what its actual goal is, is to sort of cause chaos. Here's an example of the general tone of the chaos if any of our listeners are smart enough to now not be on blue sky or anywhere else. This is from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. I'm telling you, I'm trying dear friends.

I'm struggling here not to engage in hyperbole. But I don't know what else to call these people besides political commissers. And again, they report to Elon Musk. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government. We're in a dystopian quasi-science fiction territory here. This is the nuanced thing that I've struggled to communicate

on various podcasts and social platforms recently, which is that, like, they don't have any real legal authority, but when you give it to them, They can use that. And like, even if what they're doing is extremely superficial and chaotic, it doesn't mean it will stop there. Let's call what is. Like, let's call this a coup.

Let's call this like a constitutional coup for now, constitutional. In a coup situation, time is really all that matters. The clock starts ticking. But another sort of important piece of this is, like, correctly identifying the level of damage and reacting proportionally because they're trying to use some sort of law to enact it. You have to kind of keep the hysteria to like a reasonable level just so that you can react appropriately and and intelligently. We're not at the point where like we saw in South Korea where like politicians have to like break down doors and jump over fences to get into

like vote. But like we will get there. Don't worry. We will get there. But for now, like we do have other mechanisms in place to stop this. Like a lot of federal judges are like blocking a lot of the executive orders or like telling Doge they can't do stuff. Like we are still in the we have laws moment where I think a lot of people in blue sky are fantasizing about the moment we don't. But like for right now we do. And I found this secret desire in me for a deep state to be real.

You've described this as waiting for the adults to step in. A part of my brain believes at some line. Obama and Bush, like triumph, like, all the old presidents come back and like. We'll step, we'll step in with, with, like, with tanks. And like, we're, we're back at neocon. Like, we're just invading Middle Eastern countries and, like, running relatively sustainably. Like, that's, that's. Grant, do you think that George W. Bush, um, manage the Middle East in a good way? Is that what you're, is that what you're saying? Do you want him? No, I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying, we will just go back.

to where like America felt normal and we were doing atrocities. Okay, well, I'm going to ignore, uh, you wanting war crimes internationally to feel comfortable at home. I, I, too, am a Green Day fan, but like, you know, it's a. Yeah, I want to go back to the American idiot, uh, level of, of panic. That's what I want to focus. I want to focus on the desire to go back. Because I do think the most important thing we can say in this episode before we go

to the paywall at, at some point is that you can't. There is no going back. There's never been a moment of going back. There's all those like viral images of like women in Iran having a Coca-Cola in 1970, whatever, before the Islamic Revolution sent them back to the Stone Age. And it's like, it didn't actually do that. It created a new government. There will never be a moment. And I'm going to say this is clearly possible for everyone listening.

There will never be a moment in America again where politics felt like they once did. Counterpoint. I've attended Market Hotels Indies-Party's party. Which brings me back to... Did it feel like an indie sleaze party? You know, it was three times more expensive than partying when I was 19... But you've walked right into my trap. Indy Sleez is not an American term.

No, no, it's not real. I'm aware that it's a British term. But it's still... Need the jump on TikTok. I heard it for the first time ever... I was there, man. I was there. Wait.

I was there. Yeah. Are you doing math? Is that what's happening in this pause? I was there in 1968. I was there at the first Cannes show in Cologne. I'm losing my edge. I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.

I'm losing my edge to the internet secrets. You can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978. I'm losing my edge. Look, the thing that you remember will never come back. There will never be a not internet pause. There will never be a quote-unquote normal politician again. The biggest problem with the politics in America during the Biden era was this feeling like we could. We could go back to like normalcy of like neoliberalism and look where it got us.

Like you can't go back. To your point about like you're having trouble with the nuance because it's like if you freak out as if the constitution doesn't exist now, then you're in a world where you've left them. get to that far, but also if you're like, the judges are going to knock all this down, this is just bullshit, you're also not taking a problem seriously. I think that is the most insidious and kind of brilliant, horrible thing that's happening, where to anyone who is not paying attention to this all the time, all the time, there's no way to talk about this without sounding hysterical. There's no way to talk about what is happening without sounding like either a hall monitor or like you're like talking about like gobbled to cook. Yeah.

And like that's not that's not abnormal. I've talked to older people who lived through dictatorships before and after. I've read about them as well. It's not it's not abnormal to have that sort of frustration of just like I sound insane if I care. And if I don't care, it could just happen. It's like a feeling of like helplessness and, you know, you feel gaslit on this level that like, I mean, the term for it, and I try very hard not to reference this guy in everything I do about this subject, but it's just really hard because he's, he was really ahead of the game. Morrissey. Morrissey. I'm talking about Morrissey. My favorite far right UK influencer.

The term you're talking about is hyper normalization, which is the name of a documentary by Adam Curtis and every person. should watch right now. It's three hours long and it will horrify you. But it was coined by Alexei Yerchek, a anthropology professor who was born in Leningrad. Okay, here's a good quote for it. We thought it was difficult in normal times. But then the hypernormal came and not only were things difficult, we could see that there was no end of the difficulty and no ability for us to change our lot. And it's this feeling described another quote, we know they are lying, they know they are lying, They know we know they are lying. We know they know.

We know they are lying. But they are still lying. That is the feeling that you're having right now, which is that everyone involved knows that there's a lie playing out on a societal level. The most recent example is that like Doge has. Doge in general. The concept of Doge is hypernormal. We all know that this, they have an AI generated logo of like a Shiba Innu named after an internet meme. run by a guy who is like not a government employee in any capacity.

This is hyper normal. And the longer you're in it, the more dangerous it becomes because you start to lose the contours of normal. Like you're living in a prism that doesn't make any sense. And the first Trump administration, looking back, was like fairly standard. There's a game like to play with people where I'm like, name one thing Trump did in 2016, 2020. The only thing you can say is like the only thing he passed was like the tab, whatever this should he did some tax stuff. He pushed through some executive orders that were pretty much undone immediately after he left office. And he helped install a bunch of Trumpist judges.

But for the most part, he was. Oh, yeah, my bad abortion doesn't exist because of him. That's not true. I thought that was Biden. Well, but it was his Supreme Court. He basically, he pushed through a bunch of judges on the federal and Supreme Court level. And yes, obviously, he stacked a deck for himself. But which are, and I'm not dismissing that.

Those are big things. but he was a fairly standard, ineffectual president. This time around, he has created an ecosystem, and he has aligned himself with people who are very, very good. And I'm not talking about Musk. I'm talking about the Project 2025 people. And they have created a world where, with the help of Musk, you cannot tell what is real, what is not real,

what is worth caring about, what is not worth caring about. What can you do? What can't you do? Like, we are just in a total breakdown of shared understanding. And it is going to get worse. I want to talk about all of that for the real ones on the other end. But I do, I want to, I think one real thing that Doge is doing, this comes from your favorite guest we've ever had on the show. Wait, can I tell you who my favorite guest is?

Yes. Not PJ. That's for sure. Wait, are we going to talk about PJ? No, wait. We're talking about Charlie. Charlie, I don't like him either. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't like any of our male guests. I don't, I don't like them. I think they, I think they're aggressive and I think they ruin the vibe of the show. You need to get off AI therapy and get a real therapist. I think I think that's something for you to explore on your own time. I find male guests threatening and they make me nervous. Charlie, along with Ian Bagost, I'm sorry, Ian for pronouncing your last name wrong, I'm sure.

they talked to IT contractors and workers for the government as like during the Doge takeover. They anonymously said, one of them said, you can't unring the spell. Once these Doge guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want. So either through intent or carelessness, one of these guys described that,

like, they could just like fuck up the code of something and like parts of government could stop functioning. And I do think that that is a real thing. thing, they might not be real, but once they have access, real consequences can happen that I think we cannot really imagine in a, like, a serious way. I 100% agree. And the damage they've done already is so extensive that it will take years to fix if it's even possible.

Can you give an example of that? USAID would be the biggest one, which is like not a total doge move. USAID was like, sort of like, maybe this is useful. Like the three prongs of the Trump regime right now are. Stephen Miller and immigration, Russell Vott and the Project 2025 people and the Office of Management and Budget, and Doge.

So Stephen Miller in immigration, that's all the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp stuff, the ice raids. And that's been his bad project for a decade. Like he is just an absolute demagogue maniac who looks like Kiff from Futurama. And Russell Vott and OMB, I mean, they wrote it down in Project 2025.

They're very clear about what they want to do. want to handicap congressional spending by effectively turning this like it's not obscure in the sense that like it's unimportant it's like kind of obscure in the sense that I feel like the average person doesn't really know about the Office of Management and Budget but it's it's the biggest department within the executive branch and it can basically determine like all spending around federal agencies information technology and stuff and then we have the Office of Personal management, which is effectively the HR department. So they're targeting how the government spends money and how the government hires and

fires people. And they're doing that. If you follow what Project 225 laid out, they're doing that to handicap the government entirely. Like Russ Vatt has like this deranged PowerPoint. I was watching the other day where he just talks about like what we're going to do is he said he wanted to traumatize civil servants and give them like severe PTSD. from how, like, aggressive they are about harassing them and making their lives miserable.

Take that with a grain of salt. But, like, that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to, they're trying to guck up the works. And then in the process, use that as cover to do longer-term grift and, and spread and, like, encode hate into our laws and real repeal, like, protections for vulnerable populations. But that's what they're doing. When you say it's going to take years undue, when Biden is president again, that. Right. When Obama and Biden and Clinton all come together and create a triumvirate, which worked very well for late stage Rome. So it'll be good when we have that.

When they morph all together and take the substance and it just becomes Hillary Clinton, like what you're saying is undoing all the ways that things are mucked up, getting like the systems working again, getting the staff back in the right places or just back in general, that would take years of work. Sure. The FAA stuff. I just saw a plane do a barrel roll. I haven't seen. Should I not fly? So should we stop flying? So I'm supposed to go see my mom. I have a personal ink on this one because I, I am the son of two flight attendants. My mom is still one to this day. It makes complete sense that that's where you come from. Keep going. Like I grew up with very vivid memories all the way up until 9-11, like watching planes explode and my mom being like, I think I know people on that plane. then it stopped. We effectively got rid of plane crashes almost entirely. Now, obviously there are huge international, like, incidents where, like, you know, like, like the Malaysia Airlines flights and stuff like that.

But those are, those were so rare considering the amount of planes in the air. And in the last, like, month or two, we're averaging, like, a high profile plane crash, like, once a week at this point. And that is not something that you can just, like, easily fix. Like, let's say, let's say, like, every single Republican, vanishes. They get, they get blipped tomorrow. And we have a perfect neoliberal society once again. You can't just like rehire a bunch of people for the FAA. Like it doesn't really work that way. Everything we're dealing with right now, for the most part, will be in our lives in some capacity for like the majority of my life now.

Yeah, which is just not, which is just not going to be long knowing your health history and also the state of the world. What about my health history? I have perfect health. I have very high blood pressure. But other than that, I have perfect health. I have like stroke level blood pressure apparently, but I, other than that, I'm great. I can't imagine why. Ryan's doctors and I talk weekly, you know. That's right. I produce Ryan's hole. That's what the scumming room.

You are producing my entire life. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Your colonoscopy, by the way, has been rescheduled to next week. I had one of those ones actually because I hurt my tailbone. But the hospital I went to was right next to a Taco Bell and I was a kid. And so I ate a bunch of Taco Bell.

and then I had to have the inside of my rectum looked at because I had bruised my tailbone falling out of a chair in school. And the... That's the Liv Mast lifestyle, if I ever heard it. The interaction between Taco Bell and the lubricant used by the doctor to check the inside of my butt had an incredible reaction. Just like, honestly, a lot like that plane, just barreling down that tarmac.

just fire and blood and destruction once it was all done. You're welcome, listeners. Yeah. The thing I think I was counting on, and maybe it's still too early, even though this past month has felt like a fucking year. I thought that Trump was annoyed with Elon, like, before he even got in office. I thought he was tired of him being around. I thought that J.D. Vance would have been trying to stab him in the back by now.

What I really remember about Trump won was they were knife fighting at every corner vying for like who was in charge and like what was the aim and um is that just because we've elder abuse trump in where like he just doesn't have the wherewithal to like to care that he's getting outshined i thought it would bother him most that somebody is getting more attention than him but he just seems like sleepy biden a lot of people and myself included kind of thought that that would happen um trump world 1.0 was a reality show i think it might be due to age. I think it also might be due to desperation. You know, I think Trump really internalized not only being shot at, but also just like the possibility that he could have died in jail. I also think

he straight up doesn't care. Like I just, I actually think he doesn't give a shit because this is one of those sliding door moments that I'm fascinated with relitigating in my head over and over again where Trump is banned effectively from social media in 2021. He eventually starts to come back, but by that point, he was like, I'm going to just stay on my own platform, truth social. And I remember, like, people kind of making fun of him being like he has no relevance. But I do think he learned something very valuable at that moment. It's almost like we cut the cord on him and forced him to evolve. It's not super dissimilar from, like, going from an ad-based income stream to a subscription-based income stream.

Like, he sort of learned how to, like, find his, what is it? like your total thousand you need. Like I think we we sort of inadvertently forced him to evolve faster than the rest of us. And it's one of those quirks of history where like he could have chosen like a different path than actually like bet wrong on history. But unfortunately he he kind of evolved in the direction everyone else was moving in. And he is now much more focused and direct. And it drives me crazy because like I was one of the people advocating for like get him to

fuck off social media. He like, people were going to die. People did die. And unfortunately, he, like, he evolved in the exact direction we all evolved in. Let me see if I'm getting the trade. He's getting what he emotionally needs from his truth accounts. And so he's abated. He's, like, more interested in that, even if, like, Fox and friends are talking about what Elon is doing instead of him.

Like, he's getting, he's getting that emotional need felt. I want to add to this. I think it's also, like, he wanted to win. He wanted to be a winner. once you're a lame dunk duck in your second term like he never cared about like activating anything

he just wanted to do good enough in the first term to win a second term like there's no or a third yeah but there's no incentive now possible for like for like for like there's

no more he can reach must feel very empty I would hesitate on trying to like pin down where his ego lands only just because like we can't know really Like, I mean, I've definitely read behind the scenes stuff about how he supposedly thinks and feels. But I would say the difference is that he is in some way feeling, I think, what we all feel, which is that the TV doesn't really matter. And his obsession with traditional forms of entertainment and celebrity have clearly changed.

the Trump of 2016 would not be on Aiden Ross's kickstream. It would not be talking, he would not be talking to Theo Vaughn on a podcast. He would be like calling like Barney Frank like a fat nippled freak on the view. Like he would be, he would be like in a beef with like Lauren Michaels or something. Like he, 10 years ago, he was much more interested in a world of celebrity that he grew up being obsessed with. I mean, this is the guy who would go on late night and have Letterman make fun of him just so he could, get attention. And over the last 10 years, and I think especially in the last five years, he has embraced a much, much different celebrity ecosystem. You think he understands that

because we took the Twitter away from him? I think we forced him to learn. In the big book about Hitler, I'm reading, there's all these moments where this weird thing happens that puts them down the path or keeps them on the path. And if this thing had gone slightly differently in some way, you know, like if that bullet had been like a centimeter closer or like if he hadn't lost his Twitter account in 2021, like you can, you can ask all these questions. And we definitely, we shaped him into something much more effective for the moment we ended up finding ourselves in now. And we couldn't have known in 2021 that that was the last days of Twitter as a concept, but also just like the last days of like the platform hegemony of the 2010s, the sort of gangham style

Ellen's show moment. Like it was all ending and we and no one really sort of I think clocked how dramatic that end was going to be three or four years later. Okay, I've been watching a lot of house lately and he he likes to use metaphors, right? So it was like the city was burning down and we didn't notice and we put him into the woods first. We like kicked him out of the into the woods not realizing the city was burning down behind us and we would all eventually be out there too.

And on that note, we're going to wander into the woods and we're, we're going to look into what parts Ryan is actually most worried about a month into this fucking monstrosity. Honest to God, I think the only thing that could make me feel better is you guys giving us $5, which you can do with. Give me $5.com. Patreon.com backslash panic world. Also, if you unsubscribe from Garbage Day and you then subscribe for Panic World,

you don't love you. I love you if you do that. Sure, but you don't have to email me about it. Like, at a certain point, it becomes hurtful. So you don't have to email me about it. Look, look. Ryan supposedly is doing a much better job of having his mental state be intact despite the state of the world than I am.

And honestly, the only thing that makes me feel good is when I see our numbers go up and I see that people give us $5. A number go up. Patreon.com backslash panic world, $5. month more stuff there. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving.

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And one piece of advice for me to you. Chill out. Touch grass while you still can.