Pirate Wires - Biden Hot Swap Summer! (ft. Jason Calacanis), Project 2025 Meltdown, AOC Sues The Supreme Court

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

EPISODE #60: We're back! Anything happen while we were gone? Oh.. only the entire Democratic party is in complete disarray. So we figured we'd bring in the man who predicted the Biden hot swap. Jason Calacanis joins the show! The All-In x PW crossover you've been waiting for. We also discuss the Project 2025 meltdown, AOC suing the Supreme Court, and our Infrastructure falling apart. Oh, and you may notice some new faces on this episode too. Enjoy!  Episode note: Around 10:20, Brandon's internet went down. While he worked to fix the issue, more members of Pirate Wires team stepped in and joined the pod. Brandon eventually comes back, but we decided to keep everyone on the show. 6 members of the Pirate Wires team at once! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Jason Calacanis, Riley Nork, Matt Marlinski, Eric Button Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Jason Twiter: https://x.com/Jason Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital Matt Twitter: https://x.com/mattmarlinski TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome To Hot Swap Summer! 1:00 - Democrats In Disarray - Everything Going On With Biden 11:15 - Project 2025 31:30 - Welcome Jason Calacanis To The Show! 1:07:10 - The SAVE Act Passes The House 1:15:50 - AOC Sues The Supreme Court 1:22:00 - Our Train Infrastructure Is Falling Apart #podcast #biden #politcs #technology #culture

The man who predicted the hot swap summer, Jason Calacanis. Hot swap summer's here. Anybody can come. You got Dean Phillips coming back. You have Gavin up there and Wittner, the crazy crystal lady. Marianne, let's go. I love her. Get her in there. I'm going to defeat Trump with love. My word. Sure, why not? Cast a spell.

Because think about what an advantage it is to hot swap. It's a free option. None of us knew that Joe's cognitive decline was happening and he made a choice for himself and his family. And we're just responding to that reality. We wish we weren't in this situation and we wish Joe the best and we're celebrating Joe. And this Democratic primary is a tribute to his 50 years in politics. I mean, I do things for the lulz. It's going to be a great hot swap summer. his 50 years in politics. I mean, I do things for the lulz. It's going to be a great hot swap summer.

Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We've got Brandon back after, I mean, just weeks away. The world was waiting for you. They're happy you're back. I'm happy you're back. Sanja was happy you're back. We were gone for a full week as a full team.

In that week, America became a year older. I became a year older. And the Democratic Party has completely collapsed into a state of utter chaos. We have to start there. I think right before we left, I'm pretty sure we were talking about the debate and the debate fallout, Joe Biden, how could we not? Certainly in all of our takes and our writing. Like I said, I mean, it was the first meaningful debate in any of our lives is how I've characterized it before. Certainly

going into that, I did not expect to see anything that mattered. And then actually, it was the only thing that mattered, right? Now we're looking at something that's more impactful than the entire Republican primary. And in that, in a sort of week or plus that has followed, we've seen a total evolution in the way that the Democrats are reacting to this. First, it was just tragedy, tears, what are we going to do? Then it was like total panic, hysteria. We've now bifurcated into two camps. You have the Whoopi Goldbergs of the world on The View saying, I will vote for this man even if he shits his pants. This is an actual opinion of hers. I don't care if he's pooped his pants. I don't care if he can't put a sentence together. And then like the Paul Krugmans of the

world, who is saying in the pages of the New York Times, listen, yes, it's a problem that we have an actual dementia patient who is in the White House right now. And yes, it is going to be really hard to run him against Trump. And yes, he should step down. But if he doesn't, I will never mention the fact that he has dementia again, and we will just vote for him. But then you also have like the George Clooney thing. So Barack Obama is kind of meant to be the behind the scenes puppet master of the anti-Biden crusade. George Clooney is now being used as evidence for this because apparently George and Obama are tight. George just penned an op-ed encouraging um biden to step down it's funny i think this one and maybe we just start here like riley proposed a take a couple days it was maybe it was yesterday even about

clooney and i was like why the why and i just discarded i'm like why are we talking about this like who cares that george clooney asked president biden to step down um the democrats really care the fact is that you and i are sitting here today because this will be your last week of employment this is not an assessment of your productivity you try not to take this personally well i just had a bad night like they really really care this has been an ongoing evolving uh news story i would say it's like the significance of george clooney coming out but we're now in this place of just it is total chaos there's a giant question of what's going to happen um later on in this episode we're going to have a little guest appearance from one jason

calcanis to talk about the hot swap summer. But we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know if Biden's going to step down. We don't know if the DNC has been plotting his ouster for months and months, a dangerous idea, according to Paul Graham, which we will also talk about a little later on in the episode. But what are you guys just straight away, what are you making of all the chaos? Or you making of all the chaos or have you been enjoying the chaos were you enjoying your break sajana are you even aware of the chaos are you still just sort of quasi on vacation i mean i will admit my my friends and i watched some clips of the debate afterward and it was almost like you had to i later watched the full thing but like it felt painful to witness um the implosion

it was i mean people keep bringing up elder abuse kind of like you know uh somewhat mockingly but it is really i mean seeing biden like stammer his way through that debate uh i think was basically as bad as it could have been for the Democrats. And what was interesting was that, like, you know, everything, I think we now have like sort of memory hold that everything was put in place for Biden to excel in that debate, like all the rules that he had insisted on, that Trump's mic could be cut off, and, you know, that they would have these specific moderators. And Trump really post debate has just taken the strategy of not saying anything at all.

So it's kind of like they got what they wanted, which is that Trump shuts up, and he's kind of just let everything spiral into chaos. But what do you make now, though, of what's going on on the DNC side? Do you think... I mean, you have Nancy Pelosi coming. Nancy Pelosi's was a pretty funny reaction, I thought. She has been grilled. And of course, up until now, I mean, if you're a Democrat, what do you do?

You have to just say, of course, we're supporting him until you don't. And then you just get completely, you fall into line and you support whoever the candidate is. But for now, you have to say you're supporting him because you don't want him to look any weaker than he already looks. And so Pelosi is up there and she's like, they're like, you know, what should happen? And she says, well, I just want whatever he wants, whatever he wants to choose. I just want him to choose.

As long as the president had the president, it's up to the president to decide if he is going to run uh we're all encouraging him uh to to make that decision uh because time is running short that's what they're all saying what's out but but it's but think about that like he's already chosen he said publicly he's like i am unequivocally going to be uh i'm going i'm running you can't i'm you're not going to stop me i'm the candidate i'm running and she and then nancy pelisi on in interviews um saying like you know whatever he decides and i'm sure he'll make the right decision eventually um and it's just like this implicit like you better make the right decision pal the only people actually who seem to be supporting well there's

some people sort of unequivocally but probably the most prominent unequivocal support is coming, I think, from the squad. So you've seen this rapid pivot from them, from like, this man is complicit in literal genocide to this is settled. He is running for president and nobody else can. Actually, you've been deep in the squad stuff. I know you're writing a take or you were thinking about the AOC thing this morning. What do you make of that actually? deep in the squad stuff. I know you're writing a take or you were thinking about the AOC thing this morning. What do you make of that actually? Well, I mean, I think it's like the, the part of the democratic party that is still like vociferously pro Biden and kind of offended by the suggestion that he should step down, I think sees it as a tactical strategy because they have such a

hysterical view of what will happen if Trump will win. Like this is, you know, you were pointing out this woman yesterday who said on Twitter that, you know, all these white men can come out like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can come out on late night and say, Biden should step down. But for women of color and immigrants and all these people whose rights, you know, will be eroded is the way they talk about this by Trump presidency. They actually can't, you know, break ranks with Biden because they have to sort of, you know, pursue the candidate who's most likely to beat Trump. And I think that like, for them, the squad rhetoric is basically, I mean, what you've seen from AOC, who's been, you know, I mean, she was just unendorsed by the DSA for her endorsement of Biden, I guess, and for sort of not being... Is this because of the Palestine stuff? It's, yeah, I think it's basically because of the Palestine stuff. I mean,

the line of thinking is that, like, she is endorsing Biden, Biden is, you know, continuing to arm Israel. And so, you know, AOC is complicit. But I think the way she would, you know, defend it is basically Biden is the person who has the best chance of beating Trump. And so wherever you kind of fall on that calculus seems to be informing sort of if you're a diehard Democrat like whether or not you you say the obvious about biden which is that he's you know clearly senile yeah i saw this there was a prominent let's say right-wing funder who i um am in a group chat with a huge group chat and uh he had mentioned this morning like there there is no disagreement on philosophy here. It's entirely a tactical disagreement that we're watching play out. It is just straight up this.

It's just, who do you think has a better chance of winning, Biden or someone else? And we don't quite know. It seems like they've sort of coalesced around Kamala as the alternative. But I don't really know. I also don't know what the rules are exactly i said earlier right when this all when the soon as the debate happened i think it was the morning after i was like i can't wait to discover what new rule i never knew existed that's about to determine like who our next presidential candidate on the democrat side is and i still think that's

going to happen i still am waiting for the other shoe to drop and it's going to be something totally bizarre. And then you're going to be treated like an asshole for never knowing it or something. I'm like, oh my God, you just must not pay attention. If you didn't know about the secret, you know, rule 55 that says Nancy Pelosi herself gets to his internet's exploding he's rushing to come What the... So you might have noticed Brandon dropped. His internet's exploding. He's rushing to come back. So is Riley.

And randomly, we have two new guests on the pod. We've got Matt, who you met last time, and the legendary Eric Button, who you've never met before, our director of Offset Pirate Wires. He has no idea what he's even about to talk about, but we're going to get into it. Sanjay is going to break it down for us until, I don't know,

Brandon and Riley maybe pop in the podcast momentarily before even Jason Calacanis. We're talking about Project 2025 because in the sort of chaos and pandemonium of the last, what is it, 10 days or whatever since the last, maybe is it a little bit more than that since the last, since the debate, randomly, this year old collection of policy proposals became the hottest political issue in this entire country.

It's called Project 2025. And right off the bat, Sasha, you're going to break it down for us, the bit you've, you've read. But, um, but my feeling is like right off the bat foreboding title. Like it was not just, you know, the hope and change plan of, of, uh, of, you know, the Trump years, Trump 2.0 or something. It was project 2025. It sounds like a little bit sci-fi, a little bit dystopian. Um, and certainly that's how it's been framed. Uh, but what, what is, uh, let's, let's separate the fact from the fiction. Take it away. Yeah. I mean, that's how it's been framed. But what is, let's separate the fact from the fiction. Take it away. Yeah. I mean, that's a good starting point. Because I do think a lot of what has happened here is just bad optics, because it's sort of

reminiscent of like the United Nations Project 2031 or whatever, which was their like new world order plan. You know, you could say it was New World Order. You could just say, like, you know, they want to, I don't know, give contraception to people in third world countries, etc. But anyway, that was controversial. So this sort of invokes that. But basically, this is a project by the Heritage Foundation. So it's not actually technically affiliated with the Trump campaign. Heritage Foundation, a very prominent conservative think tank, um, that typically since the Reagan administration puts out, um, before an election year, a kind of long compendium of policy proposals, um, called the Mandate for Leadership. Uh, and so, you know, this is typically, the first edition was like 3000 pages, I think it was this like 20 volume, very academic, very academic set of policy proposals and, you know, contributions from lots of different conservative academics.

Project 2025 is actually several things. It is this policy proposal, which has gotten the most attention. And I can talk about that in a second. But it's also a presidential personnel database that they're compiling. So they're calling it like a right wing LinkedIn. But basically, they're sort of soliciting applications from people who might be interested in, you know, potentially staffing. I guess they're imagining a Trump administration. And they're compiling, you know, their emails and resumes and that kind of stuff. They have a presidential administration academy training course that they're doing. So they're going to be training people. I mean, it's kind of classic think tank stuff, I think. And they're also releasing a 180 day playbook, which they haven't yet released, I think. But that would basically be sort of the first 100 days of the incoming administration. Here are the policy proposals that we think should be implemented.

900 pages. It is a collection, as I said, of like very sort of academic essays with kind of disparate points of view proposing a bunch of different potential policies for various departments in the government. But, you know, what has really irked a lot of commentators is that some of the initial chapters espouse a very very strong sort of unified executive theory where they're basically saying you know we need to consolidate more power uh in the executive branch in the office of the president the person of the president um and you know one of the essays in the in the policy uh document advocates for essentially abolishing the federal reserve among other things um and then there's you know some inflammatory language throughout about potentially jailing pornography

producers but it's it's a lot of basically very conservative policymakers laying out their vision for the government um so i guess when i started, when I first started clicking into it, it was a few days ago, I think Biden just tweeted or Biden's handlers, Jill Biden, I don't know who tweets for him, tweeted, Google, Google it, Project 2025, Google it. I think it was that either Google Project 2025 or Project 2025, Google it. And so I Googled it. And it was just, first there was the actual link to Project 2025, which seemed totally benign to me. It just seemed like pretty standard right-wing things

that I've heard about forever, a little bit disparate, like all different viewpoints, but roughly tethered together in terms of just like, they felt like familiar right-wing things. The most shocking thing I saw was like an anti- the most shocking thing i saw was

um like an anti-abortion pill thing uh and i guess now i didn't even see the porn thing but that's i guess pretty crazy they weren't even saying to ban it but they were saying like it's it's not protected speech they're making argument for that but it was a lot on just the same kind it's like anti-dei and uh the like you said the executive powers anti-bureaucracy um streamlining law and the tax code i didn't understand why it was shocking um and my opinion and they're trying to so all of these pieces are trying to associate this with trump there was this sort of sub controversy which was like is trump associated with it or not and it bloomed out of nowhere and i didn't understand that or like why we were even talking about that.

So I asked about it online and then actually one of the authors hit me up. So he says, this is Nathan Lemur. I'm a Project 2025 contributor, helped draft a chapter that was published in the book released last year. And if you remember, Nathan actually was on the show a few months ago to talk about the TikTok ban, to give us a lay of the land in Washington. I had no idea that he was even a part of this until he DM'd me. He said, have continued working as a member of the telecom and AI working groups. There was a realization among conservatives that we were caught flat footed in 2016 when Trump won. No pipeline for staff and many agency leaders didn't have a policy plan. 2025 was an idea to equip whoever won in 2025 model ideas and a blueprint that conservatives would like, a wishlist, if you will, which is what it seemed like to me.

It didn't seem like an actual Trump platform series of policy proposals or whatever. It just felt like a bunch of conservatives talking about stuff they wanted. And it was framed. I saw a lot of just wild misinformation about this, including again and again. And we kept asking Eric, actually, who is with us in the chat now, kept sharing summaries from GPT.

It was either open AIs. And then what was the other one that you used? Complexity. And it kept saying shit like, they want to ban gay marriage or revoke sort of gay rights. And I'd already known from the other night, working with GPT on this, I kept drilling down, like, where are you getting that from?

Like, what specifically are you, where are you finding this? And it's not in, you know, the Project 2025 text. And I think it's actually getting it just from other people writing about it online, which is what this whole conversation has devolved into. It's just people talking about this thing called Project 2025, which they're associating with the rise of Nazism in this country. They're talking about it as if we've never heard anything like this before. And I actually am failing to hear even one new idea in there,

which is maybe my criticism of it. I don't feel like I'm seeing this vision for the future. It feels like sort of standard shit that people have always wanted. And I just, I don't know, I'm kind of at a loss on the Project 2025 fear-mongering. Don't quite get it. Someone did say something interesting, which was like, maybe it's the fact that there is a plan at all. That's what's scaring people. There wasn't. Trump's a kind of chaotic guy, right? And all of a sudden, if this is his plan, if he's really going to go in there and start, I guess, doing policies that conservatives have always been asking for, for literally my entire life, I mean, maybe that would be scary. But one, I don't think that's going to happen. And two, I guess I can't get over

the fact that people are... I still can't sort of stop reacting to the reaction, which felt like it was at level nine. It still is. I mean, people are still talking about this and there's just nothing new in there. Unless I'm missing something. Brandon, what do you think? I think the Biden campaign is desperate for some sort of comms victory right now. And that if they can get people to believe that Project 2025 is a democracy-ending plan, that they'll have a sort of platform or a position that will essentially keep them in the race. I think right now they're just desperately calling

for something that'll sort of keep the sharks at bay, which includes MSNBC, obviously, George Clooney, like everybody has turned against the Biden campaign. So I think they're in kind of like DEF CON level five, trying anything they possibly can to get to stick. And yeah, sort of end game stuff, I think. Yeah, I think Brandon's right. I think there's two things happening here where the left cannot really keep attacking Trump because Trump over the last six months has just steadily drifted toward the center. He's giving them just like less forcibility to attack. So it's like, what's the next best thing we can do is go to the people in MAGA that are actually more hard right is a new term than Trump. So that seems kind of obvious.

The other thing is just a note about the name. All like the evil stuff in this world starts with project and then something else. It's like Project Texas, which was the TikTok like thing where they were trying to hide some shit. You had Project Nimbus. Wasn't that like the Google thing that there people tried to quit over um so it's like terrible terrible optics played by the conservatives it just gives conspiracy theory it does right yeah it does it is i think i i really believe

and this whole thing does feel if this is blue and on um they want biden not even that i'm gonna get specific biden and biden's camp i mean i doesn't know about this but biden's campaign handlers want you to google this because they know it's gonna lead you down a crazy rabbit hole of wild shit mark hamill uh the luke skywalker guy or the guy who played luke skywalker and now he's just a full-time um like hysterical cat mom with fear for our democracy i dissent and he he shares this um this flyer that has trump doing like a nazi it look it's it's not actually a nazi salute but it's giving nazi salute like you know he's thinking nazi um uh and again trump has nothing to do with this has disavowed this is

like i don't even know who those people are. Um, it is weird by the way that you can just play like some random group of people are like, here's what we want you to do. And then Rachel Maddow can say, how dare you do that? Mr. President. Meanwhile, he's just golfing and like really just loving that by he's not a part of this at all. Anyway, what does it say?

Uh, it says that Trump is going to end no-fault divorce uh complete ban on abortions without exceptions ban contraceptives condoms he's coming for your condoms matt let's be honest uh additional tax breaks for corporations and the one percent well even a broke clock's right once a day twice a day uh higher taxes for the working class that is funny by the way they really believe this they really believe that um believe that Republicans want to abolish all taxes for rich people and aggressively tax poor people. They genuinely believe that that is just crazy, the life that they think is happening. Imagine, it must be scary to be an MSNBC cat mom just waking up every day in this headspace. Eliminations of unions also listening uh raise

the retirement age we literally actually have to do that cut social security cut medicare which i thought biden came out against in the last debate and the affordable care act that one's true and i support it uh raise prescription drug prices also funny to think of trump like i want aids drugs more expensive um promote and expedite capital punishment um increase arctic drilling it's like this is like he wants to just be bashing seals over the head it's in there it's point number 75 anyway the project quote tweets this and just um goes through piece by piece by piece and it's like we didn't say this we didn't say this we don't mean this like um and so at that point i don't know man piece. And it's like, we didn't say this. We didn't say this. We don't mean this. And so at that point, I don't know, man.

It's really just all that's really happening here. The for sure thing that I'm taking out of the whole project and what seems to be the most concrete prescription is a firing of civil servants. It's like a thinning of the government. He does want to abolish the Department of Education and various other departments. That's something that sounds radical only if you don't know anything about American history and

think that this is some important... Abolish Department of Education means we're getting rid of public education, right? Wasn't it created under... I think it was Jimmy Carter. This is a brand new department that is just full of bureaucrats that you don't need and that's kind of what we're talking about um which leads me to the maybe strange question of like is that actually just what they're afraid of

i mean i think that's why they were so hysterical over the chevron decision i mean they sort of like they being a sort of specific kind of person on the left, because I don't think it's everyone who really values the image of like an expert civil, like they should be responsible for sort of like some form of lawfare. And then we should have really this kind of like technocratic bureaucrat class that regulates and sort of, you know, restricts the excesses of like an uneducated general public. I think that's a pretty widespread belief. And so they see Trump, I think they see, um, yeah, any attempt to sort of like, you know, curb the federal reserve or the FCC or something as, you know, despotic and totalitarian. I mean, those are the words that they keep using. Yeah. I think it all falls in line with is like, Trump is literally Hitlerler thing the democracy's on the ballot thing he's gonna get rid of all these norms and services that we have in the government i mean what was the new republic that wrote about like they put trump as like hitler on the cover of it like they're still

running that campaign about he's like going to end the world and so if that's what you believe in then like all these little things sort of add up to the amalgam of like, he's ruining everything and going to take over as a dictator. This in light of what, I mean, Saja, you brought it up in Slack today and Eric, you just raised it in the pod. Like compared to the fact that Trump appears to be moderating is especially interesting. He, on abortion, every time Kamala is like, Trump said he would ban abortion. These are like straight up, they're just straight up lies. I mean, he has repeatedly been pressed on this. And honestly, honestly like is it surprising to anybody that trump doesn't care about abortion that's a man who's he's definitely paid for abortions like who are

we kidding here like that is not a man who's trying to ban abortion and and and then like separate from me just having to intuit that he's said it explicitly again and again and again um he doesn't want a national abortion ban uh is that to say that it's not gonna i mean who the fuck knows i didn't think roby way was gonna happen um so i actually am glad that they codified gay marriage and interracial marriage into law for example um these are one of the things this is one of the things that project 2025 is being framed that they're saying you know he's gonna reverse these things he actually can't it's a law you'd have to pass a new law through congress um this is no longer like oh a rogue court can decide um but i don't know i'm not saying that like crazy things can't happen we're living in clown world now the rules are different but in terms of like fear over what does trump specifically want uh not a lot of i mean

some of them yeah like they're talking about, you know, building the wall as well. I think he's, I mean, yeah, he said he was going to do that in 2016 though. And he didn't. So like, we have two things there. One, you shouldn't be surprised. And two, you should sort of be encouraged.

This is not a man who follows through on what he promises. So like, why are you even scared? And I go back and forth between wondering why you're so scared and thinking you can't actually be this scared right you can't actually think that he's a nazi um and that is an answer i just i don't know man i can't figure out what these people the really hysterical one like the mark hamels of the world i don't know i can't get married i know a lot of them personally that's what they think you just can't change their mind i mean i literally talked to people the past weekend who would say they would vote for a court what do you say why didn't he have you asked them why he didn't do these things in

2016 i probably should have but i mean i asked a guy over over the uh last week um he's a real anti-trumper he was going off about chevron and on instagram which by the way i have a huge problem with people talking about politics on instagram and their instagram story it's like keep it fucking funny light sexy bizarre i don't want to see political shit in there but it was there and i was triggered uh and i asked some poignant questions and one of them was this i was like why do why do you think that he didn't do any of this stuff in 2016 if you think he's like this is quarter who he is and his response was just trump is a rapist and i'm like okay so we're not like we're not gonna get anywhere that's actually the easy thing they pull the most extreme thing out so like usually roe v wade is like their kind

of way of being like see i told you so they always try to pull the most extreme example out of it. Dude, I don't get it. This is the least scary election ever. They've both been president already. We know exactly who they are. Trump was president. Biden was president. They're not running on anything different. They're running as the exact same people. I mean, Biden now has advanced degrees of dementia, but it's the same like the same ostensibly the same thing and i don't it's just the hysteria seems so it just seems off to to me like like to the point where i really have a hard time even believing it whereas i really but that girl the famous screaming lip screaming after trump won i believe that I believed that. I was like, I believe you.

I think that you really do think the world is ending. And I didn't know. I was like, is the world ending? I don't know what just happened. It was weird. 2016 was fucking crazy um it was 2024 it's not so crazy anymore to your point uh trump followed through on maybe half of the stuff uh i guess the steel man would be he was uh blocked by the left from doing what he wanted to do like

the border wall funding was crazy which i think is actually a strong case for what project 2025 is putting out there where it's like, okay, let's strengthen the office of the president. Let's give him a bit more power. Call me crazy, but I wouldn't mind either a leftist or rightist president getting in there and actually doing shit so that every election actually is consequential. We have four years of that. If it sucks, they get voted out. I mean, go back and forth. At least like if we're going to spend a whole year every four years going crazy, let's at least have some outcomes, right?

Yeah, this is what people are worried about. Like Bukele, they're like, oh my God, but what if he was sufficiently empowered to the point where he was able to jail all the criminals? That would be this huge civil rights violation and i think here's well this is a thing this is like you start everyone starts to just at that point you have like sort of awkward quiet and there are people in the room are like oh is that not a good thing like how do i i didn't know what are we talking about now and it starts to get

uncomfortable um because well we'll save that one for another day. What we have to talk about now, we got to bring in the man who predicted the hot swap summer, Jason Calacanis. Here he is in the studio, J. Cal, the one, the only, the legendary creator and host of the All In podcast and a bunch of other things. Something about an Uber investment, I believe. Oh, I got to check the cap table.

Hold on. Oh yeah, it worked out. Elizabeth, thank you for joining the show. I'm a big fan of the show, actually. I listen most weeks. And I am just such a fan of independent publishing. As you know, I grew up in the 90s and, you know, there's a lot of gatekeepers.

So I started a zine in the early 90s called Cyber Surfer, and then I started Silicon Island Report. That's how I started my career. So when I saw what you were doing with PW, I was like, this has got great potential. It's like outsider, it's a little bit punk rock, and I've been watching it, and I'm just super impressed because I know how hard it is to make a viable media concern.

You guys are crushing it. It's funny you say the zine thing. Thank you very much. Zines are definitely an influence. Punk is an influence. Early Vice, that's definitely in the DNA, I think. The stuff that inspired me. I'm a huge fan.

Today, one of the things... We're here, obviously. We have to talk about the hot swap summer. Sure, hot swap summer. That's what we're going to get into in a second. I think we're going to get into just all in stuff in general too, because I got a couple of questions and just interesting things that have happened over this, I guess, last... Three years?

188. I think we did 186 or 187 today. So yeah, it's been... Yeah, since COVID. It started in COVID, yeah. You guys started right around the same time that I started Pirate Wires. I think so, actually,

because I remember Elon retweeted something you wrote. I can try to remember the article, and that's how I became aware of it. And I was like, ah. Fifth Estate was my piece. That was a couple years later. That was during his takeover, his hostile takeover of Twitter.

That was quite a night. What a fun time to be writing. I loved writing about that. But listen, I want to talk about the hot swaps. You, honestly, you're a great sport on the way that people come after you online, but you sometimes don't get enough credit. And you laid down a theory on this election. You did not think, I also kind of vaguely, I was more vague and I was like, I don't feel like Biden's going to be the,

I still don't. Or now, obviously I don't. But for a month, I was like, I just doesn't feel real. You're waiting for the other shoe to drop or whatever, but you were more vocal about it

and explicit even. And you said, I think it's going to be a bad debate and it's going to be before the convention. He's going to be replaced. Hotswap summer. Maybe you think it's going to be a bad debate and it's going to be before, you know, the, the convention, he's going to be replaced, um, hot swap summer. Maybe you think it's gonna be a moderate. You've talked about, um, a little more recently, uh, about the whistleblower, but I want to back up and just say like, or get your story on, I mean, why do you think people, even on your own show,

like friends of the broad, right? Like people were resistant to the idea. What do you think was holding people back from the concept that Biden might be dropping, which seems in hindsight, quite obvious. I think you have to go back eight years, I think, to understand, and a little bit of journalism, like we're talking about here. And I've spent, I started my career doing zines and being an outsider journalist. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to Fordham at night. I had to like, in order to get published, I had to go to a photocopy store, a village photocopy on 43rd Street in Manhattan. I still remember it when I was 23 years old, get 30 years ago, printing up my magazine to get my voice out there. And I understand the journalist mindset. And what

happened when Trump became president was it broke journalists' brains because he wasn't supposed to win. We had just had Obama, right? And Obama felt like for liberals in New York, and I grew up in Brooklyn and lived in Manhattan, that the world had finally gotten where they wanted it. We had a black president. The world was going to get better. We were going to live in a post-race society. It just felt like this coronation of Obama and getting the Bushes out and this warmongering and starting wars, all of that was like kind of felt good to elites. because that was supposed to be like the next phase of this. And it was so earth shattering to them that somebody who's an outsider like that, who is bombastic, insult comic, all the stuff he is, and it scared them. And so then they switched from being objective journalists to advocates. And this was like, for me watching from the outside, I was like, wait a second, when we came up in journalism, we had fact checkers in the organization, and we would sit in meetings.

If you came with a piece, somebody would have their red pen out and say, who said this? Although this is an anonymous source, you can't use an anonymous source. If you want to use an anonymous source in the publication, I need to talk to them on the phone, and we need to get two people to back up their story. It was taken very seriously. It was a vocation to be a journalist. That's how people looked at it. And it was a lot of respect for it. And they just gave up all their credibility by saying,

you know what? We're going to get this guy out of office. We're taking this guy down. Now, Fox had decided that. Rupert Murdoch was not part of journalism. He was part of entertainment. And so then they just said, you know what? Fox is winning by picking a side. We have to pick a side. And the subscription business of

the New York Times exploded. Washington Post, New York Times, Guardian. I don't know if you remember this, but they were saying, in order to stop Trump, you need to subscribe to our pubs. Yeah, I remember. That was the marketing campaign. I mean, just think how deranged that is. They've now turned into a PAC. Like they're a political action committee that's servicing stopping Trump. Now, I understand where they were coming from. Trump was a little bit scary coming in there.

And then Peter Thiel got it right. Like, don't worry about what he's saying. Like, worry about the intent of his words. I'm sort of paraphrasing here. Don't take him literally. Take him seriously. Take him seriously. Not literally. I mean, it was literally. Peter has his them literally. Take them seriously. Yeah. Take them seriously, not literally.

I mean, it was literally, Peter has his moments and that was one of them. So I think they've spent eight years saying Trump is the existential risk for the world. And I get it. Like January 6th was dark. Like that was dark. And the election, turning over the election stuff, there's some dark stuff there that'll come out. That's already started to come out, but we just kind of lost all of that because people don't want to, you know, it's very hard for people to be objective if you're partisan. So the left has become super partisan, right? It's become super partisan. And they just think Biden is the tool to beat Trump. And now they've realized he can't beat Trump. And that's why they've immediately flipped. So it just proves

this theory that everybody, the media, the Democratic Party, and the celebrities, the donors class, they're all just in it to win. And Trump can't be beat by Biden. They realize it. Kamala, maybe. And now they're just wondering who's going to be the person who can be. Do they not know that before the debate is what you're saying is like there was maybe suspicion, but nobody really knew. They knew it was a possibility. I think there's a big cover up here. I think what's going to come out is a whistleblower will come out and i think they're going to have known that he has dementia alzheimer's cognitive decline that neurologist who went to the white house whatever number of times it's either three or ten

and they're covering that up i don't know if you saw that like weird press conference which is like i can't tell you the name of it even though the names in the newspaper and on the call logs and on the visitor thing but i can't tell you the name of it, even though the name's in the newspaper and on the call logs and on the visitor thing, but I can't tell you the name for privacy reasons. That was very weird. So long story short, I think they knew. And I think the reason they put the debates in June was I think they set Biden up. And I think they set him up to say, if he crushes Trump, who's the easiest candidate in the world to beat, he's like, these are two really hated presidents. You should be able to beat him with a very moderate platform. If he doesn't beat him, then we can start this process of taking him out. And that's what you're seeing right now. So on that, that was my rough sense of it as well. It was like, clearly, they wanted this. Obviously, now it makes sense why they pushed it forward. It's not just to kind of avoid the potential calamity of a fall debate.

It's for the opportunity to replace Biden if it's really bad. I also saw, I mean, there was a vote change or a rule change in 2022 that would allow anyone who drops, if he drops out after the convention, you have a series of party bosses that would be able to put someone in themselves without a primary. And the entire thing to me feels a little bit anti-democratic, right? You've just circumvented an entire primary. So that was sort of, that was a narrative, right? So people are talking about that online, obviously.

And I'm thinking like, even if you don't agree with that, it's maybe something more simple, whatever. Like clearly people are going to be talking about that and wondering about that and asking questions about that. simple whatever like clearly people are going to be talking about that and wondering about that and asking questions about that uh and paul graham referred to this specifically the idea that there are people who wanted this to happen on purpose as a dangerous idea and he chastised balji for um for talking about this publicly with his big platform he said it was really dangerous for these ideas to be getting out there um dangerous ideas dangerous ideas. He evoked the dangerous ideas. It was a dangerous idea. And this is the person, this is a guy. He's a bomb thrower. Yeah.

Who has talked about defending danger. It's like any dangerous idea other than ones I don't like are allowed to be talked about. It's actually the central premise and a brilliant one of his investment thesis is to hire people who are rule breakers and who are hard to get along with. This is a fundamental tenet of venture capital is that the people who you make the most money with are the people who are willing to reinterpret the rules, bend them, sometimes break them, which happens when you bend things sometimes. And he would ask people like, hey, what have you done that? Not that's illegal, but what have you hacked? What have you gotten in trouble for? He's looking for troublemakers. What have you hacked? What have you gotten in trouble for?

He's looking for troublemakers. And so, you know, if you have a, if you did an illegal business in your childhood, that's like Y Combinator big plus one for getting in. It was disappointing to me to see that. But it was also a pattern, not of his, but it reminded me of something that happened to you guys on the All In pod. So you had Vinod Khosla come after you.

The reference to you guys, there were two sort of things. One was the- Yeah, no, I heard your episode on it. I think you had very good clarity on it. I think he said we're, he kind of was a word salad of like, they're MAGA and they're not in Silicon Valley and we were all laughing. We're extremists. Extremists.

Extremists is the word that I keyed in on. And here's the reason. So in both of these cases, you have two very prominent, high status individuals in the tech industry going after other high status individuals in tech with bad ideas, not challenging the ideas, but challenging their ability to share those ideas. And it feels really reminiscent of what was happening throughout the early 2020s, late 20 teens, and in 2020, 2021, where we were trying to quarantine ideas off. And it feels almost like a frightened reaction from these people. Culture maybe in tech is changing or something, and they're trying to shut down that change

rather than engage in any sort of way. I mean, do you kind of agree with this roughly? I think a person who would see how in 2016, if you said you supported Trump, you would have people quit in your company, you would lose venture capital investment, and people might protest your product. And then- That word from Peter Thiel. I was there when it happened in 2016. We were the only ones. It was crazy. Yeah. And so then you fast forward and it's 2024 and Saks hosts a fundraiser. And kind of, if you want credibility in tech, it's to be so punk rock that you're willing to say, Trump's not the perfect package, but it's better than somebody who is suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia or cognitive decline.

Right. I mean, the weekend at Bernie's thing is like kind of a cruel analogy, but it's kind of accurate. They're trying to cover something up with somebody who's not able to do the job. And that's why when a meme, especially a dank one, sticks, my theory is it's because it's accurate. It's kind of like the relationship of humor, right? It's like when something kind of hits home, we can laugh about it and process it. So yeah, I mean, the thoughtful thing I think would be to say, what is it about Trump's platform in this election? Forget about what happened in the past. I've kind of like put that into one box, Trump 1.0, and now I'm like sort of studying Trump 2.0.

And when I look at Trump 2.0, he's acting more presidential, less insult comic humor, less name calling. And he's like, hmm, this abortion thing, like, and stacking the court. Yeah, people don't like that. So yeah, screw the evangelical votes that got me in the first time. They're not going to help me this time. Who's going to help me this time? Moderates. And women. They're going to decide the election according to most of the pollsters. So yeah, you know what I'll say? Hey, listen, I gave it to the states.

That's a better legal framework. So if that's the better legal framework, let them decide. And look, they're making the right decision. And by the way, I'm totally for rape, incest, all these exceptions. And yeah, maybe you all think it's 12 weeks, some other state thinks it's 24. And that's fine. But the only thing I'm against is killing babies when they come out of the womb. It's like, oh, really? What a what a brave stance. You don't believe in killing babies when they're born. You know, like, yeah, he's super moderated. And is your assumption that like, that's, it's the fact that he's, as radical-seeming as then? Is maybe just these people are more frightened or something?

He plays people. Well, what do you guys think? I want to talk about- Evangelicals, and then he's now playing the moderates, right? He's brilliant in that way. He knows how to get their votes, basically, like a great politician. But what do you make of the way that you guys specifically have been targeted for talking about this stuff?

I mean, it's- You know, anytime you get an audience, because this is like the third time I've been micro-famous in my career. Like in the 90s, I was super famous in New York with Silicon Alley Reporter. I had like, you and I were on that weird signal group that Eric set up, I think. And I had a New Yorker profile written about me. It's kind of like

that was the height in the 90s of being important. I was on Charlie Rose, the other height of being important. I've been famous three times and not famous most of the other times. And so every time that happens, people come after you. And the same media that props you up then also comes for the takedown. So for me, it's like, who cares? I'm already financially independent. I've got a great family. I've got a great life. I've got great friends. Like there's, there's nothing anybody can do to me. Like, I mean, if I got canceled, I joke with my daughter, it's like, oh God, please let this be the year I get canceled. And I can't work because then I could ski 50 days instead of 36 or 40. I could go to Japan twice a year instead of once.

Please let me get fired. Please cancel me. I've had the fantasy of having everything taken away from me before as well. So great. And just taking a break. Like just a few weeks off. I mean, please cancel me. Like, yeah, I'd love it.

It'd be so fantastic. But what about like, so within tech specifically yeah um i so i'd heard um that there were people who were threatened for going to the fundraiser um and not not you know by journal obviously. Obviously, everyone, I think journal. No, people said Ron Conway called people and maybe Reid Hoffman to kind of, I don't know if they threatened them. I think it's more like, is this something you really want to do? Did you think this through? What about your kids? What about the women in your life?

Like, that's how the pressure comes down. That's the pressure that comes to me for being friends with Sax. Sax and I are best friends. Like, we've been friends for over 20 years. We like to hang out and watch movies together. We like to hang out and play cards together. And people are now like, hey, you guys are both getting too famous and you're friends and you disagree. So therefore you can't be friends anymore. I'm like, to quote my friend, Elonon go fuck yourself yeah i'll pick my friends and you well that was my next thing though you know you are the moderate on the show i would oh friedberg

as well but like i feel like you you've made more of a you you've made more noise about your personal views publicly and so i think it's it's like it seems more shocking to have you being you know on a podcast with trump all of a sudden interviewing even though you're sort of you know against or whatever i mean once in a lifetime opportunity to interview of course i mean of course as a journalist who would you i would not say no to acasio and i can't stand her i would be like yes please god please i have a lot of questions yeah um but you know you're you're the one not david spent his whole life with his views he wrote the diversity myth like this is a person who is at this point or co-wrote it with peter like at this point he's surrounded himself with people who are fine with who he is but like i imagine you're getting a lot of heat

um for as you become more popular and as the show um really plays a huge role in altering i would say no i don't think it's the one thing that's altering culture but it's one of the major catalysts in uh the sort of broadening of the overdue window within tech and the sort of slow cultural change in tech. I imagine that you're getting a lot of heat, like, you know, privately from other tech people. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I'd say it's plus and minus. I get long emails from the woke side and I've probably lost some acquaintances over it, but not friends. So, you know, I'm 53. I'm an old man now, but like, I'm sure if I was, you know, in my twenties or thirties, this would be having an effect on me. But again, as I said earlier, like my life is absolutely fantastic.

Like I have everything I could ever want to have friends. I have experiences like somebody writing me a long email with their like trump derangement syndrome outlined bullet by bullet or some maga person telling me like there's some grand conspiracy and like january 6th was manufactured by like some fbi or the democrats and i'm like really i mean did you look at any of the transcripts of like the Oath Keepers? Like these guys are lunatics. Like, can you not hold these two things in your head? So I actually just ignore it. I mean, who cares? Like, this is not the point of my life. And I will say for every one of those I get, I get hundreds of people just saying, I love the show. Can I take a selfie? And

it's my friends and I listened to it and it creates more conversation. So for me, in the third act of my career, I'm just kind of like, it's kind of neat that people are thinking and having hard conversations with their friends. And I kind of like the Overton window being wide open because I'm a Gen Xer, right? I'm a free range kid. Like we like, you know, full contact debates. We liked going to Thanksgiving and having like our racist uncle and our liberal hippie other uncle fight and i was like wow that's fascinating to watch um i prefer that world i grew up listening to talk radio with my dad in the car in jersey it was new jersey 101.5 and they'd have you know three segments an hour with the hosts and people would call in

and they would be like brutally fighting back and forth because the callers would be like hostile right yeah i remember i called in age 10 i called in i can see that that's how i'm late at night and i would try to get on and they would let me on sometimes and i would try and share my opinion um and uh and that's the stuff that i think i carry with me today honestly it's like hugely formative uh what do you i saw first of all i have a couple questions about the whistleblower and the hot swap. But I want to get there is pretty simple. You know, they they they are going to put

somebody in there. And the the next thing I coined was the the speedrun primary. I don't think most people in pop culture know what a speedrun is, apparently. So a bunch of Democrats in semaphore, and Professor Cole takes, I think, both cribbed my concept a week or two later and put in it like that they want to do a Democratic. I don't know what they called it, like a fast Democratic primary. That's what's going to happen next, I predict. They're going to just say to I think Biden might actually resign and let Kamala be the first president of the United States. That would

be like a gift to her and really booster her in her profile. And then they say, everybody throw your hat in the ring. We're going to have five debates and we're going to take over the media for the summer because the summer is slow anyway for media. Journalists are all on vacation. Their sources are all on vacation in Europe, whatever. So now you get five weeks of primary. You start with 10 people or eight people at the first debate. Anybody can come. You got Dean Phillips coming back, the crazy crystal lady, anybody in between. Marianne, let's go. I love her.

Get her in there. I'm going to defeat Trump with love. He's my favorite character. My work? Sure, why not? Cast a spell. But then you go from – you have Gavin up there and whoever else Whitmer, then you go from eight to six to four to two. And then whoever gets there, they pick number two as

their vice president or whatever, you know, something in that range. Uh, think about that, what that would do in terms of excitement versus the incredibly unpopular Biden and the incredibly unpopular Trump people want a moderate. And I think a moderate would emerge, it would totally break the corrupt, woke lunacy of the left. Now, I don't know how hard they'll fight it. They're going to obviously fight it, Brandon. But I do think it could be like this incredible crash and burn for the Democratic Party and rebirth, right? Like a phoenix, they would rise as moderates. That's my kind of dream scenario. And what are the mechanics of the speedrun primary? Are the voters,

the Democratic voters voting again? Or is this sort of just like a consensus, popularity contest type thing? Yeah, I think it'd be a consensus kind of thing with the delegates. Yeah. I mean, everybody's like, it's not possible. The people who say it's not possible are partisans who are terrified, terrified at the prospect that you could hot swap. Because think about what an advantage it is to hot swap. Oh, it's huge. I keep saying that as well.

Why wouldn't you want to take this against Trump? It's a free option. It's literally like I dealt you two cards. One of them's a deuce and one of them's a king. Would you like a new card? You could throw the deuce back in the deck. It'll give you new card it's like it can only get better yes sure give me a card i i saw people early on sort of complaining about this as um or complaining about the concept of moving out biden because it would be this huge disadvantage it's like it's obviously an advantage

if you know who you're fighting to then select top down someone tailor-made to go after that person all of the weaknesses that he possibly has or whatever. It would be a huge, huge, huge disadvantage. You could tell the person, exactly. You could tell the person to Trump's weaknesses. So what are Trump's strengths slash weaknesses? 80% of people agree with him about the border. Okay. So you find somebody who agrees about the border. RFK agrees about the border. Dean Phillips agrees about the border. They visited the border. Great. You take that table, take that off the table. Right. And you just slowly take each issue off the table with that Manchurian candidate. I'm sorry, hot swapped candidate.

So my concern there is like, aren't you, don't you think the democratic constituency is going to be massively betrayed by the fact that their chosen candidate is just being replaced, fact that their chosen candidate is just being replaced, number one. And number two, a person of color is being sidestepped because she should have the nomination, right? Like these are two, in my opinion, really big lines that you're crossing. And if I'm a Dem strategist, I'm like, look, let's just take the L here. Let's have Biden step down. Kamala takes over, we do the right thing, according to our voters, Trump wins, and we set ourself up for like a massive midterm in 2026. Yeah, no, I'll tell you why you're wrong. So I think you have two of the right issues that they have to overcome, which the DEI candidate, like, oh my God, a woman of color, how could you ever do that to her

and replace her with a white male or whoever? So that's valid. I think the way they handle it is super easy. None of us knew that Joe's cognitive decline was happening and he made a choice for himself and his family. And we're just responding to that reality. It's an unfortunate reality that happens to all of us, Brandon. Sadly, we will all, if we live long enough, have to deal with these incredibly challenging issues. And then when it comes to the DEI issue or like replacing a woman, it's very simple. We are the Democratic Party. We care about democracy. Therefore, we're going to let the democratic process run out with this speed run primary. We're going to do a primary and we're going to let the best woman or man or anything

in between, they, them, it, whoever. Everyone's allowed to compete. Everybody is allowed to compete. And that's what, and you know, we wish we weren't in this situation and we wish Joe the best and we're celebrating Joe. And this Democratic primary is a tribute to his 50 years in politics. Brandon, it's an excellent question. Yeah. I'm running for press secretary, by the way. You really want to be press secretary? I mean, I do things for the lulz.

And the reason I put the suit on today was because we just taped all in before this, and I wanted to troll Saks because I started doing fox news i saw it's my next so i started doing fox news strictly to troll sacks and i and the guy jesse waters i guess who is the new tucker he loves me so they want me to be like a i think a correspondent kind of thing. Your car run said, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. Great. Good for deal flow. So they, yeah, I think press secretary would be hilarious.

And can you imagine just going out and talking to the press every day? I think you would love it. I think you would love it. I would have a lot to write about and talk about i endorse it but on your jesse waters appearance which i caught i think it was thank you last night or the night before i did it uh yeah two nights ago and then i did it two weeks ago um so now this nostra canis thing with my predictions coming true it's kind of got a little bit of steam yeah and um he brought you on and he asked

you specifically about your whistleblower and you talked about it you talked about it as if you were delivering the news you were like yes so now the x y and z happened and the next thing that's happening is you're gonna have a whistleblower yeah so this is the way i heard on fox news i heard jesse talking about the whistleblower he's like the whistleblower is coming next here comes the whistleblower but you weren't even on tv he's like carrying it on you need to do if you want to accept memes so i i kind of grew up in the 90s marshall mccluhan my friend doug rushkoff wrote a lot of books about this and doug's one of my best friends we used to go to the knicks games every week and we would talk about media theory and he kind of educated me this you know like unsophisticated kid in brooklyn about how memes form or what's a meme

it's an idea that kind of spreads this This is before memes as they exist today. This was like culture memes. And we kind of had a concept of hacking media. And you had to hack, you know, traditional media because that was the only media that existed. So you were, and it was called guerrilla marketing or hacking media. And so when you want to incept an idea, you have to think about the person receiving the idea and how open are they in terms of influence. Now, whistleblowers, that's something that Fox loves. I mean, that's conspiracy theory central. They're like just next to Alex Jones. So you bring up a whistleblower, they love that.

And so I was like, I'm going you bring up a whistleblower. They love that. And so I was like, I'm going to incept the whistleblower. And the way to incept the whistleblower is to say, this is what's going to happen. And it's clearly a prediction, but they've taken a run with it because I packaged it properly. Right. And this is how you hack me. It's the packaging. It's the title. It's the keyword you use. Hot swap summer,, you know, Hot Girl Summer, Megan Thee Stallion, you're kind of hijacking that a little bit. So you have to hijack something and then add to it, right? Speedrun, that exists. People love doing a speedrun in video games, and then you put primary at the end, right? And then people remember it because it evokes in them something they understand. It unlocks dopamine in their brains. And so the whistleblower, there's obviously 50 people who know the state of Joe's cognitive decline. There's at least 50. And so what I said on All In today was not only do I think there's going to be a whistleblower, I encourage anybody who has this information to do the patriotic thing and to

step forward, whether you're the doctor, the nurse, the secretary, the EA, the person who overheard something in the Oval Office, or somebody's sibling. It is your moral, civic, ethical, patriotic duty to tell the truth here to the American people. And you should do it. And you know, the podcast is pretty popular. You know, like top 10 podcasts in the world every week. That's going to get emailed, that clip will now get emailed to those people. And one of those people will be sitting there at night and they're going to have a crisis because they're going to say you know what jay cowell's right this is wrong lying to the american people's wrong um last question for you uh and thank you for your time i know you guys were recording today yourself jay stradamus is that what they say no uh no stracanus i think

i got the domain name for the VLLs. No Stracanus. I mean, I was going to ask you about, you know, your predictions for the Democratic Party. We already gave it to us. I want to know more about, we did some reporting on the sort of Trump VC vibe shift. And it turns out, like, funding hasn't really changed at all. In fact, a little bit more on the Democrat side. So it seems like culture is changing.

It's not yet necessarily mapping to the best of my knowledge. It doesn't seem to be entirely mapping to like real sort of monetary change. And now I'm wondering just about the shape of specifically in tech, the media and the culture. What do you see five years from now? Even just let's say three years from now, even just let's say three years from now, where is tech culture? Politically, culturally, you know, how different is it from today? And then from 2020? Like, what does it look like? It's a great question. You know, tech has always been very libertarian and liberal. And those are slightly different things,

obviously, socially liberal, and then maybe less government, which would describe the conservative party previously before they got involved in abortion and all this stuff. And it's super interesting because I do think if you think about that libertarian bias of like less government, your instincts are correct. You should follow the money. Lena Kahn was hired at a very young age for writing a bunch of reports or papers, essays, whatever, when she was in college, graduate school, about preserving future competition. That she could, that the way we should do antitrust in this country was to stop future competition as if she could look in a crystal ball and know hey google buying youtube or facebook buying instagram will reduce competition and social

later on etc okay that's an interesting theory great a graduate school theory perfectly fine biden put her in charge of right uh the ftc what it's a break from the consumer harm stuff it's a different way of looking usually it's supposed to be is the consumer been harmed and there are tactical things that um you know like price fixing you know we all all of us run some you know burger joints we go and we uh play golf and we're like what are you charging for a happy meal a 5.99 okay yeah what are you charging for a Happy Meal? A $5.99? Okay, yeah. What do you charge for Happy Meal? Oh, $3.99? It's pretty far from $5.99, don't you think? And it's like, yeah, I'll charge $5.25. And we all decide we're going to keep that in a certain

thing. Or there's dumping products onto the market. Okay, I'm going to make my Uber rides, you know, I'm going to lose 50 cents on every dollar for Uber rides, and then I'm going to triple the prices and I'm going to price gouge, right? So there are tactical things like that, for Uber rides, and then I'm going to triple the prices, and I'm going to price gouge, right? So there are tactical things like that, that the government should look at, I think. Lena Kahn has cost people a lot of money. The Biden administration has cost people a lot of money. Most startups don't IPO. You know, in fact, I've only had maybe three or four in my first two or 300 investments IPO, Uber, Robinhood, Desktop Metal, Rude AI, four. Most of them get bought or shut down. Most shut down and then a bunch get bought.

This is fucking with people's paper. And if you fuck with people's paper, they're going to take it only so long. And then you look at taxes and you look at the wealth tax, you look at the grumblings about a wealth tax, you look at the transfer tax. Like when the Slack founder, Stuart Butterfield left San Francisco and he sold his $12 million house, which seems like a crazy thing. It's probably like a 4,000 square foot house. It's like the average house in Texas. They were making a big deal in San Francisco that that they got him for whatever two percent for selling this you know over 10 million dollar house and whatever they're going to give it to the homeless industrial complex like people pay attention to that stuff and then people move their headquarters uh to a lower tax state uh maybe people set up a stock market in texas i don't know if you watch that stock market being set up in Texas. So, um, and then people might reincorporate their companies out of Delaware and other places like

Nevada. But it sounds like you're applying a more rightward swing, a continuing rightward swing, a more libertarian, I would say. Yeah. Which, you know, it used to be like, it used to be hard to, to put people on a spectrum because when you said Republican, they used to be for less government involvement in your life and less spending and more fiscally, more fiscal responsibility. And then Trump spent, you know, $8 trillion, put us $8 trillion more in debt. And so they're big spending too. They want to get involved in people's lives, like reproductive issues. So it's hard to like pick a party now. Like I am certainly somebody as a moderate who doesn't have a home anymore. I have no home.

Like I'm socially liberal. I think people should be able to do whatever they want. And I think it would be great if we pay less taxes and you had less regulations. Where does that put me? You know, like which party am I part of? I don't know. So I think it's a libertarian thing that's kind of happening. And people are, it's like this guy, Malay, the reason he's resonating with people so much is we realize the administrative state and these employees, there's too many of them. And we want less government, less regulation. So I think that's where we wind up in three, four or five years, is people saying, do we need the Department of Education? Vivek is kind of, people saying, do we need the Department of Education? Vivek is kind of, you know, he's annoying. He's abrasive. He's a know-it-all. You know, if you went to school with him, you probably

hated him because he's like that guy who's super annoying and talks over everybody. But he's right. Like, you should just literally go into government and be like, anybody who was born on an odd number day in an odd number year you don't have a job and if you're born on even numbered year you have a job i like the idea of just getting rid of i mean trump get rid of half get rid of 20 day one fuck it we're so in debt and our interest payments are so high like just get rid of 20 of people everywhere everybody share the pain just like a corporation well listen um i am excited to see what happens i am looking forward to the whistleblower uh i'm looking forward to the rest of the hot swap summer it's gonna be a great hot swap summer i will be listening to the all-in as i love to do it's a

great show obviously everybody here i'm sure is listening to it already but thank you for joining it's been real and i love i'll see you as well well and i and i love pw so keep it up thank you for joining. It's been real. Absolutely. And I love- I'll see you on Fox as well. And I love PW, so keep it up. Thank you, sir. You guys are super punk rock, and I listen every week, so great job. We were kind of talking about Democrats and sort of the party in disarray and Project 2025.

Abits this chaos. I mean, a lot of it's politically motivated too, right? Like the Project 2025 thing is clearly a political attempt to distract voters from the chaos of the Democratic Party. And the Republicans attempting to pass the SAVE Act also feels politically motivated to me. It seems like a great opportunity to score some points with voters rather than an earnest attempt at policy. But I'm going to allow Sanjana to break that one down for us before we start talking about it. The SAVE Act. Yeah. I mean, so basically this is sort of, you know, there's been a perennial battle among Democrats and Republicans over voter ID law. But basically, yesterday, House Republicans and a couple of Democrats passed the SAVE Act, which would essentially require that you show proof of citizenship in order to vote. And so currently, you know, voter ID laws vary extremely widely by state. You have states in which you're required to present, usually sort of more conservative states, you're required to present proof of photo ID when you vote. And then you have, you know, the sort of majority of states where,

you know, you might have to sign some statement under perjury when you're registering to vote that says I am a US citizen, because it is already illegal to vote as a non citizen. And there's actually very strict penalties if you end up getting caught. But usually you just sign a sort of statement and then you can, you know, show up to vote and may or may not have to show a form of ID. And so after this passed in the House, the White House released a statement and basically said they sort of said that Biden would veto it. They said, you know, there's no evidence that non-citizens routinely vote in U.S. elections. You know, the sort of typical Democratic Party line is that this is a racist policy because, you know, some people might not have access to the means to verify their citizenship. Some people. people might not have access to the means to verify their citizenship. Maybe they lost their birth certificate. Some people. Yeah, they always sort of bring up black and brown people who...

Black people don't know how to get driver's license. That's what they're saying. Yeah. Well, I guess it wouldn't be... I mean, it would be more than a driver's license, right? It would be a sort of birth certificate or a passport or something that shows that you're a US citizen. But still, I mean um it is presumably not super hard to verify your citizenship or it shouldn't be um but yeah the white house is going to veto this if it passes the senate which seems like it's unlikely um but this is sort of catalyzed debate over voter id laws once again so i mean, it's clearly, I think the Republicans obviously just want to be able to say the Democrats opposed this bill. And I mean, it just doesn't sit right

with me, the idea of, it doesn't sit right with me, the idea of opposing the bill. It's sort of like you were saying, well, it's obvious, it's already a crime. It's like, well, breaking into cars in San Francisco is also a crime. But if you told me that there was a bill on the table to, I don't know, stop it, I would be super down on account of it still happens. Riley, what do you make of this one? Yeah, it's just smart politicking by Republicans to get Democrats on a vote of, yes, I don't care about whether or not illegal immigrants vote in the election, which is essentially sort of what it's saying. And it's, yeah, for everything that they say about, oh, we got to save our democracy, democracy is on the ballot. To get them on the record where that's just kind of not the case right before the election is just really smart. And it's like sort of unexpected for the party that thought Mitt Romney was relatable and needed to sort of rally the troops to convince themselves that IVF was banning IVF was a bad idea.

It's just sort of smart politicking and a little bit unexpected. But yeah. Shut up, Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney frazzled me. I was like, whoa. Disrupted. It also feels like it sort of opens the door for like a lot of people to sort of question again. Like if Biden were to win this time around, I think you're going to have a lot of people who sort of question like who was voting in the election this time around. And I think that's sort of a dangerous prospect for democracy.

in him as a leader right now and so for him to win feels sort of inconceivable and it will fuel the next president will uh or he as the next president would never be seen as legitimate um it would be seen as like a deep which i mean feels correct but then i don't know like i wouldn't vote for someone with dementia but i've seen people say that they would um and i guess if you believe that trump is hitler like guess if you believe that Trump is Hitler, like if you really believe that he was Hitler, wouldn't you vote for a vegetable over Hitler? I would. I would definitely vote for a person with dementia over literally Hitler. Considering Biden's health for the past three and a half years, the country hasn't fallen apart. We've actually successfully proven that we don't need a president.

So at least for me, that bar would be low to vote for a vegetable. It's kind of sad. It shouldn't be that way, but I'm just being honest. No, but that is also because it is like if we don't – Sanjay, you were asking earlier, like what are we actually – are we accepting that we're not voting for a person, but whatever is around the person? I think people have implicitly accepted that at this point, that it's like, oh, well, there's a whole team of people and I don't really need to know who they are to know

that they're like probably on my side, which that I don't even know what to make. I really don't know what to make of that. I've seen that said explicitly by some Biden supporters who were basically like, you know, you get the apparatus of AIDS and the policymakers and, you know, you just need like Biden is basically just a figurehead. And so that's why they say they're they're going to vote for him no matter what, which is really interesting if you compare that to like how strong and idiosyncratic Trump's personality is. and idiosyncratic Trump's personality is. Trump is kind of the antithesis in some ways of the president as administrative state in that he's just so unpredictable. So it is a kind of interesting dichotomy

that you have, I guess, presuming Biden stays on the ballot, that you will have. There is a poetry to it, to be running a, I don't want to say a megalomaniac but like a a the cult of personality type figure a strong the classic strong man against nothing um which implies yeah what you said sort of the i don't even say deep state but i'm thinking deep state

but the administrative state around him uh super interesting and also a super interesting read on we keep going as the democracy thing this is a trial you know democracy's on the line or whatever but concurrently you have the democrats flirting with no primaries so the democrats sort of circumventing the democrat process possibly as we were talking about earlier with jason and um and you now have aoc calling for the impeachment of several Supreme Court justices. It is feeling not so democratic on that side. Who has been following the impeachment thing?

So AOC on Wednesday, it says yesterday, right now, introduced two articles of impeachment against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. uh clarence thomas and samuel alito um and just like the the details of this are i mean the alito the the alito articles are hilarious um i think we covered this in a podcast a few weeks ago maybe a few months ago um the story of like alito's wife hanging an upside down flag in their in their front yard during january 6th and the internet like had this huge debate about what the upside down flag means if you look at the american flag code which there is one i didn't know that um an upside down flag means that the country is like in a state of distress and like you're worried or whatever like that's a signal anyways um this

like caused some like unemployed millennial neighbors or whatever to like chimp out on alito and his wife and there's this whole beef you can look it up matt you can pull it up maybe the new york times article i think there is one anyways so alito's article articles of impeachment um accused him of because he allowed that flag to fly in his front yard during January 6th, so he improperly did not recuse himself from Supreme Court cases related to January 6th. So that's like the meat of the Alito accusation. It seems very, very thin to me. The Thomas accusation doesn't seem as thin, but seems potentially as a stretch.

I don't know. I'm not a legal scholar. He seems to have actually not sort of declared that he's gotten lots and lots of gifts from this guy called Harlan Crow, who is on the board of the American Enterprise Institute. And the articles of impeachment accuse Thomas of regularly taking up positions that the American Enterprise Institute has sort of proffered. And so thus they say there's a conflict of interest going on here, and Thomas should be impeached.

So that's kind of the, those are the sort of general facts about it. She's going to introduce it to Congress. This has happened one time in the past. Supreme Court justice was impeached by Congress in 1804. He was acquitted by the Senate and they've tried it 15 times otherwise and neither house uh both houses acquitted the the person getting impeached both times well it's a huge kind of scary thing the the court stuff is really dangerous i think the way they're attacking the court because if you don't if you shake the faith in that institution, I don't know what the...

How do you come back from that, really? If the whole country just fundamentally loses faith in the court, then there's not a solution. There's not like, oh, well, we're going to let you vote for them or something. That becomes way more hostile and way less objective. The whole thing is, even if there's no such thing maybe as objectivity, I think we actually, in this case, sort of need it. We need the illusion of this. We need Democrats and Republicans sort of roughly aligned on what the purpose of the court is and what they're supposed to be doing. And this thing just, I think it drives like a wooden stake right through the heart of what we need out of the court. It just makes it way more political. You're going to see renewed calls

from the left to pack the court, which in my mind effectively dissolves it. Once you pack the court and they're all left-wingers, it's like, okay, well, you seized the court, you've dissolved the old thing, you've created a new thing. That's kind of a legal coup.

And no one will ever take this seriously again because the only way to fix it is to do a top-down gesture from... It'll be the executive doing the same thing. From whatever party he comes from or she comes from, people are going to say, oh, well, the court's biased and things like this. And yeah, I don't know, man. AOC. Yeah. I don't know how the Dems get away with saying that Trump is a threat to democracy. This seems like a threat to democracy to me. Just combine it with the timeline of Warren continually trying to introduce the – she's calling it the Judiciary Act of – now it's 2023. She's tried to introduce this thing twice, and it adds four justices to the supreme court

yeah this is this is this has only been done the last time they added supreme court justices it was yeah it was around the civil war grant it was either lincoln or grant i think it was grant who did it yeah so so they the first time they did it they added it was just to accommodate the number of circuits like the country was like still growing right so they're like we need more supreme court justices um it was expanded to nine justices after that 10 during the civil war i don't know really why but then they moved it back down to nine this is in 1863 or so and so it's been like 180 years that we've had nine and um all of a sudden you know for whatever reason we need four more well the problem is we all know what the reason is it's like they want to control the core they can so democrats control most bouts of power in

the country unofficial and official and uh and this is this is the this is the this is the real juicy one because historically they've used it to pass law i I mean, that's what Roe v. Wade was. You've used the court to effectively pass law without ever having to cast a vote because you know that you never could have passed a vote like that. When was Roe? Was it 60-something or 70-something? 73, I think. So you never, ever... You couldn't do it now.

You couldn't pass that law now. You certainly couldn't pass it then. You couldn't pass something as expansive as Roe. And that was how the left was using the court. And now they can't, and they're really mad, and they want to take it over. They also want to jail the opposition candidate. And they want to not have votes at all to elect their candidate for president, which is just not super democratic, but here we are. I would just say, by the way, they have plenty of opportunities to codify the principles of Roe into law, and they never fucking did. Well, they did.

Like I was saying before, they did with gay marriage. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's tired partisan politics, right? It's all great when it works your way with Roe v. Wade or gay marriage or when you can yes queen ruth gare ruth bernard ginsburg but as soon as it goes against your way it's like okay now we have to pack the courts like okay like that's not how this works like yeah with with roe specifically it's just like you couldn't pass it because there aren't enough democrats who agree

with you it's super super super contentious and it cuts in different ways. Like this is one that's really weird. There are plenty of Democrats who are against who are who are against abortion. General, I don't know what they would say about Roe, but it's a complicated issue. And, yeah, that's that on the other deranged AOC news of the day. I do want to kind of end with a brief infrastructure chat, which I think is pretty interesting.

While we were all watching the mayor of New York City sort of get hyped up and excited over the new trash can that he released, there was like viral memes of his trash can. He was really, really proud of it. This story from two years ago, I believe it was in Gothamist, went viral again about the like, what was it? Two million or four million dollars that went to McKinsey to study the problem of the trash can or whatever. Very, very stupid. And sort of just once again, beats the drum of like, we have no state capacity.

We are not capable of building things anymore. I mean, this is like the nation that once built the Hoover Dam and now we're celebrating a trash can. It's really bad. And I think we do have to come back and revisit that sometimes and just remember how incapable we are at this point in time. But then this other story went, I don't, it didn't go viral, but it got some attention online. I saw it because I'm into trains and into infrastructure. It was in New York Mag and it's about Amtrak.

So Amtrak has been sort of melting down all summer and New York Mag sort of went in there and broke down the history of the service and kind of tried to understand what was going on. What I learned and didn't really know much about was Amtrak was originally the Pennsylvania Railroad. And that was made sort of grossly unprofitable for a series of government gestures like a long 100 years ago, ultimately was nationalized by the state. And from the 1970s on, this once private road has been run by the government. And from that point on, literally back in 1972, I think, or 73, when it was taken over by the government, everybody knew the whole thing had to be replaced. This was already a 50-year-old service. It was corroded to the point where they were in danger of losing service. So beyond the world of expansion, we have to replace this

thing. And what followed has just been decades and decades of grift and waste, actual fraud. In many cases, the most recent one happened under Obama. There was a close to $500 million package that was given to Amtrak to start replacing this stuff. Almost all of it was lost, but really stolen and nothing was improved. And so here we are. Basically, I think the interesting thing to me about this was just the concept of, I guess on some level I knew this, but to see it written down, this is 100 years old. We are riding on something that we have not built. We have not replaced. We have not refurbished. It is 100 years old. Our grandparents and great-grandparents, in some cases,

are the people who built this. And we inherited it, not even from them. It's been generations that we've not been doing stuff. And that's a really kind of, I think that's the high level. We always touch at different pieces of what's going on in the country. And we want to get to this really interesting progressive world of the future where everything's better and abundant. And we've got cool rocket trains across the country that look like something out of the great Gatsby. And I can have a martini in the Rockies or something as I soar through the mountains. We can't even get commuter rail from New York to Boston that's consistent and on time because we're not able to build anything. And this is it. It's like the stuff is taken over by the state.

It ends up in the hands of people who don't care about it and are not interested, not incentivized for things to work. They are just incentivized to take as much shit as they can from the public and everything kind of crumbles. And then if you try and subvert that system, if you try and change that system, if you try and top down, clean up that system, you're accused not of trying to fix the trains, but of hating trains and hating poor people or hating whatever else. And this is why I think the sort of anti-civil service thing really speaks to me

the most because I look at the Amtrak stuff and I think like there needs to be a lot more people in jail. You should not be able to just lose $500 million of public money. I don't know. Saj, what do you make of this story? I know that you follow this stuff. I mean, it's especially depressing when you consider the fact that that Northeast corridor is arguably the most well-connected region in the country, right? I mean, this is like the pinnacle of American public transportation is Bosniwash, and it is just completely decayed. And I don't know, it's depressing too, because it's like, it feels kind of hopeless when you think about how many people have really like an economic incentive to do nothing. I mean,

the perennial example is like California's high speed rail, which we've talked about a lot. And just, you know, it's just a money pit, like nothing's ever going to get done. No one even thinks it's going to get built. I think at this point, like it's just, you know, every few years they'll sort of like hand wave over a few more hundred million dollars and nothing happens. And I sort of, I don't know, I feel I don't want to become cynical because I'd like to think that we could still, you know, build things that can happen in other countries. I mean, I was just in France last week and like, you know, in in the south of france just not a very well-funded part of the country and they're doing like you know massive refurbishments on the trains um did witness some theft on the train but like it was

running very well and on time uh and you know it's like it does feel um like there is this kind of you know weird just intractable uh rot at the heart of our government and i don't know i i don't know what save and i know we talked about this last week a little bit but like what save some kind of you know really crazy rebel like political revolution would get us out of this i don don't know. Like a new project, perhaps? Maybe one next year. Yeah. People usually forget that a lot of the New York's infrastructure was built by private companies.

So the Pennsylvania Railroad Company built the original Penn Station. They used to have to take ferries from Jersey City and go into the city. So like, we'll just build our own train station. So if you look at the immaculate original Penn Station, they built that. The subway was private company. So if you go on the east and west side, you notice they're like kind of different sized cars

because they're different companies. They're private companies that eventually became the MTA, which is now more government rot. So like, I always keep saying for like a city like New York, I go like, I wish there was like a boring company here who would just like, look, we're gonna build the whole new tunnels because it costs a billion dollars

just to build a mile of track in new york city we can't do that we can't build to the upper east side right now into east harlem you know they said you can't and then i think like when you give me a price like okay a billion dollars for a mile of of new subway that's crazy but also we just had a trillion dollar infrastructure plan and where the fuck did that money go? Like 100 billion from New York City. It's not like they're not spending billions of dollars. Like it's unlimited money on some level, but it's not put into this. I think the real problem is that you have two parties in America, one of whom believes

ostensibly in using the government to do things. And the other, which rejects that the republicans reject that conceptually so you don't in europe you have multiple parties who all believe in like the concept of public transportation and public education and things and so it's not just one that's demanding stuff and one that's like no no more spending um i think if you had both of the parties sort of on board conceptually with the transit they'd be holding each other accountable maybe but i don't even know um i really don't know i think it's like you need some kind of robert moses to come in here with entrenched crazy amounts of political power that you just an ability to sort of navigate a system to make things happen i think um cost of

labor is really expensive like a lot of that comes down to i was looking at the uh what is it the second avenue subway line backstory that is straight up fraud there's just people being paid who are not working i think the mob's involved so i gotta maybe be quiet about that because i'm gonna try to die um i think that's also i got people dming me over the trash can and stuff they were like the reason this is actually happening is because adams is fighting back against the mob. I don't know anything about that again. Do not Tony Suprem on me. In fact,

if the mob kept the crime down, I would not go on. I'm not coming after you guys. Please do not kill me. But I would like the trains to run on time. Riley, what do you think about the trains yeah it's just it's a clear example of like bureaucracy just not functioning

well and so that's why it's so peculiar when they push back at the notion of dismantling the bureaucracy it's like we have visual evidence of it not functioning well. So why is it such a big deal that we would want to dismantle it? It makes no sense to me. We are having a conversation just about bureaucracy, and no one really wants to be clear about that for some reason. I think the Republicans, because it's not a sexy thing to be like, I hate bureaucracy. And the Democrats, because maybe they don't want to admit that Trump's over the target. It's that phrase of like, that's why they're really freaking out.

It's the bureaucracy stuff. Like, that's really the one thing that I am certain he, who knows what he's going to do in office, but from his rhetoric, the one, the through line is like, get rid of those people. And I don't know. If that happened in every corner of the country, I would not hate it. Eric, thoughts? Because I don't, I mean, you guys, corner of the country, I would not hate it. Eric, thoughts? Because I don't, I mean, you guys,

you got Eric here, Riley here, Matt here. I don't know how long we're going to have you in the pod. I think you should come back more, but like give us something. Give us a goodbye. Okay. So I'm obsessed with trains, possibly more than Mike. You're one of the train autists.

I am. Let's go. Over July 4th weekend, I took a 17-hour train ride overnight on Amtrak. It was about 2 AM. I couldn't sleep, which was fine. I was listening to an audio book. And 2 AM, the train stops. And they actually... So first of all, let me back up. Trains are aesthetically core feature of the United States. The Amtrak would stop once an hour for a 10 minutes smoke break, which I thought was just amazing. Everyone got out, and aesthetically core feature of the United States. The Amtrak would stop once an hour

for a 10-minute smoke break, which I thought was just amazing. Everyone got out. We shared cigarettes. Hell yeah. At that point, like 10 at night. It was amazing. Fast forward to two in the morning.

The train stops. There's no station. We're not stopped at a station. And then I'm like, yo, what's going on? Like, oh, the train ahead of us derailed. And I'm only thinking now when we're talking about infrastructure like it didn't even bother me or seem like out of touch or like out of out of place so the train like derailed at night uh but that probably shouldn't

be happening like that should probably be that's like the opening pages of atlas shrugged 100 just things shutting down and nobody knowing why or being shocked about it. Yeah, so anyway, it was crazy. I didn't think it was crazy at the time, but looking back, it's crazy. We end up, get started, and we had another six hours in our journey and went fine. But we need something like Amtrak to survive.

I just hope they can maybe pull off something like the Brightline, just privatize it. Well, apparently Brightline is going from Nevada. Exactly, that's what I think. It's going is it san diego to vegas now i think i saw there's might be la that's amazing i mean let's see yeah we'll see we'll see if that happens i think it's just at this point it's you have the government getting in the way of things and then you have anytime something starts to work this small minority of very loud people who just get mad at the i think the concept of things working it's like doesn't correspond with their their framework

for the world or something and they freak out about it and they tend to shut a lot of things down we got to resist that man that's cancer i want cool train i really do i want to be able to i want to be able to ride directly from san Francisco to New York on an extremely fast futuristic type train that has a sleep-in car and a bar cart. And I'm journaling over Manhattan as I pass through the mountains. And there are some mysterious, sultry strangers in the corner smoking a cigarette. That's the future that I want. And that I deserve. I think we all deserve it

we're gonna fight for it we're gonna see you back here next week maybe we'll talk about trains again maybe not i don't know uh maybe biden will be out of the office by the out of the race by then we'll see um thanks for watching subscribe or die just subscribe later