Pod Save America - Trump Comes for the Judges
Episode Date: March 21, 2025With a Republican Congress bending to Trump’s every whim, the judicial branch is the last check on his power—and now he, Elon, and the MAGA regime have decided to wage war against it. Meanwhile, T...rump wants to ax the Department of Education and is going after colleges he doesn’t like. Jon and Dan break down Trump’s latest (probably illegal) moves, check in with the DOGE-bags, and dig into Trump’s broader effort to dismantle the federal government. Then they dive into a new 2024 post-mortem from Blue Rose Research, revealing who voted—and why.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
On today's show we'll talk about Donald Trump's probably unlawful order to kill the Department of Education
and his move to starve colleges of funding
that have political views he doesn't like.
Doge is busy making it harder for seniors
to get their social security, which seems efficient,
and they literally staged an armed invasion
of the US Institute of Peace.
We'll get to that wild story. And because we're nerds,
we're going to dive into the election post-mortem from David Shore and Blue Rose Research,
which is notable because it includes 26 million survey responses. So lots of data to dig through.
But first, now that we have a Republican Congress that seemingly exists only to do whatever Trump
tells them to do, the last remaining check on the president's power is the judicial branch, which Trump
and Elon and the MAGA regime are now going to war with.
So for several weeks now, the president's billionaire top advisor has been using his
social media platform to call for the impeachment of judges that rule against the Trump administration. But the situation escalated last week when James Boesberg,
the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court, tried to block Trump from jailing people
in a foreign prison without due process, an order that the Trump regime partly
ignored, arguing that some of the flights were already over international waters
when the ruling came down. The MAGA position is apparently that the president should
be able to lock up whoever he wants in an El Salvador mega prison run by a
brutal dictator so long as he tells us they're a threat to America. We just have
to take his word for it. So one of Trump's minions in Congress, Brandon Gill, introduced
articles of impeachment against Judge Boesberg. Trump himself also called for
the judge's impeachment and here's what he said when asked about it by Laura
Ingram this week. Many people have called for his impeachment, the
impeachment of this judge. I don't know who the judge is but he's radical left.
He was Obama appointed. We have very bad judges,
and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed.
I think they, I think at a certain point,
you have to start looking at,
what do you do when you have a rogue judge?
The judge that we're talking about, he's,
you look at his other rulings.
I mean, ruling's unrelated, but having to do with me,
he's a lunatic.
You have local judges, local federal judges,
local judges period, and DAs and prosecutors,
DAs, state attorney generals, attorney generals
that wanna really take over.
I think some of it's for the publicity.
They love the publicity.
All of a sudden they're on the front page
of every newspaper, but they have no right to be.
So we are only about 60 days into Trump's second term and we are in a very dark place already.
So dark we even got this highly unusual statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts
this week. Quote, for more than two centuries it has been established that impeachment is not an
appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.
The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.
What do you think?
John Roberts, welcome to the resistance.
I mean, good job, John Roberts.
Not a sentence we say very often on this podcast.
Yeah.
The fact of the statement is very notable, right?
And I will say that the statement was,
like there was a lot of sort of like criticism online
that he never mentioned Trump's name.
But then when I actually went and read it,
it's actually a lot less mealy mouth than I assumed
and John Roberts is pretty mealy mouthed in a lot of ways.
And so to his credit here,
and I think the statement probably speaks
to what we're gonna see from John Roberts
over the course of the next few years here,
which is trying to walk this fine line
between defending the independence of the judiciary,
and preserving his legacy, right?
He has overseen the greatest drop in trust
in the Supreme Court in its history
during his period of time as Chief Justice,
while not going so far as to poke the bear
to the point where Trump will outright defy in order,
or even begin to radicalize people
against the Supreme Court.
Because if Republicans stop liking the Supreme Court,
no one's gonna like the Supreme Court,
because they already turned off a whole bunch
of Democrats with everything they have done,
but most notably the Dab's decision.
We should also say this about Judge Boasberg.
He was elevated to the DC Circuit Court by Obama,
but he was not appointed by Obama. That is incorrect from Trump, from the White House,
everyone, every Republican has been saying that. He's a George W. Bush appointee. Some of the
things Boasberg has done, he dismissed Trump's tax return lawsuit so that we couldn't see Trump's
tax returns. He ordered the release of Hillary's emails, limited grand jury material disclosure in Trump's classified documents case. So not exactly
Impeach, maybe we should impeach him. Not exactly a radical left lunatic. He used to be the head of
the FISA court, which is the court that approves surveillance warrants. So this is not some lunatic
leftist. So the White House and Republicans in Congress,
they have to know that they don't have anywhere close
to the votes needed to impeach anyone, let alone a judge.
You need 67 votes in the Senate to convict.
So why do you think they keep pushing this?
Like, is the hope that the constant threats
and accusations are just gonna undermine the legitimacy
of the judicial system, is that the constant threats and accusations are just gonna undermine the legitimacy
of the judicial system, is that the play?
Do you think you're sure they know that it takes 67 votes?
I mean, I don't think Elon does.
He's been tweeting about it forever,
and I think he's just a dumb shit
who has not spent a lot of time studying up
on the government he's trying to destroy, but that's him.
Yeah, so I think Elon,
maybe some of these members of Congress,
there is a collection of people with broken brains who spend too much time online
of time reading books who don't know it.
But there, Stephen Miller was tweeting about this.
They like people, those people do know.
And I think the goal here is pretty clear.
It is to set the stage to till the ground
for the moment when Trump wants to defy a court order.
Because he has not done that yet.
He said he's not gonna do it. And he does not have that yet. He has said he's not going to do it.
And he does not have the public on his side.
There is a Washington Post Ipsos poll
that shows that 84% of voters, including strong majorities
of Republicans, believe that if a court declares something
the Trump administration is doing is illegal, that Trump must
abide by that order.
Only 11% think he should defy it.
And so if you want to get to the point where you can actually
do that, you have to do what they did to the media,
do what they're doing in the universities.
You have to destroy trust in that institution
and this is the beginning part of that process.
We should say that just before we recorded,
Judge Boesberg just accused the government
of evading its obligations and moved closer
to holding them in contempt for not explaining, they still
haven't explained why they didn't abide by his order to turn the planes around.
So he is not backing down with all these threats, but he is, he's pretty angry at the government
and he, I think he should be.
This is the most, the Trump administration thinks that they are on
solid ground on this one because it's a, they think, you know, who really wants
Venezuelan gangs in the United States.
But the more we learn about this and the more information that's come out, not because of the government, but because of reporting and because some of these people's families have and lawyers have learned about where they are. It is shocking, shocking what is happening. The New York Times reports that
Trump folks believe that the Alien Enemies Act, which is what Trump invoked to do this,
allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant. So currently immigration agents
without a warrant can basically just knock on
your door and ask to come in and that's all they can do unless they have a warrant because of the
Fourth Amendment. But Trump and the government are basically now saying, well, Alien Enemies Act,
if we think that there's, you know, a Venezuelan gang in there and we've labeled them a domestic
terrorist organization, then we can just come, you know, have send
federal agents in federal ICE agents into people's house without a warrant, which now
you may say, okay, well, if I'm a US citizen, then they're not going to come to my house.
Well, how, how is anyone going to know?
How's anyone going to know?
They can show up at a US citizens house and say, they suspect that Trendy Aragwa is hiding
in your house and then take you away.
And who's going to know since we're not doing due process
anymore, we're just putting people on planes,
sending them to El Salvador and locking them up
for indefinite periods of time.
It is just truly astounding that they've taken all
of the checks and balances out of the system, right?
You don't need to go to a judge to get a warrant to go in the house.
And the person you get in the house, you do not have to present to a judge before
you send them out of the country. And if the Trump administration can be so fucking stupid
as to accidentally cancel an Ebola prevention program, do we really think they're not going
to make some mistakes on the people they're deporting? And we're already hearing stories
of these. There are people waking up in an El Salvadorian mega prison
that is famous for how horrible the conditions are,
infamous for how horrible the conditions are,
who were not members of these gangs, right?
Who should not have been subject to this
because the point is you stop in front of a judge
and a judge helps verify that this is the person
that the Trump administration says it is.
And then if they are a member of this gang
or if there's another reason why they should be deported,
then they're deported.
But now this is just, it is, I mean,
it is fully and totally authoritarian.
It runs against everything that our system was set up for.
They grabbed this guy who's a professional soccer player
in Venezuela.
This guy showed up at two protests, you know, to protest Maduro, the dictator in Venezuela. This guy showed up at two protests, you know, to protest Maduro, the dictator
in Venezuela, and Maduro's regime tortured him, and he got away, he came to the United States,
he applied for asylum, and they mistakenly think his tattoo is Tren de Aragua
when it's actually a fucking soccer tattoo.
And so they got the tattoo artist
to like sign an affidavit to say this.
And so the family was waiting for an immigration hearing
and all this, because the guy had been held for a while
and then just woke up one day
and was just taken to this El Salvadoran prison.
So a man who was tortured by the Maduro regime
is now being held indefinitely in a prison in El Salvador
because they mistakenly think he's a gang member.
And then when DHS was asked about this,
they're like, well, that's one tattoo.
And there was also a social media post
where he had a gang sign and everyone's like,
no, that's just a, like a thumbs up, like soccer sign that they have.
I mean, it's fucking ridiculous.
This is what's happening.
No hearing, no evidence, no nothing.
It's not good.
It's not good.
You see Elon's maxing out on donations to Republicans who support impeaching judges.
Of course he is right.
The guy loves to buy a politician. Giving federally regulated campaign
contributions is a pretty inefficient way for Elon Musk to flex his muscle because he can only
get the same amount of people like you and I or anyone else out there. But it just, it creates
this incentive structure for more people to act like morons and support these impeachments.
Like Brandon Gill, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So you're going to get more people like that because they want the money,
they want the support, they want the attention that come to me associated with Elon.
And that is one thing Elon Musk is very good about doing.
It is leverage his money for attention to influence.
And this is another way in which he's doing that.
He's also spent well over $10 million
on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race
that could flip the state's liberal majority
back to a conservative majority.
So early voting is now underway in that race
and the election is April 1st.
Dan, you wanna talk about the stakes here?
Yeah, so if you live in Wisconsin,
this is an absolutely essential race
because the balance of the Supreme Court
is once again in question.
You may remember not that long ago,
we talked about in the show a lot,
there was a race to a couple years ago,
the Janet Proosiewicz,
who I think you guys even campaigned with in Wisconsin,
won an election, gave the liberals a majority.
These are technically nonpartisan races,
but the parties have lined up behind the candidates,
Democrats behind Susan Crawford,
and Elon Musk and Republicans behind Brad Schimel.
And when the liberals have the majority now,
we're able to undo one of the nation's most unfair
gerrymandering systems and make it so that we have more
free and fair elections.
Because Wisconsin is, as we all know,
is the quintessential battleground state,
but Republicans were dominating the legislature
and the congressional delegation because of that.
And going forward, the Wisconsin Supreme Court
will hear cases on things like abortion,
personal freedoms, civil rights.
And if you think about this
from the perspective of people who aren't in Wisconsin,
many of the big cases that are about
how the 2026 and 2028 elections are gonna be conducted
will come before that court.
So you're either gonna have a majority of people
who abide by the rule of law
or a Supreme Court majority
that is bought and paid for by Elon Musk.
And just even beyond that for everyone else is this is the first major
election in a battleground state since Trump won.
This is Elon Musk is on the ballot here.
He has spent $10 million.
The Democrats and the Crawford campaign have made Elon Musk a centerpiece of it.
Brett Schimel has not committed to recusing himself of any cases involving
Elon Musk come up before the court,
even though Elon Musk has spent
already $10 million to elect him.
And this is a-
And Tesla is currently suing the state of Wisconsin.
So the case may come to Brad Schimel, yeah.
And if you wanna send a message to Elon Musk
and to every Republican in the country
about how toxic it is to be associated
with what Elon Musk is doing,
the best way to do that right now,
the best way to inflict some measure of political accountability
on Elon Musk and Donald Trump is to win this election
in Wisconsin on April 1.
Yeah, and it's close, as they always are in Wisconsin.
So it's going to be a really tight race.
In order to tip the race, we're sending John Lovett
to Wisconsin this weekend.
He's doing six kickoffs.
And he's going to be around Madison on Saturday and Milwaukee on Sunday. to Wisconsin this weekend. He's doing six kickoffs.
He's gonna be around Madison on Saturday
and Milwaukee on Sunday.
So go see Love It if you're in Wisconsin.
And he'll be with Ben Wicklar.
So just, you know, he's chaperoned.
On this trip, yes, to be clear, he's chaperoned.
Yeah, we don't send him to Wisconsin by himself.
And you can also go to vote, saveamerica.com slash Wisconsin.
And there's gonna be, there's plenty to do
as we get to election day here.
Also, Tommy and I are not going to Wisconsin,
but we are going to Norco, California this weekend, Dan.
That is that Norcal, California.
That is Norco, California.
Norco, yeah, it's about an hour and a half from.
I was like, stay on your side of the grapevine, okay?
It's about an hour and a half, uh, east of LA.
We're going to be with Ro Khanna, uh, who's doing a town hall in the district
of a house Republican who refuses to hold the town hall.
Ken Calvert.
We've already been to Ken Calvert's district once when we were trying to
elect Will Rollins in this last cycle.
Uh, so we're heading back this time with Ro Khanna.
Rose doing, uh, much like Bernie and AOC are doing these town halls,
Ro is doing a series of town halls as well.
So that'll be fun.
We're going out to see some folks.
So come say hi if you're in Norco,
or come out to Norco if you're in LA.
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Big day at the White House on Thursday.
Trump signed an order eliminating
the Department of Education,
which has already seen its workforce halved.
Promises made, promises kept.
The AP notes that the department handles $1.6 trillion
in federal student loans and billions of dollars in programs for colleges and school districts.
It also accounts for roughly 14% of public school budgets.
The White House claims that none of the department's services or benefits will be disrupted,
though they aren't saying how they'll do that without, you know, an actual department with actual employees.
Here's what Trump had to say at the signing.
Today, we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making.
In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the federal Department
of Education.
And it sounds strange, doesn't it?
Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it.
And everybody knows it's right.
And the Democrats know it's right, and I hope they're going to be voting for it,
because ultimately it may come before them. But everybody knows it's right.
It's doing us no good. We want to return our students to the states.
Look, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. I have to tell you, I give them a lot of credit, China's top 10.
And so we can't now say that bigness
is making it impossible to educate
because China is very big.
What the hell is he talking?
Bigness.
So as you heard him there,
they're acknowledging that they'll need Congress
to officially shutter the department,
though they certainly don't have 60 votes
in the Senate for that.
Republicans have already said they'll introduce legislation
right after Trump's announcement.
What do you think happens here?
What do you make of all this?
As you mentioned, they're not passing this bill, right?
That is not, the Congress is not gonna act on this.
To put that in some perspective about how hard it is
to shut down the part of education,
Ronald Reagan ran on it.
It was a big part of his campaign platform.
After winning more than 500 electoral votes in 1984,
he couldn't get any traction on it.
So it has not become any more popular since then.
The economist YouGov ran this interesting poll
where they asked people about the part of education.
Do you want to expand it, keep it the same,
reduce it or eliminate it?
The plurality was expanded at 39%. They combined keep it the same and expand it, keep it the same, reduce it or eliminate it. The plurality was expanded at 39%.
The combined keep it the same and expand it was over 60
and only 17% of people wanted to eliminate it.
There is no, there is absolutely no appetite
for this anywhere.
What it is, is it's just, this is sort of like
the birthright citizenship EO he did.
It's he can say, he's a promise is made,
promise is kept and he did this and then it goes nowhere.
But it does sort of create
the predicate for Musk and Doge to go in there
and eliminate it even further, right?
Like maybe the building will still stand
and there will still be an office that Linda McMahon
will have the opportunity to go to periodically,
but the core functions, absent some judicial intervention
are gonna be gutted, and it's gonna have
devastating effects.
Yeah, I mean, you know, they keep,
I think they know how unpopular it would be
to sort of cut the funding or disrupt benefits and services.
You got student loans in there, you got the education,
the federal education department is responsible
for Title I funds for the state.
Title I funding is for public schools
in disadvantaged communities. So poor working-class families. It's for children
with disabilities. And so you have kids with disabilities, low-income schools, and
all the student loans in the country. And the Trump administration is trying to
say, well, they're either gonna move the distribution of those under other
departments, or they're gonna have a smaller education, what they're either going to move the distribution of those under other departments, or they're going to have a
smaller education or they're going to have, I don't
know what they're going to do, but the idea that
those services are going to be completely
uninterrupted just doesn't square with, um, what
most people in education believe, uh, experts in
education believe and also how the entire Doge process has gone so far.
That's the key point.
Right? Like they might think to themselves genuinely that they're not going to disrupt
any services benefits, but they keep firing everyone who knows anything about education.
It's like to what end, right? Is that they want a real estate transaction to sell the building?
It's just, this has just, this is a-
They think they're saving so much money
just like getting rid of all those employees
and they're not because that's not where most of the money
that the Department of Education oversees is coming from.
It's just, it's all so stupid.
Like this is a way to check off something
that was on the wish list long before Project 2025.
It was a big part of Project 2025.
This has been, Newt Gingrich ran on this in the nineties with a contract for
America. This has been a Republican pipe dream. And this
is where you get the chance to say they did it. Even if
they're not accomplishing the specific goal, because they do
need Congress for it, they can accomplish the goal in spirit,
which is to gut public education in this country.
It seems like a good fight for Democrats to take on. What do
you think?
I very much think so. In fact, if you're a message box subscriber,
you have in your inbox right now,
a full messaging guide on this.
If you are not a message box subscriber,
you're lost, I guess.
Well then, I don't know what you've been doing.
So I go through a whole bunch of the polling on a bunch
of the message guidance,
but let me give the short version
of how I think Democrats should talk about this, which is
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are shutting down the part of education and gutting
public education to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
The result of this is going to be teachers are laid off more kids in the
class, in the classroom, dilapidated schools, and huge cut to special education
funding, all to pay for tax cuts for the ultra wealthy, like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Like that is how you talk about it.
It is not about cutting individual funding streams.
It is important to say like why they're doing it,
what is gonna happen,
be specific what's gonna happen and who it benefits.
Yeah, it's, I think along with some of the healthcare cuts,
this is gonna be probably
what's gonna piss people off the most,
especially if and when we start getting the stories
about people whose benefits or loans or whatever else
or funding for certain schools was disrupted,
then I think it's really gonna blow up.
There's just a context for limiting the part of education
that does not exist for USAID,
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
or the Institute of Peters we'll talk about in a minute.
People have been talking about this for a very long time,
this country probably has been trying to do it
for a long time.
Voters keep rejecting it time and time again,
and now Trump is doing it unilaterally
at the behest of the world's richest man
in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
And so this is a huge opportunity for Democrats.
It is one of the things that has the best chance of breaking through in the flood
of all the terribleness that's happening.
So, and Trump is also targeting colleges
and universities he doesn't like.
We have mentioned before the $400 million
in federal funding he's threatened to withhold
from Columbia unless the school acquiesces
to the administration's demands,
the deadline for which is Friday,
when you're listening to this. Some of those demands, banning masks because they were used
at the protest last year, giving campus law enforcement wider latitude to arrest, quote,
agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment, and placing the
school's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies in, quote, academic
receivership, which means it's no longer overseen by the actual faculty who teach within it.
Now Trump is also going after his own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where
the administration froze around $175 million in federal funds because of a trans athlete
and swimmer, Leah Thomas, who competed and graduated in 2022.
The White House rapid response account posted a clip
of Fox News announcing the move with the words,
promises made, promises kept.
Given that Leah Thomas graduated three years ago,
is this promises made, promises kept,
or just another way to own the libs
that's gonna end up just hurting a lot of students
at the University of Pennsylvania?
I mean, it's clearly punitive.
It's clearly not based in any sort of substance or reality.
And I think we have to view it in the context
of the larger conservative project
to systematically and strategically take out
any institution that they view as an opposition
to right-wing thinking in this country, right?
It's why they spent so much time
to try to take down unions, right?
Passing right to work laws. It is why they have gone much time to try to take down unions, passing right to work laws.
It is why they have gone after the media, which they view
as incorrectly in my view, but view
as an ally of liberals and Democrats,
in part because they are fact checking and calling out
the hypocrisy of what's on the right.
And universities, they've always believed
to be a breeding ground of liberal thought.
And so they are trying to destroy them.
They are trying to cowl them into acting a certain way
and they are trying to gut their funding.
And it is part of a bigger project
and we have to view it in that context, I think.
Alan Blinder at the New York Times reported on Thursday
about layoffs, hiring freezes, lab shutdowns
at universities across the country.
What'd you make of that story?
I mean, this is the end result of what they're doing.
I thought was notable in that story was that
they wrote that academia was caught flat-footed.
I was like, oh, the one time the famously nimble academia
was asleep at the wheel.
I mean, there is a longer term challenge.
There is more appetite for what Trump is doing here.
And it's not just because of the protests around Gaza
and the controversy of how a lot of universities handle that
and what some of the presidents said before Congress.
Pew, this was in the New York Times,
Pew tracks how people feel about the impact
of various institutions on American society.
And they asked people at universities.
And in 2012, only 21% of Americans
thought that universities had a negative impact on our society.
And by last year, it was up to 45%.
And that's not just Trump or Republicans.
That is the high cost of college.
It is student debt crushing people and this idea
that people have been sold on this idea
that the best pathway to success is a four year
college education and that, but you're going to leave there
with so much debt that it is going to crush you financially.
And universities have done a very bad job of both
in the short term around Trump and the time before that of
one dealing with the sort of indefensible rise in tuition
but in sort of explaining the role they play
and because they are these nonprofit institutions,
some of whom like the most famous ones,
who have billions of dollars in endowment,
but then take taxpayer money.
And what we have not explained and they have not explained,
and maybe people before Trump did not explain well,
is that these universities are the laboratories
for America, right?
They're the ones doing the research that is helping us, you know,
build new technologies, discover new medicines, figure out how to fight disease.
And we have it in the,
in the universities haven't made that case and the,
and people supporting that sort of R and D funding have not made that case.
Well,
and the two problems you just mentioned are undoubtedly going to get worse
because of what the Trump administration has already done.
Universities have not kept tuition down,
they haven't done a good job.
And so, you know, therefore we are subsidizing
higher costs at universities through financial aid,
student loans, and all the other stuff
that the federal government does
to help students attend school.
Meanwhile, the costs keep rising and rising and rising.
So that's a huge problem, but gutting a bunch of
federal funding at universities.
Uh, do we think that's going to make tuition go down?
That's going to help cost at college.
Well, they're not interested in it.
They want fewer people to go to college.
Right.
And then the other, and then the big one that you
mentioned is between what the Trump administration
is doing to colleges and universities, between what
they're doing to the NIH between what they're doing to the NIH,
what they're doing to other public health agencies,
other agencies that are responsible for medical research,
for technological research.
I mean, it's not...
Look, part of this is you've got research here
and innovation and medical research and scientific research.
There's gonna be a huge brain drain
and a lot of these scientists and researchers
and experts are going to go to other countries
and other countries are going to develop the
breakthrough technologies and discoveries and
cures that usually happen in the United States.
And the industries and jobs and everything else
is going to go overseas as well.
And we're not going to have them here.
But then there's a broader issue, which is like the United States is the place where a lot of these discoveries happen.
And if they don't happen here, because we're gutting the funding for them,
they're just not going to happen.
And there's like, there's like, it was a, a diabetes study, uh, that was like
a 30 year diabetes study that they just canceled the contract for.
And like that, you're not getting that back. You can't turn this stuff back on that. that was like a 30 year diabetes study that they just canceled the contract for.
And like that, you're not getting that back.
You can't turn this stuff back on.
That like, there was a report right before Trump took office
about how close we were coming to a vaccine
to deal with colorectal cancer.
I thought it was pancreatic, wasn't it?
Or maybe it was both.
I think there was an mRNA for pancreatic cancer.
Well, we can leave all of this in.
But anyway, there was multiple vaccines.
But we're on the cusp of something incredibly important.
All of the progress it's made on Alzheimer's research,
all of that stops and it doesn't start again.
Oh yeah.
And so that's the, as you pointed out,
that is the progress on very specific things
that have tremendous benefit to people in the world
is gonna stop and it's not gonna happen. And then there is sort of the economic impact
in the United States where, you know, these universities,
like in this story, they talk about how they may have
to stop teaching biochemistry at universities
because the labs are funded by research grants.
And if the research grants are not there,
the labs are not there, and then they won't teach that.
And so the next generation of scientists, researchers,
doctors, technologists, all of that is not gonna happen
because of this idiotic, short-sighted effort
from the Trump administration.
And this fixing this is not-
For nothing, this is not saving us much money.
This is not changing bloated budgets
that needed to be changed.
This is just
destroying shit because they don't know what the fuck they're doing. They're going in with the sledgehammer
Elon Musk doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. Doge doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. Donald Trump certainly doesn't know what the fuck he's doing neither is his dumb fucking cabinet and
And like and the saddest part is like we're not gonna know you know
like there's just gonna be these, these studies are gonna go away
and these researchers are gonna lose their jobs.
And we're not gonna know all of the potentially
life-saving discoveries that we lost
like 10 years down the road.
Yeah.
It is deeply depressing.
Cause there's so much in between administrations
can be turned back on, right?
There's tremendous damage in the four years
but you come back in, you can put in new policy,
sign an executive order, pass a new law.
The things that Trump is doing, both to universities
and the federal government itself,
are not things that can be fixed in one four year term.
I know, I keep thinking about the next Democrats running
for president or, you know, God willing,
the next Democratic president.
And there's gonna have to be a massive, nationwide, maybe even global effort to like, try to recruit really good, smart people back into
government and public service and researchers and scientists and medical and just like an experts.
And it's gonna I think it's gonna be really fucking hard too, because again, why are you taking it?
Like, maybe maybe you wanna work
for the next democratic administration,
but what happens when another, a JD Vance
or another Trump comes into office
and then you don't have job security anymore?
Right, like can the next democratic president
bring in a bunch of incredibly talented political appointees
to tackle these problems?
Absolutely, and I suspect that will happen.
There will be a mobilization of the best and the brightest
to come in and do that.
But what about the people who keep the government running
all the time?
The ones who have these jobs in part because of job security.
They can do other things,
but they're in it for public service and they're in it
cause there's a stability in government employment
with good benefits.
You have like, you know what the pay structure is.
You can be there a long time.
And if that security no security will no longer exist,
having those people there is gonna be deeply damaging.
I don't know what we would have done
when we arrived in the White House
if there hadn't been a whole bunch of people
who'd been there for the last three presidencies,
who had been making everything work,
who knew things, who had institutional knowledge.
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Speaking of Doge, let's check in with the Doge bags and Trump's broader effort to destroy
the federal government. Politico reported Wednesday that the Department of Agriculture,
USDA, is stopping millions of dollars worth of deliveries to food banks in at least six states.
Earlier this week, the Social Security Administration announced that you can no
longer apply for benefits or change the account where your benefits are delivered over the phone.
You either have to verify your identity online or go in person to your local Social Security office,
which will be tough because the AP reported
that almost 50 social security offices have shown up
on Doja's list of federal government site closures.
Is this government efficiency at its finest, Dan?
We're just making it harder for seniors
to obtain their social security benefits.
It is Donald Trump waging war on his own voters.
The people are gonna be affected most are the people in the,
in the rural parts of the country where they are not near a social security
office, where, and if they end the,
probably the nearest one just got on that list list of 50,
that's going to get closed and it's going to make it impossible for people to get
their benefits. There was a report today that there was a two hour wait time for
calls right now and a one month waiting period for appointments
in an office that may close sometime soon.
It is truly insane.
And these are the kind of things
that have real political impact.
Congressman Mike Lawler, the Republican,
today put out a statement attacking,
criticizing Trump and Musk for trying to close
the Hudson Valley Social Security Office.
So I think you're gonna see that from a lot of people
because this is where it matters.
This idea that you're gonna make it impossible
for people to access their benefits,
you're gonna make older folks
to have to verify their identity online
as opposed to be able to call,
or I mean, is truly, is deeply damaging
and I think is gonna hurt politically too.
39 million people live in households
without any internet connection.
25% of Americans 65 or older have reported never going online.
So those are social security beneficiaries.
And like you said, the low income areas, rural areas, people with disabilities, people who
just can't get around because they're older, those are going to be the people hurt by this.
And I don't know, maybe Mike Lawler,
cause he's a Republican in good standing,
or we'll do something crazy.
Maybe Mike Lawler will introduce a couple articles
of impeachment against a federal judge,
and then they'll open up the Hudson Valley office,
and they'll close one down in a blue district.
That's probably where we're headed.
I do think this is, I'm sure Democrats are gonna be
all over this one, because every single poll you see
everywhere is, Social Security is like the number one
issue for folks and it's probably, well it's the number
one vulnerability for Republicans and it's probably why
Donald Trump has said over and over again he's not gonna
touch Social Security.
So, hoping that the Democrats jump all over this one.
Go, I mean this is old school, but go to press conferences outside
the social security offices on that list.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Invite some influencers,
we'll make it new age communications,
but go stand in front of them.
Take a vertical video of yourself in front of one,
but go to a social security office.
Bring all your canes.
Yeah.
Go there.
Yes.
Wave them around.
Go from the Tesla dealers to the social security offices. Yes. Wave them around. Go from the Tesla dealers to the social security offices.
Yes.
Right?
Fewer Tesla dealers, more social security offices.
Again, peaceful.
One last Doge item, not so peaceful.
We gotta talk about Doge's armed invasion
of the US Institute of Peace.
This is unfortunately a real story, Dan.
Here's the short version.
Some doge bags gained access to the Institute of Peace on Monday night.
The Institute of Peace, we should let you know, is a nonprofit organization.
It is not part of the executive branch.
It is funded by Congress.
It was founded by Congress, funded by Congress.
It's a nonprofit, but of course it has government money and the job is to, of the
Institute of Peace, is to help resolve conflicts around the world, as the name
suggests. So, but Donald Trump decided we're gonna zero out the Institute of
Peace, a couple other agencies, just like they're doing everywhere else.
Okay, so the Doge bags get access to the Institute of Peace
on Monday night by apparently threatening
the federal contracts for the outside private security firm
that the Institute employed.
This is according to Politico.
Some of the staff at the Institute of Peace
tells the Doge bags that they're trespassing, but then they ignore
the Institute of Peace staffers, the Dogebags, and they, quote, proceeded to walk towards
the gun safe.
Then the Institute of Peace staffers contact D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department on the
trespassers, on the Doge people, but in an alarming twist the police end up
detaining the Institute of Peace's head of security and lawyers instead at the direction of a State
Department flunky who has since been declared the US Institute of Peace's new acting president and
who by that time had shown up with even more doge bags, DC police said in a statement that they were contacted by the US attorney's office, our pal Ed Martin, his office in DC, eagle-eyed Ed,
who's threatening, you know, members of Congress and everyone else. Crazy man.
The Institute then filed an emergency request in court trying to deny Doge access, which Judge Beryl Howell denied,
though she did question Doge's tactics.
Good for her.
Thank you.
She said, quote, this conduct of using law enforcement,
threatening criminal investigation,
and using armed law enforcement
from three different agencies, why?
Just because Doge is in a rush?
Feels like all this could have been handled
in a few emails.
I mean. Hey, could you clear out of the office?
We've zeroed out your budget.
Like what?
Or if they refuse to, like, hey, we're gonna take you
to court then because we believe we can shut your agency
down and you don't think we can.
But we did, like, what did you make of all this?
I mean, just it's truly perfect.
A bunch of tech flunkies arranging an armed invasion
of the Institute of Peace.
I mean, it's just, I mean, they don't have,
probably don't have the authority to shut the thing down.
Like that is, you know, it is not, as you said,
not a part of the executive branch per se,
created by Congress.
And like this sort of like brute force activity
taken on the deep state, ooh, we bullied the Institute of Peace guys. Like this sort of like brute force activity
taking on the deep state, ooh, we bullied the Institute of Peace guys.
It's like bravado.
It's like that'll get you plot hits in MAGA Trump worlds.
And so you'll see more of this absurdity.
Like they seem so tough the way they got the cops
to help them get into the Institute of Peace.
And as opposed to just doing it,
like I guess another way of thinking about this is
there is a right way and a wrong way to do these things.
Even if you disagree,
even no matter what you feel about the value
of the Institute of Peace,
there's a way to go about it.
But they, Elon Musk and Doge will not
and cannot do it the right way,
which constantly keeps hurting their efforts
to do the thing that we disagree with,
because they keep getting stopped in court,
and it keeps being messier and dumber than it needs to be,
but this is just like the extreme example of that.
Yeah, and it's, what's really, I mean, it is,
there's a lot of humor to that story
because it's so fucking absurd.
What's really worrying about it is like,
so now we have the Department of Homeland Security
and ICE agents deciding that they don't need a warrant
anymore and that they can now, you know,
go in and look for Trende Aragwa
in any house that they want.
We are flying people to prisons in El Salvador
with no due process.
We have a US attorney in DC
who is now sending FBI agents and DC police
in to detain these staffers at this agency
who just didn't wanna let a bunch of people in
to shut them down.
And what kind of like government
bureaucrat or person at a nonprofit is going to want
to live in Washington, DC.
And you start thinking like, oh yeah,
that's what they're trying to do here.
They're trying to make the city Trump city now.
Yeah, to make everything so uncomfortable
that people will just leave.
And they've had great success at that.
They've had great success.
And like the number of examples now
of using the power of the state,
force, police, FBI, like just against Americans,
against immigrants, against people they don't like,
it's very scary.
We are so far past right now
what even some of the most hyperbolic
arguments about what Trump would do are,
we are right there.
Yep, yep.
And it is, I don't know if it's like,
part of it is the,
I know part of it's the media environment.
I keep wondering why there's not more alarm every day.
And I don't know if it's just some people are like,
I can't tune in all the time.
I can't get worried about this all the time.
If it's just that people don't know,
if people aren't hearing about it all,
if Democrats aren't fighting hard enough
or making enough noise, like I don't know what it is,
but it feels oddly quiet for the level of insanity
that's taking place right now.
I've been thinking a lot about,
there are a million reasons for this.
I think we, as a society, like political stakeholders,
the media, just average everybody,
people lack the vocabulary and the imagination
to talk about what's happening here,
because it's not something that we ever thought
would happen in this country.
And so we just don't know how to do it.
Like we're in almost every other country in the world
has been on the, has faced this down at some point
or they've gone through it, right?
Where they've been at, they've had an authoritarian regime
where they've been a dictatorship
and they've come out of that with so much reform.
That's never happened here.
It's never been a fear here.
And since the very beginning.
And so we just, we can't like like just, we can't comprehend it.
And like I got a New York, like I'm not complaining
about the New York Times headlines here,
but like as an example, when Trump gave that insane speech
at the Department of Justice, where he goes
to the Department of Justice, a place where presidents
almost never go and gives a speech calling out his enemies
while surrounded by his self-appointed law enforcement hacks.
And it was like, Trump gives unusual, unusually fiery speech
at the Department of Justice or something like that.
Just like, we can't, we don't,
no one knows how to talk about it.
But there is a media environment change here too.
Like I would think about what it felt like in 2018,
when people became aware that Trump was putting kids
in cages in detention centers.
And the outrage, it dominated the conversation. I mean, I was on a book tour at the time.
I lost all my interviews, right?
Cause that's all I didn't want to talk about,
for good reason, right?
Like that was the right choice.
That became the dominant national story.
Now-
Think about the first week,
the first week when people flooded the airports
because of the Muslim ban.
Well, that's the response, right?
That's another point is that there was a way
in which the quote-unquote resistance was involved
in attention-getting tactics that did drive some of these things, which is not happening now to the
same extent. But just think about everything you said about what's happening in El Salvador.
If that had happened in a 2017-2018 media environment, it would be a dominant conversation,
but nothing can be a dominant conversation right now
in the same way.
And that's not just because Trump is a more effective
flood zone strategy now,
it's because just the world has changed so much
and people are living in these algorithmically designed
bubbles, the power and reach and influence of the people
who could drive the conversation on a mass scale
just does not, is just massively diminished
from where it was years ago.
So we are, I mean, this is how this happens, right?
This is exactly how it happens,
is that people aren't paying enough attention
and the people who are opposing it
are not drawing enough attention
or grabbing people by the lapels to make them pay attention.
And we are headed someplace very dangerous.
I've been wondering if this also partly explains
sort of the odd polling numbers for Trump that we've been wondering if this also partly explains sort of the odd polling numbers for Trump
that we've been getting, which is he's so underwater
on the economy, and it's like the one issue
that's dragging him down the most,
and on a lot of other issues
in his overall approval rating,
it's not as low as you would think.
And I wonder if it's because the economy and inflation
and cost of living is like the one issue that people are experiencing every day, And I wonder if it's because the economy and inflation
and cost of living is like the one issue
that people are experiencing every day,
even if they're not tuning into the news
and the Trump show version two.
And all the other stuff is just not breaking through
as much because people aren't paying as close attention.
And because the media environment is so diffuse.
Yeah, your news consumption is not correlated
with your exposure to high prices, right?, your news consumption is not correlated with your exposure to high prices.
Right, like your news consumption is correlated
with whether you know about what's happening in El Salvador
or shutting down the Department of Education
or any of the other 12 terrible things
we're gonna talk about on this pod in future pods.
But whether you can follow no news,
you still have to go to the store
and buy eggs, gas, food.
You have to pay your rent, your mortgage, et cetera.
Yeah. And that's always been true, right? Like have to pay your rent, your mortgage, et cetera. Yeah.
And that's always been true, right?
Like even before we entered this fucked up era,
you can't, the one issue that you cannot make go away
is the economy, whether that's layoffs,
high unemployment or inflation.
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Okay, before we get to the new 2024 postmortem, it's time for our weekly corrupt date. What do you think Dan? That's pretty good. I think that's pretty good.
We've been through a lot of options here and I think that's well done.
That gave us corrupt date. Commerce Secretary Howard Letnick, who's become a real hype man for the
administration's griftiest stunts, was focused this week on the only commerce
that matters, the kind that puts more money in the pockets of the world's
richest man. Here's Lutnick on Jesse Waters with a free ad for Elon and free
stock tips for all of us.
Buy Tesla. It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this
cheap. It'll never be this cheap again
People are gonna be dreaming of today and Jesse Waters and thinking gosh. I should have bought
Elon Musk's stock Elon Musk is probably the best person to bet on I've ever met
He's building the coolest robots you've ever seen go online and look up optimus
It is the coolest thing you've ever seen. Go online and look up Optimus. It is the coolest thing you've ever seen.
We're all going to be buying robots.
They're going to cost about $30,000.
You're going to be buying a Tesla robot and anybody who doesn't buy a Tesla robot is going
to be silly.
No one's going to be key in anything.
Here's a tough headline from Axios that followed Lutnick's appearance.
Tesla falls after commerce secretary recommends buying stock.
That's a good headline.
What do you think?
Are we all idiots if we don't buy $30,000 Tesla robots?
It feels like there's a real chance
those robots are gonna turn on people
and I don't want them in my house.
You know, you got $30,000 laying around,
you buy a Tesla robot. Buy some stock.
The commerce secretary telling people
to buy an individual stock.
Everyone else has to specifically put in,
lead their tweets about it.
This is not financial advice.
And here he is, an official of the federal government
who is theoretically an expert in the economy,
just pitching the stock of the president's biggest donor.
I mean, his boss was hawking Teslas on the White House lawn.
So it's kind of all fits.
Did you see that Pam Bondi announced
quote, severe charges against violent Tesla arsonists,
who she's accusing of domestic terrorism
now that vandalism against Tesla dealerships
is domestic terrorism?
Up to 20 years in prison for lighting Teslas on fire.
I have three thoughts on this.
One, don't light Teslas on fire.
Don't light anything on fire.
No.
No.
Arsonist is bad.
Two, I don't know.
That's our squishy centrist opinion.
That's right.
Make it the episode title.
Arsonist is bad.
Two, arsonists should go to jail,
although I'm not sure this is technically domestic terrorism.
And three, there is a bigger thing here
in that you see it in the Lutnick comments,
you see it on Trump selling Teslas in the White House lawn
is that the world's richest man spent $30 million
to get this president elected.
Now he has basically bought a government, right?
Where you have the commerce secretary pitching his stock,
the president is pitching his cars,
and the attorney general of the United States,
the chief law enforcement officer, going and the Attorney General of the United States, the Chief Law Enforcement Officer,
going before the cameras to threaten the people
who are protesting at his dealerships.
Specifically, she's not doing that for other things.
She specifically, she like, he has his own government
to do his bidding, and it is truly wild.
It's a good corrupt date.
All right, so we're finally getting some higher quality data about what happened in the 2024 election,
at least higher quality than exit polls.
David Shore and the folks at Blue Rose Research combined precinct level data from across the
country with the 26 million survey responses they got from voters in 2024 to give us a
pretty clear picture of who voted and why.
Here are a few of the big takeaways.
None of them too surprising,
but they really just sort of confirm
some of the initial findings that we have been going over
over the last couple of months.
Number one, Hispanic, Asian, young voters, immigrants,
and politically disengaged voters swung towards Trump
by significant
margins.
In fact, politically disengaged voters swung towards Trump by so much that if everyone
who stayed home in 2024 had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.
Number two, Trump's favorability rating on Election Day 2024 was almost exactly the same as it was on election day 2020.
The difference was that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were much less popular.
And number three, the issues most important to voters were the issues where trust in Democrats were lowest.
Cost of living, the economy, inflation, taxes, and spending. The next
most important issue to voters was health care, which is the first issue where
Democrats were more trusted than Republicans. In fact, the only five issues
that were ranked important by more than 50% of voters where Dems were also
trusted more than Republicans were health care, poverty, housing, mental health, and Medicare.
And by the way, except for Medicare,
maybe mental health, healthcare,
they weren't trusted that much more than Republicans.
And Republicans are trusted more on Social Security
than Democrats.
Yes, oh, thank you.
Yes.
All right, where do you wanna start?
So we can get into the details here,
and I would encourage everyone to read the whole study.
I will stipulate at the beginning here that
this report has some controversy in democratic circles.
There are people who disagree
with some of the conclusions from it.
This is one report, right?
We're gonna get other reports.
I think David's a pretty smart guy
and he's been pretty pressing on a lot of things,
but we're looking at one report here.
My takeaway from this is it adds some granular detail
to what we've been talking about since the election.
But one way to think about these results is that
everything that we thought was going to happen
after Trump was elected in 2016 to politics, right?
To the Republican coalition, to everything,
the exact opposite happened.
The idea was that Trump came in with this racist rhetoric and he was doing all this horrible immigration stuff
and he was gonna forever cost the Republicans votes
with Latinos and black voters.
Instead he made gains there.
And in fact, now politics has actually become
less racially polarized with Donald Trump as president where
Black and Latino voters who identify as moderate conservative are now voting for Republicans at levels similar to white
moderates and conservatives
right young voters like the belief was that Donald Trump was gonna radicalize all these young voters be Democrats the view was that in
2017 people who were young young voters then were the view was that in 2017, people who were young voters then
were the most progressive generation in history.
Now, by some measures, you could argue that Gen Z
is the most driven, mostly by young men, but not entirely,
that Gen Z is the most conservative generation out there.
And this is one stat here that just,
we have to just germinate on.
A 75-year- old white man was more likely
to support Kamala Harris than an 18 year old white man.
That's the exact opposite of what everyone thought
after Trump won in 2016.
I mean, it's also the numbers around naturalized citizens.
Yeah, this was gonna be my other huge thing there. It's also the numbers around naturalized citizens.
Yeah, this is gonna be my other huge thing here. Our best estimate is that immigrant voters
swung from a Biden plus 27 voting block in 2020
to a Trump plus one group in 2024.
He fucking won immigrants.
Yeah.
And this is not, they note here,
this is not a small group either naturalized citizens
make up around 10% of the electorate.
Now, again, this is, that is based largely on precinct data.
And of course you can look at heavily immigrant precincts
and look at the swings, you know, Lovett and I were talking about this,
you might also guess that, okay, maybe in these precincts where there are a lot of immigrants,
maybe the white voters swung more or maybe other voters swung more or Americans by birth swung
more. But when you combine that with their survey responses and you look at the districts they looked at
or the precincts they looked at,
which were heavily, heavily immigrant,
that just can't explain,
that can explain maybe some of it on the margins,
but it can't explain the whole swing.
That can make a little bit difference
in the battleground states.
When you look at precincts in like Queens and the Bronx
and some of the other ones where we saw huge Trump swings,
this is one of the reasons that Trump was,
that the Republican advantage on electoral college
diminished this time because Trump was making these gains
in immigrant communities in blue states.
Yeah.
Are there any charts or other takeaways
that jumped out at you the most
and we could always put the charts up on the screen
because we have the presentation here?
Yeah, I think the, I would say the immigrant chart
was the one that really stuck out to me
because that once again just goes,
runs counter to the exact opposite of what you would think.
Here is someone who ran on building a wall
to keep immigrants out, who passed a Muslim ban
or signed a Muslim ban to keep immigrants out,
who put kids in cages and then ran on mass deportation
in his next presidential campaign and he won immigrants.
And we have to really dig in to why that is and where it is we failed to be able to make a case
to those voters. Before we move on, like what overall real quick, what kind of messaging
strategy and attention strategy would you take from this data that you already, that you haven't already taken away from the results?
So when you look at like that chart
that runs issue salience with issue trust,
it obviously it's devastating for Democrats.
But when you look at that, you sort of are saying,
how do we win power back?
And so you have, there are two potential paths there.
One is you can look at the issues that voters
already care about that they don't trust us on. And we can try to win trust back there. One is you can look at the issues that voters already care about that they
don't trust us on and we can try to win trust back there. And like we should definitely do that,
that is our medium and long-term strategy. But in the short term, the strategy is to erode trust
in the Republicans and Trump on those issues, right? And you're seeing that already on inflation
in the economy. And so we have to keep doing that. And there is a seesaw effect to politics where
if one side goes down, the other side goes up.
So that will help us there.
But the other strategy that you have to think about
is you have to, is can you take the issues
where we are trusted
and make them more front of mind and so you.
Like you're never gonna get, as we were mentioning before,
you're never gonna make inflation
not top of mind to voters, right?
The economy will always,
in people's personal financial system, always top.
But immigration is an issue that Trump made front of mind, right? He made it front of mind even
before the border crisis. He created the idea that in people's minds, completely fabricated,
that we were living in a wave of migrant and immigrant crime. And like, do we, and Democrats
are defeatist on this sometimes. And so we sort of say, we don't have the power, the gumption,
the megaphone, the messengers to take an issue that people trust us on
and make it a top issue.
When you, some of that is true,
some of that's a reality of our messaging situation,
but the thing I look at is that healthcare dot.
You say there is our opportunity right there.
And there's two opportunities right in front of us.
One, the Republicans in Congress do not act.
Premiums are gonna go up for millions of Americans
because the additional funding and tax credits that went in place during the pandemic are going to expire this year. And so Trump
Republicans are going to raise people's premiums. And the second one is Medicaid, right? Medicaid
is healthcare for many Americans. It pays for so much of healthcare. You know, what is it?
Something like 40% of births in America are paid for by Medicaid and the Republicans want to gut
that. And so here's a chance where there is an issue that voters care about
where we have a huge trust advantage on,
and we have two opportunities
to drive that message home this year.
And raising trust, like these things are,
they're not, they don't operate independently
of each other, right?
If we raise the salience and trust of us on healthcare,
that's gonna help us on the other economic issues, right?
Cause it's gonna seem like we're fighting for people,
and that's what we have to do. I'm also, as you were talking, I was looking help us on the other economic issues, right? Cause it's gonna seem like we're fighting for people. And that's what we have to do.
I'm also, as you were talking,
I was looking at some of the issues.
There's a cluster of issues in this chart
where people rank them above 50% importance
and people trust Republicans more, but only slightly.
So those are issues that I think we could like.
And education is one, we just talked about that.
Housing, we're slightly
more trusted. Civil liberties and privacy, which they are destroying right now, the Trump
administration. Social security, which is talked about. And political division. So all
issues that people really care about and they trust Republicans slightly more, those seem
like issues that we can claw back some trust on.
Okay, so because we're nerds,
we have a lot more we wanna get into on this.
If you really wanna hear us go deep on this,
you can listen to the rest of this conversation
on Dan's subscriber exclusive show, Polar Coaster.
We're gonna talk about it now,
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So go check out the rest of this conversation
because we have a lot more to talk about with these results.
And we're gonna answer some of your questions about them.
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