The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1013: Mallory McMorrow and Tracy Alloway: A Self-Inflicted Crisis

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

The market plunge is just pure Trump chaos, and perfectly matches his record as a businessman. From his numerous bankruptcies and many failures—including his airline, his casinos, his university, his water, and his steaks—he's been running one long con. And the supposedly smart people who should have known better put him back in power, somehow thinking he would never do something like destroy global trade. Meanwhile, in Michigan, where there have already been job losses directly caused by Trump's tariff war, State Senator Mallory McMorrow announced she's running for the U.S. Senate—saying she's had enough of the leadership and the bullshit in DC. Bloomberg's Tracy Alloway and Mallory McMorrow join Tim Miller. show notes  Tracy's Bloomberg podcast, "Odd Lots" Mallory McMorrow's Instagram Mallory's new book, “HATE WON’T WIN: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than We Found It.” 

Hey guys, we've got a great double header for you today. Mallory McMorrow announced she was running for Senate yesterday, so I'm planning to have her on to discuss the campaign and more. And then I wanted to bring in somebody who had real expertise on what's happening with the markets and the tariffs following yesterday's Liberation Day announcement. And so we brought in Tracy Allouay, who's a very insightful observer of what is happening in the markets. She writes a newsletter and does podcasts with my guy, Joe Weisenthal.

So she, I think, is going to educate us. I'm going to have more economy experts on in the coming weeks and months because that is what Donald Trump has thrust upon us. And so I look forward to that and we'll probably have Tracy back when the time is right. But before we get to it, since we got so wonky and nerdy in that first segment, I want to emote with you guys for a second. It is fucking insane that we are here with regards to the stock market and the economy.

I mean, as I am taping this right now, the NASDAQ is down 5%, almost 6% really. The S&P 500 is down 4.5%. This is all self-inflicted. None of this had to happen. There is not a bubble that has burst. There is not some issue in the credit markets. There were not a bunch of credit default swaps being bundled. This is not the big short. This is not a global recession. This is not a bunch of credit default swaps, you know, being bundled. This is not the

big short. This is not a global recession. This is not a pandemic. It is just Trump chaos. Any pain you have in your retirement account or your 401k right now is only due to Trump chaos. If you're one of the people who's going to lose their job over this, it's only due to Trump chaos. lose their job over this. It's only due to Trump chaos. And here's the thing. Trump's whole career has been failures like this. This was utterly predictable across every metric.

We screamed it from the rooftops here at the bulwark and elsewhere. He bankrupted a casino. How do you go bankrupt in the casino business? Trump's stakes, Trump airlines, Trump water, fail, fail, fail. He's failed at everything. He was a horrific businessman. He was a good marketer. And we can be honest, he's been a pretty good political manipulator. That's what he's good at.

He's a con man. He's good at conning people, but we are all about to experience unbelievable pain, unbelievable economic pain, because people who should have been smarter than this went along with the con. People who should have known better, who should have known Trump for who he is,

went along with this and decided to take this risk because they thought maybe they might get a little tax cut or maybe there might be a little regulation cut that might help their business. Well guess what? All of your fucking businesses are going into the tank right now and it's hard to see a way out. Tracy Allaway will talk about that in a little bit more dispassionate way. Up next, she'll educate us, get us smart on what's happening.

After that we'll get to Mallory McMorrow. I very much look forward to it. Stick around. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We are on the morning following Liberation Day and we have been liberated from the value of our 401ks. I want to talk about that and much more with one of my favorite finance journalists, Tracy Allaway. She's a co-host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast alongside the stalwart Joe Weisenthal and also author of the Odd Lots newsletter. How you doing Tracy? I'm good, thanks. There's a lot going on, huh? Busy morning. Thanks for taking the time with us here at the Bulwark.

I'm just pulling up my little Bloomberg account here because we're right off the top. Not looking great. No. Creators is the word you guys have got up here on the website. That's right. And you've made this tricky by recording at exactly when the market actually opens. But I think at this point, we all know the direction is going to be down, right? The announcement in the Rose Garden Liberation Day was a lot worse than a lot of the professional economists and

analysts were expecting, and this morning, if you look at my inbox, it's just a flurry of notes with the words recession and stagflation in them. Everyone is rushing to revise their forecasts for the rest of the year. Most of the notes that I've seen are forecasting a dip in GDP, so that would be a recession. And a lot of them are ratcheting up inflation outlooks as well, going to as high as four or five percent. That's a pretty big deal given that we've just been seeing inflation actually come down. It is quite a big deal and I want to get into kind of exactly what the announcement was at the tariffs and the big picture economic stuff but initially I just have to react to the fact that your friends in finance world, your sources, the people you talked to,

there did seem like a level of surprise. I know we're on CNBC after the announcement, they said it was the worst of worst-case scenarios. Obviously, the market is reflecting surprise. You know, as you said, by the time this posts, things might be different, but NASDAQ opened down 4%, down 2.5%, S&P 500 down 3%. Why are they surprised, I guess is my question.

They could have just listened to Trump or listened to the bulwark or listened to Newsmax. It wasn't like there was a secret here. I mean he said it was his favorite word. You know, he kept promising it. Why didn't they believe him? A couple reasons. I think it's a totally fair point to make. I would say the main reason when it comes to finance professionals, it's really hard for them to imagine someone in power doing something that is so clearly against the grain of canonical economic thought. I don't think there's a single seriously taken economist out there who actually thinks that

destroying global trade is going to help the American economy actually go up. So there's that. So they didn't think he could possibly be this much of a moron. It was unimaginable to them that he could be that dumb, is essentially it. Well the other thing I would say is, that's the case for a lot of non-professional armchair economists as well, right? Even Trump supporters. When you talk to them about, well, what do you think Trump wants to impose these massive tariffs?

That seems like a big deal. They'll say, well, you know, Trump, he just says stuff. He's not necessarily really going to do it. And then lo and behold, he actually does it. And even now, after he's done it, there's still plenty of people who are arguing about whether or not this is just a negotiation tactic and whether or not some of the tariffs are going to come right back down.

Well, I guess I had the benefit of having to obsess over Donald Trump. There's a lot of downsides to that, having to know a lot about Donald Trump, having that take up space in my brain. One thing that you could realize is he bankrupted basically everything that he ever said. He bankrupted a casino and he was he's a very good pr person and a very good media person He was never really that good of a Manager of businesses and we're seeing that now But I guess maybe they all thought since the first term had three good years

I I guess that was it though, you know That's the rationale that he didn't do it the first three years of the first term Yeah, I mean the media story is strong, right? And by the way, if Trump is living rent free in your head, maybe you should impose a 30% tariff on that. That's one idea. How would I collect that? It's kind of similar to, I don't know, did you see his bleep the other day where he said that we are the, the fentanyl smugglers are going to have to pay tariffs,

tariffing the value of this. So whatever vehicle he uses to tariff the fentanyl smugglers, I'll use to tariff him, I guess. That's right. It's all very confusing. And I got to say, like, when you look at some of the tariffs that have been unleashed, there are weird things in there.

Like I was just writing about this actually. There's a 30% reciprocal tariff imposed on Nauru, which is this tiny island in the South Pacific that mostly exports fish and pig meat and some phosphates, but not that much anymore, to the rest of the world. Even if you think this isn't necessarily an economic tool, it's a political tool, it's a tool of diplomacy maybe, the question is, what exactly do we want from a place like Nauru? I can't imagine that many Americans want to become phosphate miners. America's fishing industry has been in decline for a long time. In fact, there are other things that Trump administration is doing that reportedly are

hurting the fishing industry right now. It's just all very confusing. I think the big question is, what exactly do we want? When do we declare success from these particular policies? NARU has been screwing us for years, Tracy. You don't understand. Our leaders have been too dumb, and NARU has been taking advantage of them.

Let's talk about some of the specifics here. JP Morgan calls it the largest tax increase since 1968. James Sorowiki caught this, and you're kind of alluding to this here, but the reciprocal tariffs is a little bit of a misnomer actually because they didn't really look at the other country's tariff rates. They looked at the trade deficit, I guess. So as James is this example, Indonesia exports 64% more than they import from us. So we use 64% as the baseline and we're very generous.

Actually, we only did a half of only half of that. So 32%. This is like nonsense math. I mean, like it's, it's much more than a reciprocal tariff actually. It's all very weird. There was a lot of confusion when they released the numbers yesterday because at first no one could figure out what those figures were actually based on to your point. And it does seem like they basically made a simple math calculation where they took

the trade deficit and divided it by exports. And I got to say, if you look at the table, you start seeing some very strange stuff. So South Korea, for instance, has a higher tariff rate than Brazil. We have a free trade agreement with South Korea and tariffs are coming in higher than Brazil, which actually does compete a lot with the US in agriculture. It's just weird. And then the other thing to remember is that famous billboard that Trump trotted out, that was just the reciprocal tariffs. So these tariffs are coming in on top of other tariffs that have already been imposed. So for instance, China, it's getting an additional 34% tariff, but it

had 20% worth of tariffs imported, sorry, imposed on it earlier. So its effective rate is now 54%. Right. Yeah. I don't think you should feel bad or anyone should about being confused by this because this Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, was on CNN last night and Caitlin Collins asked him about that very issue, the China issue. They said, well, you said it's 34. So is that on top of the existing 20?

And Besant was like, I believe it is. He couldn't even say with confidence that, and it does turn out yes, that it was. I mean, the chaos is stemming from them. It felt like somebody that was, honestly what it felt like to me, Tracy, and this is maybe outside your wheelhouse of knowing the criminology of the White House, but it felt like the people didn't really, even inside, they didn't really believe Trump and they were cramming on their midterm and had to push something out before April 2nd. It's like, oh shit, he's really serious about this.

We got to come up with a billboard. This is exactly to your point earlier about why didn't people expect this. I mean, people in the administration don't seem to have expected this, right? Trump was talking about tariffs all of last year, and that's his big thing. I mean, someone pointed out earlier that he's been talking about tariffs when he was like on Oprah in the 1980s.

It's a long held belief. And yet, you know, we are months into the new administration, not that many to be fair, but we are certainly a lot more months longer into his campaign, his planning for taking a new presidency. And here we are, and no one seems to have worked out the details, much less communicated them to people.

People you would imagine are important, like Besant. Like the Treasury Secretary, yeah, you would think. Also just worth noting that Russia, Belarus was not included in the reciprocal. I'm afraid I can just worth noting that Russia Belarus was not included in the reciprocal. Everybody can just sit with that if they want. I want to get into your newsletter about the long-term effects. Was there anything else about the details of yesterday that stood out to you? Well, the other thing I would say is all of these reciprocal tariffs, they're focused

on goods, right? Actual exports, things that Americans like to buy, I don't know, t-shirts, Nike sneakers, whatever. When we're talking about economic losses as a result of the tariffs, it's not just that these products become more expensive for Americans, it's also that they start to lose some of their associated, I guess, brand value. So for instance, if I'm, I don't know, a teenager over in China, am I going to want to buy a bunch of Nike gear nowadays? I'm not sure that's clear. You know, it's becoming more expensive potentially, even in China. And at the same time, that brand value is

diminishing very, very quickly. So there are all sorts of intangibles, soft power that are wrapped up in the taxation of actual things. Yeah, you're seeing this in Canada, I think most starkly, right? A friend of mine said, I'm forgetting if it was their sibling or their friend or whatever, is living in Canada and keeps sending them photos from the grocery store of how no one is buying any of the American products. They're the only things left on the shelf because people are like, F this.

Part of it's the tariff, a part of it is, like you said, the associated brand value. You had a great newsletter on the other long-term effects on this earlier this week. There were two things that jumped out to me. One was just, even if this turns out to be a bluff, which it doesn't seem like to me, there could be long-term impact on inflation and prices. Also, it's going to benefit the bigger companies over the little guy. Talk about both of those.

Sure. The thing that markets and investors hate the most has to be uncertainty. Boy, are we seeing a lot of uncertainty lately. We are seeing it at the consumer level in the confidence surveys, but we're also seeing it in things like the manufacturing surveys. The Dallas Fed put out a really interesting survey of energy companies in the area, and everyone is scratching their heads trying to figure out what all of this means for their business.

A lot of them are talking about, well, maybe we're not going to invest as much capital over the next year because we just don't know what's going to happen. Why would I start building a factory in one place if I'm not sure the tariffs are actually going to be around in five months or whatever? Uncertainty weighs very heavily, not just in the immediate term, but in the long term. We're talking years and years and years. Joe and I like to talk about one of our favorite examples of this is US housing.

So in the aftermath of 2008, a lot of house builders obviously went bankrupt. There was a lot of capacity taken out of the home building market. And you could argue that even today, more than a decade later, that capacity hasn't been replaced. So, you know, more than a decade later, that capacity hasn't been replaced. So, you know, memories for this kind of stuff are actually fairly long. And so the capacity question

is going to be a big one. How long will it actually take for us to react to some of these tariffs? These are huge, expensive projects, take a lot of time, take a lot of money to build massive factories, even simplistic ones to make sneakers or whatever. The other thing I would just add on to that is all of this is happening at a time when there doesn't seem to be what economists call a fiscal offset. So the government isn't planning on spending any more money to try to boost domestic industries, or at least we certainly haven't seen it yet. If you oppose tariffs and then said, well, we're going to send billions of dollars into

the US economy to target strategic industries, that could help. It would at least be a cohesive economic plan, but we're not seeing that. Yeah. It's not a traditional free market conservative economic plan, but yeah, that would be at least something. The thing that jumped out to me about that Dallas Fed thing that you mentioned is if there was a sector that is more Trump's base than that, I don't know what it would be, right?

Like those folks, you know, are most of the people that they interview, they talk to for that are going to be Trump supporters. And so if that group is saying that we're saying uncertainty, we're going to hold off on investing rather than saying, oh, you know, we trust Mr. Trump, we're going forward. Like, I mean, that is particularly alarming because imagine what people in more skeptical sectors are thinking. I mean, the energy industry is the heart of Trump's base in many ways. And the interesting thing about that Dallas Fed survey is, you know, it's not just the short-term things. Like there was one guy, he was a supplier for parts in the oil industry, and he was basically saying, well, we had one supplier ask us if we could move all our production to Canada,

which is ironic because you would assume that's the opposite of what Trump intended. One can only imagine how that supplier actually feels about all of this happening to his business. But the other thing to point out is there were people in that survey who are questioning the fundamental tensions in Trump's policy. There is, again, this is all anonymous. You just get a vague idea of what these businesses actually do. But there was one business that basically said Trump's plan for energy independence in America doesn't work with oil prices at like $50 a barrel. And we're seeing oil fall again today.

You can't incentivize drillers to build new drills and produce more oil if the price is really low and capital costs remain pretty high. It's just not going to work. I'm sorry, Tracy, that doesn't seem right to me because we have the liquid gold that's underneath our feet. And wouldn't they just be so excited that Mr. Trump wants them to drill the liquid gold or it doesn't matter what the cost is? Someone has to pay for it to come out of the ground. It's not the government.

I'm not sure it's going to be the businesses either. Hey guys, we've been talking about our sponsor at Seoul, the group that does the out of office gummies and the out of office THC CBD drinks products. And I mentioned I had my husband's 40th a couple of weeks ago. And we were using the sole drink products. And we had my man DJ87 there in the living room. And let me tell you, the people that were not wanting to drink alcohol for whatever reason, we're very much enjoying the sounds of DJ87, maybe more than they

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Right now Seoul is offering my audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getseoul.com and use code thebullwork. That's getseoul.com promo code thebullwork for 30% off. There's news out today, the March job cuts jumped to the highest level since May 2020. You already mentioned the Dallas Fed analysis. Give us a broader look at kind of like just the indicators, the possible recession indicators and what people are seeing right now. Sure.

So if you look at a lot of the short term moves today, I mean, oil would be a good one, right? Like oil is the lifeblood of the global economy still. And we're seeing that drop precipitously this morning, which means people expect less economic activity in the future. I imagine over the next few days, you're going to see some interesting things happen, like more risk premium being built into U.S. Treasuries. We call it the term premium and it basically means investors want more compensation for added uncertainty way out in the future.

So again, that idea of long-term uncertainty really being here to stay. And then the other thing I would say is there are a lot of questions swirling around what this means for the Fed for the rest of this year. Yeah, I want to get to the Fed next, but just some of the other things, the job numbers, like number of openings are going down. I think I saw you mention this in a newsletter, consumer spending is slowing. You had a newsletter about the credit market. Oh, yeah.

Also, there are some issues. And you're a dispassionate analyst of all this. But when you kind of look at all that together, like the recession chances, like right now, April 3rd, compared to say, I don't know, six months ago, November 3rd of last year, and has gone up a little bit significantly. Okay, so I am a dispassionate journalist, as you said, which means I have no opinions whatsoever. I'm going to quote some opinions from other people. You have opinions. That is not true.

You very much have opinions. I've seen your opinions. All right. Let me hide behind others' opinions for this one moment. I've seen people ratchet up the expectation for a recession this year to like 89%, 90%. I haven't seen anyone ratchet up growth expectations. That's not happening. And again, if you look at what was happening in November of last year, people felt pretty good about the economy. In fact, they were feeling even better, possibly because

they thought Trump was going to win by then. And so you were seeing a lot of the consumer surveys come in stronger, particularly from Republicans versus Democrats. Now we're sort of getting into the reality of the administration. And I think the business friendliness of it is, you know, in question, to put it mildly. I think this is an obvious point, but it's just worth asking because, you know, sometimes my Trump derangement syndrome takes over. Nothing else caused this besides just the chaos he put into the markets over the tariffs, right?

Like there's no other outside factor or, you know, kind of cyclical economic factor that is that is bringing this to bear, right? Well, to be fair, I will say there were signs of the economy slowing for the past few months. And you pointed out a bunch of the indicators that we've been seeing. So that's kind of been happening a little bit. But what's really interesting about yesterday,

and Joe actually made this point very well, both of us have been in finance journalism for a long time. We've seen a lot of policy speeches over the years, and we've seen lots of big ones that the market has reacted to negatively, but all of those have tended to be like crisis communications. You're in the depths of 2008 or the Eurozone crisis. You're saying this is going to be your emergency plan, emergency funding, the market doesn't like it, starts tanking. Usually the market is tanking because the crisis response is not enough.

This time, it's too much, right? It's like a purely self-manufactured market crisis impact, which is extremely unusual in itself. And then the other thing I would say is... I mean, unusual is about the nicest way to put it. Totally self-inflicted market crisis. Well, the other thing I would say that's really worrying for investors, and I think it's one of the reasons we're seeing such a strong reaction. I mean, Trump and the administration, all the professionals in that administration, they must have known that stocks were going to react very, very negatively to this.

I mean, they moved the announcement till after the market closed, which is one indication that they were, at least they had the market reaction on their mind. They did it anyway, right? Which suggests if you're a stockholder or even a businessman, I mean, businesses fund a lot of their activity through the stock market still. The administration isn't really thinking about you that much, or at least they're very comfortable with inflicting short-term losses on you. Yeah, one of my finance friends sent me a picture of the Nasdaq stock chart and you know I can't verify that he's a hundred percent right about

this but he said that this is the largest ten minute drop in the history of the Nasdaq futures. So even if it's in the ballpark, not great. To your last point there on the Trump thing, and you've talked to folks that are pro-Trump, that are in, that are supportive of the view. Is there any rational argument for this? Can they make a case that they're trying to weaken the dollar because they're trying to strengthen crypto? Is there any rational argument for what they did yesterday? I think it's really, really difficult to make that case.

I mean, I'll just throw out here, my dad's a Trump supporter, so I hear a lot of the talking points. The one that he's on at the moment is the market is overreacting. It's the globalist international investors' fault that this is happening, which, okay, blame it on someone else. That's a classic reaction when something blows up in your face. But at the same time, like, we are seeing this happen, right?

America is losing its importance in the global financial system. One of the things that's been happening in the past month or so is we've seen European stocks go up by quite a lot. People are talking about the rebirth of Europe, the biggest moment in European history since the Berlin Wall fell,

all because America is basically retreating from Europe and it means Europe is gonna have to come together, start spending a lot on defense, maybe start spending more on its domestic industry, funded by the government, I might add, not like the US, which seems to be stepping away from a lot of federal funding. And so that's going to create more economic integration, more growth, more togetherness,

cohesion, whatever you want to call it. People are pricing in the idea of a, how should I put it, submerging America. We are seeing that in asset prices. You did it, Donald. We've made the German military sector great again, as its benefits and downsides. All right, back to what you mentioned earlier, the risk-dependent independence, because I am totally with you and Joe on this. I think it's underappreciated right now and a potential kind of medium to long term crisis risk on top of all this other stuff. Talk about that and what would happen

if Trump and this administration does something to undermine the independence of the Fed. Sure. So all of this is stemming from an action they took on the FTC. So it was kind of funny, we interviewed actually in DC the FTC Commissioner Andy Ferguson, the head of the FTC. It was like a Tuesday night and he was talking about how much he loves bipartisan opinion within the commission, how much he values it. It's very important. And then the next day news came that Trump had fired the two Democratic commissioners at the FTC.

And he had used this like, you know, kind of special power to do it. That's now working its way through the courts. In fact, a lot is cited in the lawsuit that those commissioners are now filing. And the interesting thing here, the relevance for the Fed is if Trump succeeds in doing this, and if the lawyers fail at arguing against this in court, it could have implications for the central bank. It could mean that Trump can effectively fire whoever he wants at the Fed, a regional Fed president, whatever.

That would give unprecedented control, at least in America, to a president over the central bank. Markets and investors, as a rule, tend not to be fans of a central bank that is not very independent. Yeah. So we love catastrophizing here. So give us the catastrophic risk outcome of removing fat independence.

Oh, man. Are you ready to be traumatized? Yeah, we are. People that tune into this podcast come for a little afternoon trauma. Okay, all right, well I mean I think the analogy you could look at is Turkey, for instance. That's a pretty good one. We've seen a sort of revolving door of central bank heads go through the Turkish central bank. They come in for like a few months or a year

and then they're out the door very very quickly presumably because they're not doing the things that Erdogan wants. Erdogan has been pushing for lower interest rates, even though inflation has been staggeringly high. And yeah, that's sort of the outlook, right? If you have someone in power who's pushing for low interest rates, but at the same time you have capacity pressures as a result of hypothetical tariffs, for instance, then you're going to see prices go up. The central bank in theory should be raising rates, but the combination of lower economic

growth and higher prices, stagflation is a difficult one for the central bank to react to, to be fair. But in theory, they should be raising rates, but the president wants to push them down. That is a recipe for prices going up quite a lot. How's the Turkish economy doing? I actually haven't looked at it that closely recently, which again, you know, we're talking kind of emerging market stuff, right? Like these are- Like we are comparing us to the types of things that are happening in emerging, you know,

capitalist- Yeah. Quasi-capitalist authoritarian states. I think that's also the important thing to remember here. A lot of the US investment case, I mean, the US's primary export is financial assets. We sell lots of stocks to foreigners. We sell lots of our debt, US treasuries to foreigners. That's been funding a lot of our business model.

If the primary export is that, you have to talk about how important the rule of law actually is in this country, the stability. Investors investing in the US, they're not expecting, I don't know, like a coup or the president to be controlling interest rates. They're expecting a very, I guess, normal, normal line of proceedings, right? And instead, we're seeing all this uncertainty injected into the market and the US normality premium, I guess, being eroded. All right.

I want to do just a full catastrophizing episode on what would happen if that doesn't just get eroded but goes away here in this country and we can do it another time. I appreciate you coming on on a very busy day. Tracy Allouey, everybody check out the ODDLOTS podcast and newsletter. Thanks so much. It was fun slash terrifying. Yes, terrifying is more on brand. Up next, Mallory McMorrah. All right, we are back.

She is a Democratic Michigan State Senator and majority whip. She's the author of the new book, Hate Won't Win, Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than We Found It. Yesterday, she launched her campaign for the US Senate. Welcome back to the podcast, Mallory McMorrah. Thanks, Tim. Good to be here. Are we sure hate won't win? Hate is having a moment. Let's just be real about that. But that's not having a moment, but it's on us. It's on us to decide if hate is going to win and we're not going to let it. Okay. All right. I like that mindset.

I'm not 100% sure I'm bought in, but you know, the power of positive thinking. I want to play for everybody a little bit of your announcement yesterday and then we'll talk about it. There are moments that will break you. This is not that moment. This moment will challenge us, test us. And if it all feels like too much, that's their plan. They want to make you feel powerless, but you are not powerless.

So you know what won't fix it? The same old crap out of Washington. The Democrats came ready to fight back with their little paddles. Do you know who will? We will. We need new leaders, because the same people in DC who got us into this mess are not going to be the ones to get us out of it. I'm Mallory McMurrow and yes, I'm running for US Senate.

All right. Are you feeling it? Are you ready to run through a wall? Ready to run through every wall. Let's go. I want to get into that second part of the ad talking about what won't fix it. But first, I mean, you've been on a couple of times, but for folks who aren't familiar with you, maybe give us a little TLDR on your childhood, your life,

how you got here, why you're running for Senate. I was born in a small town where I pig sat for my neighbors. We're not gonna go that far back. I ran for office for the first time after the 2016 election. I Googled how to run for office, took on a Republican incumbent in a Republican district, and won. We flipped a district 20 points and I

came in representing Mitt Romney's hometown largely on the idea that residents looked at me and said, you remind me a lot of my daughter who left and went to Chicago or Denver or New York. Why did you come back? So I'm now in my second term in the state Senate. I am the Senate majority whip, the first Democratic Senate majority whip since 1984. And yeah, I announced for US Senate yesterday and the response has been incredible. But I think fundamentally, this is a time for new leadership to lead us out of the wilderness and lead us out of this moment. And that's a huge part of why I'm running.

How do you think you did with Romney family members in that State Senate district slash other kind of Cranbrook graduates? Oh, well, I don't think the Romney members answered their door, surprisingly, but I did well. You know, Cranbrook's a private school. We know that. But it's. We do. Hop and Doc went there. A couple famous graduates. Yeah, I did well. In my first, one of my first digital ads, I'm an industrial designer. And

speaking of Cranbrook, one thing I love about Cranbrook is that is where Ray and Charles Eames met and fell in love and changed the face of industrial design and furniture design. They actually invented the skateboard. So the process of- Like the Eames chair people? Like the Eames chair people. Yeah. The Eames skateboard? That frame from the chair is why we have skateboards. Fun fact. Yes. Really?

That manufacturing process, they invented it. No shit. Yeah. And they're in something new every day invented it. No shit. Yeah. And they're in something new every day on the Bulldog podcast. Yeah. All right. So, okay.

It's a little different to run for Senate though than for state Senate, the door knocking thing. You can't door knock every door in Michigan. And so I'm curious what, you know, I was listening to the ad and it's like, okay, Democrats seem to do things differently. How? What? I feel a lot, you know, that's, it could be anything, right?

Like what, what, what do you have in mind? So first of all, we have to lay out a positive vision. Something that I heard loud and clear in 2024 was people don't know what Democrats stand for. What they heard over and over was that Donald Trump is a dictator and a fascist and this is the end of democracy and those were some good points they're good points but people are also like I know that what do you stand for so there was a willingness to kind of say like yeah I know who that guy is but that guy's also successful and Elon Musk is successful and I want to be successful. And for all of the horrors that is Donald Trump, he promised to lower costs. So people were willing to give him a chance.

So we are gonna go out with a vision for a new American dream, leaning into the fact that for way too many people, the status quo has not been working. And that means three things to me. That means that people deserve success, that we are not going to demonize success, that we are going to lean into what people aspire to.

That means safety, your fundamental rights, safety from gun violence, safe communities, safe schools, and sanity. Because what we're seeing right now is absolute bullshit and people are exhausted and just want government to work and not be a reality TV show. I like that you had the three points ready because I think that Kamala did as good as she could have done.

Maybe not as good as she could have done, but I think she did pretty well in a tough circumstance. But my biggest complaint was when I had Carville in the pod a couple of weeks before the election, I said, you were famous for, you know you know it's the economy stupid and change versus more of the same and don't forget healthcare like people knew what Bill Clinton was running on it's like what is Kamala's whiteboard and he couldn't come up with it I couldn't come up with it because there just kind of wasn't one right and I do think that like that that you're right on something there as far as like the positive side of it is

concerned that the Democrats have kind of run on this sort of amorphous from Hillary all the way through, come on Hillary and Biden, and Harris, right, that all of them kind of ran on sort of amorphous arc of history, you know, we care about people's stuff, but not like anything tangible anything tangible that people who are casual observers of politics could really wrap their head around. How are you going to try to buck that? I think that's right.

I was at a meeting with Alyssa Slotkin, now Senator Slotkin, and she said that a guy came up to her at a farmer's market once and asked, what's your guy's hat? She was like, what do you mean? Make America great again. It fits on a hat. What's your guy's hat? And she was like, what do you mean? Make America Great Again, it fits on a hat. What's your guy's hat? And that's been something that I think about a lot. I came from product design and branding and media and the idea of a story and a vision is really important.

And in a place like Michigan, the idea of Make America Great Again was really compelling because, you know, as late as the 1980s, five of the top 10 metro regions in the entire country for median household income were in Michigan. So we were one of the wealthiest, most prosperous states in the entire country. So that vision is very appealing to people who remember what it was like to be able to afford the house that you dreamed of, not just a house and have two cars and go on vacation and maybe have a place up north. That was a pretty normal standard of living.

For what I've seen in the Democratic Party, particularly leadership on the federal level is just really living in the weeds of policy and kind of micro targeting people to death. So what we saw in 2024 was, oh, if you're a woman, you must care about abortion. If you're Latino, you must care about immigration. And there was like this hodgepodge of policies and the idea that maybe we can stitch this coalition together by giving every micro targeted group of people one policy,

which completely misses, well, what's the bigger vision? And I think the bigger vision is everybody wants to succeed. Everybody wants to believe in the American dream. And for somebody like me, you know, I'm a millennial. I graduated right into the recession in 2008 wanting to be a car designer, possibly the worst time in American history to want to go into that industry and Maybe right now we'll see what's happening

the terrorists But but you know I I Had tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. I didn't have any health care because the Affordable Care Act didn't exist yet I had had a great internship, but then the industry crashed. So I applied to hundreds of jobs. I slept in the back of my car for a few nights and tried to figure it out. And there are so many people that I

talk to who just the idea of getting ahead is impossible. I can't afford to buy a house. I can't afford to start a family. Child care is astronomically expensive And that isn't even getting to People don't believe social security is going to exist for a lot of jet-x and Millennials and Gen Z that we're paying into it And we're not going to get it back. So For me, I'm gonna have a campaign that acknowledges The status quo and how things were going was not working.

And when people hear Democrats saying things like, we are defending democracy, I think for the average person, it sounds like you're defending the status quo and that doesn't work. But the answer is not to burn it down. Like we see Donald Trump and Elon Musk, although I guess Elon just got fired and is being sent back to Tesla.

We'll see. We'll see, we'll see. That's not the answer either. And there's a lot of energy at our town halls just got fired and is being sent back to Tesla. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. That's not the answer either. And there's a lot of energy at our town halls and coffee hours with people coming out and saying, wait a second, this is not what I voted for. So there's an opportunity right now to step into that void. But you have to provide a positive vision that people want to be a part of. All right.

I want to throw two hats at you. Then we'll talk about Donald Trump. I'll do it. There are two hats that are kind of out there right now, the democratic world. You've got Ezra Klein over at the New York Times going around with a hat that says abundance on it, talking about bringing more abundance to the American society.

You've got AOC out there on the road with a fight oligarchy hat. Like, do either of those appeal to you? Where do you think, what might you think might be more fruitful for the party? Is there something that you could take from one or the other? What do you think? I think there's some truth in both of those, but if I'm very honest,

I think both of those fall into a trap that Democrats fall into. They sound very lofty and elitist. Like to the average person who is not listening to the Ezra Klein show, what is abundance? I don't think that actually says anything, but if you explain it to people that if we are going to spend billions of dollars on things like high speed rail,

we should actually have high speed rail. It's not enough just to introduce policies and budgets. If you don't do the thing, that's real. You know, if you're going to fund housing, you should build housing. And by the way, that's something we've done in Michigan. We passed $50 million annually since we took majority in the state Senate

for a housing fund, and we've built 10,000 new housing units. So we're actually doing the thing that we said we would do. And fighting oligarchy, again, like sounds very academic. And... Eat the rich, maybe, but no. I don't love that either. Because again, what's frustrating to me is when I hear,

you know, kind of Democrats are thinking about what went wrong in 2024. And there's all the analysis is that Democrats lost the working class. So as a result, you see phrases like eat the rich and also Democrats saying, we are fighting for the working class. We tend to talk about people instead of to them. And I don't know that people like that very much.

So, you know, when I talk to people, everybody I grew up with wants to believe that if you work hard enough, you're never gonna have to work again, that you're gonna make enough money and you can take time off and you can go on vacation. And we have to stop demonizing success. And that's what I wanna do in my campaign,

that you deserve a foundation where if you work hard enough and you do all the right things, that maybe you won't have to work and you'll be able to retire when you want to. and you won't have to, for people in my generation, have a job and a side hustle and a gig and just be working constantly as if that's what we aspire to because it's not. It's burning everybody out. So, what is a way then, because I agree with that. You're speaking to my former Republican self there.

We can, you know, people want to aspire to success and we shouldn't attack people for that. On the other hand, obviously there's, you know, I mean, we have like a gazillionaire class that has the percentage of our GDP that we haven't seen since, you know, the Gilded age. And we have a lot of really rich guys that have way too much influence on our government and our policies. How can you talk about that and talk about empowering working class people in a way that you don't think sounds academic? So I think Wisconsin showed us exactly how, first of all.

There was a really good visualization. I'm a visual person. There's a woman who runs an Instagram account called Motherhood for Good, and she showed, okay, if you take like George Soros, and it was like one little blue block of how much was invested in that race, and then you take Elon Musk, and she started stacking up red blocks, her kids' blocks, and it was just like a tower of blocks so that you could actually visualize and understand what $25 million into a state Supreme Court race looks like and then her toddler comes over and falls over into it.

It's very cute and I think very effective. We have to start talking about it in real terms. What I do when I'm talking to people, either on social media or at my town halls, is not use phrases like, oh, Republicans are giving a tax break to billionaires. That's true. But it sounds like money is just falling out of the sky. And that's not true. What is true is Donald Trump lied to you

and said he was going to lower your costs. And instead, the Republicans are falling in line to slash Medicare and Medicaid and the Department of Education and steal your tax dollars to give it to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. And I think really honing in on the fact that this is not a wide swath of people. I think still in the back of people's minds you want to believe, yeah maybe one day I will be a billionaire. But if you talk about the fact it's stealing your money to give to like six guys, people really get that and it pisses them off. And given to six guys who are now

like controlling who's hired and fired. I mean it is crazy like to me like that is a tangible thing. It is crazy to me that one of the richest men in the world who gets huge subsidies from your tax dollars as like firing people that are nurses at the VA. Oh that's right yeah I mean Elon Musk would not be successful without government subsidies. I mean Tesla would not exist. SpaceX would not exist without government contracts and the amount of money that he makes from the government. I had a town hall recently and I would traditionally get like five to ten people who come to a state legislator's town hall. It's not

exactly the hottest ticket in town. We had more than a hundred people. It was in a library and there was overflow into the hallway and of that group three people were fired federal workers. One from the VA, one from the NIH, and one woman who, you know, she stood up and said, I make 75% of our household income, and I cover my kids' health care costs, and I have a son with special needs, and he is not going to have health care. But she was so scared to even tell us what department she worked for, because the fear of retribution, there's no rhyme or reason. And to have this guy and these 20-something software engineers

that he pulled over from X just go in and slash and burn or send an email, like, tell me five things you did this week. And a woman from the NIH is like, well, I tried to cure cancer. And that's what I did the week before that. And that's what I did the week before that. And guess what? We haven't cured it yet,

but we have to keep trying. Like, it's just, it's infuriating. And I've gotten emails from people who, you know, went straight into the VA or another federal department straight out of school, who've been there for 30 years, this is their life's work, who've said, I've never applied for a job, I don't have a resume,

what do I do? This is what I do, and I do it because I care about the work and what I do for my community, and it's just heartbreaking and infuriating. What are the impacts you're seeing on the ground in Michigan here from these first couple of months, and I don't want to get to tariffs next, but what seeing on the ground in Michigan here from these first couple of months? I don't want to get to tariffs next, but what about on the government worker side?

Is that trickling down to what you're saying in Michigan? Oh, yeah, absolutely it is. I sit on the Appropriations Committee in the Michigan Senate and we had our first budget presentation. The governor presents to the legislature and that kind of kicks off the budget cycle. And 42% of our state's budget is federal dollars. So if there's a federal funding freeze, if there's a slash in departments,

I mean that directly impacts our state and unlike the federal government, we can't run a deficit. We have to constitutionally pass a balanced budget every year. So I'm sitting in this hearing and one of my Republican colleagues on the state level raises his hand and he, you know, very blustery says, is this finally going to be the year that we cut off our addiction to federal funding? And I say further, I'm like, they're our tax dollars.

Michigan is already a donor state, meaning we receive back a disproportionately lower amount of tax dollars than we send out. It's usually going to southern states. So the idea that like, A, there's not an understanding of how taxation works and policy works, and that we wouldn't fight tooth and nail to bring every single dollar back in is infuriating. And we are really struggling right now as we think about the state budget to understand what are the impacts going to be? Are we going to be able to fund Medicare,

Medicaid, school aid fund? If the Department of Education closes, that's about $2 billion that we lose, and that's school meals, that's IEPs, that's special education. Like, all of those programs go away, and that's school meals, that's IEPs, that's special education. All of those programs go away, and we don't have the ability to backfill it. All right.

Let's talk about the tariffs and more uplifting news coming from our new oligarchs, our leaders in Washington. This is a news item from your state. Stellantis is temporarily laying 900 US workers in Indiana and Michigan off after it opted to idle production at two plants in Canada and Mexico in response to the Trump tariffs. And that's just one example. What else are you saying about the economic stewardship from these guys?

I mean, let's just think about that for a second. I said yesterday in an interview that Michigan stands to be hit harder than just about any other state in the country based on Trump's chaotic tariff policy. And it hasn't even been 24 hours. He announced this, he brought out big charts and then complained about the wind

and he didn't want the charts to be blown away. And almost immediately, 900 people in Michigan have lost their jobs. Like just think about that. This is not temporary pain or whatever Trump is trying to claim that it is where we're going to be liberated from the rest of the world. This is 900 people who don't know if they're going to be able to pay their mortgage and don't know if they're going to be able to Cover health care costs today one day later if that doesn't tell you that this is terrible policy it's immediate and it's painful and it's Devastating to our state. I assume you understand better than me come maybe the interstate commerce

Relationship with Canada in Michigan might be one of the reasons why you're in Michigan would be hardest hit. When we did the live event together a couple of months ago, we're trying to block that out since it was before the election. So I don't want to bring back bad memories, but I hadn't actually spent a lot of time in Detroit. I loved it. I really loved our little weekend in Detroit that I had with my family. But I didn't quite realize that you just like take the bridge over to Windsor there. Like you're just driving. Did you see it? Did you like it? Yeah, I saw it. And when we were there,

there was like a run, like a marathon, maybe, or half marathon and people ran into Canada and, and yeah, I've run that race a few times. You run over the bridge to Canada and come back through the tunnel. It's the only international half marathon and marathon, I think in the tunnel. It's the only international half marathon and marathon I think in the world. Right. And so in a place like that, where it's that easy to go back and forth across the border, something like this has a lot of real effects even greater than it would in Louisiana. Yeah. I mean, there's automotive manufacturing and a car can travel back and forth across the border in the process of being assembled more than a dozen times before it's a final assembled vehicle. But then there's also just how we interact between Michigan and Canada. I mean, this is just like driving to the next town over. People

cross the border every single day to work in Detroit or Canada in our hospitals or in one of the automakers. We've seen visits from Canada drop already 10%. I know the folks leading on Mackinac Island are really worried about this summer season for we have a lot of Canadian tourists who come and visit Mackinac Island and you know spend the summer on the Grand Porch and ride around on horses and eat fudge and it's delightful. But if people don't come, that devastates our economy on top of the fact that seasonal workers from Mackinac Island are almost entirely immigrants.

So you're not going to have visitors, you're not going to have people to work for the summer. What do we do? Who wants to come here on an immigrant work visa, by the way? I just, because I have people asking me all the time, because I've been talking a lot about these Venezuelan deportations. People are like, are you worried? And I said, you know, US citizens are still on pretty good turf. We'll see how dark things get. But if you're somebody who's coming in on a work visa from another country, watching what this administration is doing to people, wrongly sending them to a San Salvador concentration camp, I don't want to work on a work visa here

if I'm in a foreign country. Like what happens if they like look at my phone or they decide that I overstayed it for a week or something and next thing you know I'm shackled in the Natchez prison in Louisiana? That's a legit concern I think that those seasonal workers would have. I don't think you can overstate the chilling effect that it has, not only on immigrant workers, but on when we saw the federal funding freeze for Head Start. We held an oversight committee hearing in the state senate where I'm the vice chair of the oversight committee and we brought in Head Start program directors who said, beyond even the uncertainty of whether or not we're going to receive the funding, we cannot hire now.

Nobody's applying, nobody's coming in. And that is the hardest challenge of running any child care and early childhood education facility is hiring qualified workers. And people just do not want to apply for a job where they don't know that they're going to get paid. What do you make of the, about this, the immigration part of this and this question,

I do feel like some Democrats have been reluctant to want to engage on what we've seen with the Venezuelan asylees with the student at Tufts, you know, because immigration has been a tough issue for Democrats. It does kind of fall into your number two, your safety, number two of your three S's. Like, do you think the Democrats should be scared to talk about what this administration is doing with regards to these deportations, and in some cases, not even really deportations,

kidnappings really? No, we shouldn't be afraid really to talk about any issue because then they get to own the conversation. I want to make sure that as we go out and we start this campaign, we are emphasizing that communities should be safe. I have served in a legislature where we've increased local revenue sharing to our cities year over year for police.

I represent the city of Detroit. That's a huge priority is making sure that our communities are safe, that criminals are held accountable. But we've had what we've seen here in Michigan, a couple of examples. There was a dad in Down River, so just kind of south of Detroit, who is a permanent resident here, has started a painting business, who was picked up by ICE at gunpoint after dropping his son off, his autistic son at school. And they haven't seen him again. They don't know where he is.

They haven't had a hearing. They don't know where he is right now. Right. And to everybody in this community, they're like, this is our dad, this is our neighbor, this is a man who has never committed a single crime in the United States. And he's gone. There was also a woman, last week there was a story in the Detroit Free Press who she wanted to go to Costco She lives in Detroit. She typed in Costco the GPS

Accidentally took her you want to talk about Canada to the one in Windsor instead of the one that's up by me in the suburbs So she got in the car shouldn't be a problem in a normal world You're taking your kids to Costco you're following the GPS and they were held in a normal world, you can just accidentally go to the window of Costco. You're taking your kids to Costco, you're following the GPS, and they were held in a detention center for days. This woman with her children, one of her kids developed a fever. They had no access. It was like ramen noodles. They could not have access to a lawyer, and now she's on the deportation list. It's this chaotic approach to people who have done nothing wrong. And you know, you talk about the students being picked up, like in what world should writing an op-ed get you deported or sent to a detention center in a state?

Six guys with masks come up on you in the street like you're some fucking like dangerous criminal. That is terrifying. And if we cannot articulate, you know, I'm going to be very clear in articulating, this is not keeping us safe. This is not ensuring that we are going after criminals. This is an approach that they get to show, you know, it's really disgusting what they're doing. It's a performance that is hurting people. and by the way, is not actually forwarding any policy about comprehensive immigration reform. There's nothing on the table to fix this system. I appreciate you going there on that.

And those stories are horrible. And again, I think you're right. People can talk about this and talk about wanting safe communities without excusing or being silent about this because people really need to speak up. This is just the behavior of a Stalinist country, not America. Mallory, you know we got to do this. If you're going to be a new candidate,

I got to take you into rapid fire questions. All right? People got to know a little bit more about Mallory. We mentioned already, we alluded to for the elder millennials listening, 8 Mile. What is your favorite Eminem track? Oh, it's Lose Yourself. It's on my running soundtrack. Lose Yourself millennials listening, 8 Mile. What is your favorite M&M track? Oh, it's Lose Yourself. It's on my running soundtrack. It's classic, all time. Okay. Running, lifting, what is your exercise? What's your routine? Running and yoga. Running and yoga? So, have you seen the morning routine, the guy that gets up at 3.30 and puts his face in ice cold water and then dives into a pool. Do you have one of those for your campaign?

I get up at a normal hour and make a cup of cold brew coffee and sit down. It's, you know, really at the same level. You might want to think about the ice ball. That might just be something to do. Now that you're into the campaign, it might be something to think about. All right. Michigan Mount Rushmore. Oh, Michigan Mount Rushmore. Oh, Michigan Mount Rushmore.

The Mackinac Bridge, Mighty Mac. Oh, that was a very literal, that was a literal way to answer that question. Yeah, I was like- The Mackinac Bridge is a good answer. I wanna know who is on it. Which Michiganders you would put on the Michigan Mount Rushmore.

Oh, on the Michigan Mount Rushmore, I think Gretchen Whitmer, and then I'm gonna go a completely different direction, George Romney. Oh, that the Michigan Mount Rushmore, I think Gretchen Whitmer, and then I'm going to go a completely different direction, George Romney. Oh, that's nice. Eminem. Okay. And Aretha Franklin. Ooh, Aretha. Joe Lewis, I was going to say. You can't do Henry Ford, unfortunately. Turned out

to be an anti-Semite. Redhead Mount Rushmore. I'm looking at the very different Mount Rushmore you could possibly be on one day. What if we made a redheaded Mount Rushmore? What kind of rock is that? I guess it would have to be in the Mountain West to be kind of like a slave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Redhead Mount Rushmore. Was Shirley Temple a redhead? Shirley Temple? Yeah. Yeah, okay. I don't know. I assumed you redheads had other redheads that you aspired to be like.

No. Can I tell you? I went on a blind date with a redhead once and we sat down and we were having a lovely time and the waitress comes over and says, it's so nice to see a brother and sister spending time together. And you're like, this has been fun. We'll see you. And I was like, this has been fun.

You want to split the check? I'm never going to talk to you again. Thanks. If you could go, they're I'm never going to talk to you again. Thanks. If you could go, they're all Mount Rushmore themed, rapid fire. If you could go back in time and make a deal with Donald Trump that we put his face on Mount Rushmore, but he doesn't get to run again for president, would you have cut the deal?

Oh my God, of course. Are you kidding? Let's just go back in time and give him an EGOT. He should have an Emmy and a Grammy and an Oscar and just like give him all the awards so he doesn't run. You have a daughter. She's what? Four now?

Three? She's four. Yeah. What's the cutest thing that she's done in the last month? I signed her up for, speaking of running, there's a Corktown in Detroit. There's a St. Patrick's Day 5K. They have a kid's quarter mile that I signed her up for and she was so excited. So we run right in front of the new

Michigan Central, the train station that's been reopened. And she wore a little tutu and she got a medal and she wore that medal for like four straight days. And she told everybody in the grocery store, she yelled at them, she gave them high five. She said, I'm a Corktown runner. I'm the fastest kid alive. Even though she saw every kid running past her. She didn't care. And it was the cutest thing she's done. I love that. I love that confidence. Okay. My two hardest rapid fire questions to leave with. You want to be in the Senate? Should Chuck Schumer be the Democratic leader in the Senate anymore? We need new leadership in the Senate. Full stop.

All right. Last one is really going to be the hardest one. It's more, it's less of a rapid fire than a gotcha. I follow your ask me anythings on Instagram. They're very good. Other politicians can learn from that. One thing I learned from following your ask me anythings is a little bit about your Michigan. You don't really have a full Michigan accent. The best way to prove it is by asking you this question.

What is your favorite video game? Super Mario Kart. Super what? Mario, Mario. It's a meme, Mario. Mario. That sounds a little bit more like outer borough than upper peninsula to me.

Yeah, yeah. I grew up in central New Jersey, which I swear is a real place, but that is full Mario country. All right. I bet the missionaries are happy that you immigrated there. Are you happy about your new? It was the best decision I have ever made. Best decision.

I ran for office because this has made me the best version of myself. This place. I appreciate you very much. Mallard McMorrell. Good luck on the campaign. We'll be checking in with you over the next whatever it is, 20 months or so, assuming we survive. Thanks, Tim. And I hope people come check us out. McMorrow from Michigan.com. All right. Everybody else, whatever it is, 20 months or so, assuming we survive. He looks calm and ready to drop bombs But he keeps on forgetting what he wrote down The whole crowd goes so loud, he opens his mouth But the words won't come out, he's choking how?

Everybody's choking now, the clock's run out Time's up, over, plow! Snap back to reality, oh, there goes gravity, oh, there goes gravity Choke, he's so mad, but he won't give up that As he know, he won't have it, he knows His whole back's to these ropes It don't matter, he's dope He knows that but he's broke He's so stagnant, he knows

When he goes back to this mobile home That's when it's back to the lab again Yo, this whole rap city Better go capture this moment And hope it don't You better lose yourself in the music The moment you own it You better never let it go

You only get one shot Do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, you better Lose yourself in the music The moment you own it, you better never let it go You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, you better This soul is escaping, through this hole that is taping

This world is mine for the taking, make me king As we move toward a new world order, our normal life is boring But superstardom's close to post-mortem, it only grows harder Home he grows hotter, he blows us all over, these hoes is all on him Coast to coast shows he's known as the globetrotter Lonely road's god, only knows he's grown farther From home he's no father He goes home and barely knows his own daughter But hold your nose cause here goes the cold

water These hoes don't want him no more, he's co-proteur They moved on to the next Moe who flows He knows Dove and so does Nada And so the soap opera is told it unfolds I suppose it's old partner but the beat goes on It unfolds, I suppose it's so partner But the beat goes on Da da da da dum You better lose your stout in the music The moment you own it, you better never let it go You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime You better lose your stout in the music The moment you own it, you better never let it go You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow

This opportunity comes once in a lifetime The Bullork podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with Audio Engineering and Editing by Jason Brown.