The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Because Donald Trump's stupid trade embargo has us reading shipping charts, we now know that 40% of containership traffic between Asia and the U.S. has been canceled. That means a shortage of consumer goods, which will push prices higher. At the same time, the business environment is too unpredictable for companies to plan. Meanwhile, Trump is reorienting the American economy to a corrupt oligarchy—as he rakes in billions in bribes off his crypto. Plus, Hegseth wants to clear out a chunk of the top brass, U.S. attorney nominee Ed Martin forgot to say he's been on Russian-state media outlets more than 150 times, and the DNC absolutely should not be posting about Kamala at the Met Gala. JVL joins Tim Miller. show notes HuffPost on the trucking company buying Trump's crypto coin The NYT on Trump family business deals JVL on the Ashli Babbitt payout

Music Seven seconds left. Westbrook, five seconds. They're down by one. Williams, three quarter point. No good. The Nuggets steal game one. Hello and welcome to the Bullwork podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Needed to start with that little bit of joy. A remarkable, unfathomable Nuggets comeback last night.

Because we're going to the bad place today. And America is going to need an unfathomable reround as well. Our guest is editor of the Bulwark, author of the Triad newsletter, my cohost on the Next Level podcast. It's the Prince of Darkness, Jonathan V. Last. You might know him as JVL. What's up? Hey, buddy. Glad to be on the big show. Jonathan Victory Last. We had a victory last night. I was alone. I scared the cat. I woke up Tyler with my shrieking after that three. Yeah. You need childlike joy sometimes in life, you know, even as a grown man living through, you know, the horrors and the pain of, of, uh, adulthood. I guess, I guess I found it.

Do you have any child? I found it hard, honestly hard, honestly. I found it hard to take joy in normal things because in the back of my mind is like, oh, things might not be okay. Yeah, I hear that. And I think that this is probably cope and maybe it's time for me to get back into therapy. But I feel like I'm tripling down on compartmentalization right now. I mean, what else are you gonna do?

And like when I'm in a nugget space or a Jan's Fest space, I'm just like, I'm refusing to let my brain even think about it, you know, until, and God love you, until this stranger comes up to me and wants to talk to me about the tariffs, which is fine, which is fine, we love you, I appreciate you. But I just want you to know in my mind, I am like not even on the planet. Also, I might do some self medication that helps me in a way that something you might want to look into. JVL, let's go to the Trump family

corruption. There's so many things to talk about. Wow. But I had to start here because this story just really jumped out at me yesterday. A long New York Times story about the kids, but there was this one anecdote that was really, I think, you know, the gold standard, so to speak, the Bitcoin standard. An international trucking logistics firm is buying as much as $20 million worth of Trump's crypto. The freight technologies, freight technologies, and companies issuing bonds and directing the proceeds directly to the shit coin. Their CEO, Javier Selga, said in a news release that buying Trump coin would be an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between the Mexico and the US. At the heart of their mission-

Free trade. Capitalism, baby. That's what it is. It's free trade. At the heart of their mission is promotion of productive and active commerce between the United States and Mexico. Boy, I mean, that is just like they basically just put out a news release that said we are bribing the president in order to hopefully get a carve out in the trade war.

I mean, like it wasn't even really subtle. So let's talk about this. This company is called Freight Technologies. It is a very small logistics company. Total market cap for this publicly traded company is about four million, not not billion, four million dollars. So I want you to think about that. When they say they're going to spend 20 million

on the Trump meme coin, that is five times the value of their entire company. My buddy who went to Wharton was staying with me this weekend. I need to call him up here to see if there are any, you know, any business school lessons on this. OK, so this is this is why they had to take out a bond to do the purchasing. Right. Because they don't have the cash, because again,

they're going to take a five exposition of their entire company on this. Now, how they're going to sell this bond is beyond me, because who would buy it? Right. You you're a bondholder. You're secured sort of. bondholder, you're secured, sort of, but what are you really secured? You're secured by the cost of the Trump coin. If you wanted to exposure to that, you would just buy the Trump coin yourself. You wouldn't buy a bond in a company where the bond is going to be secured by the coin. But here's what's interesting.

So the Trump coin itself has been on a downward spiral since day two. I don't know if people remember, I do, because I made a lot of money on it. A lot of money? I mean, for me, a lot of money. I made enough money to buy one-tenth of a nice watch. Okay. How about how many dinners for your family of 11? I like two, maybe three, maybe three. Depending on whether you're going out for a fancy steak

or whether it's a chilly night. Okay, no, I mean, the no fancy steak, it's like half of a fancy steak dinner for all 12 of us. But anyway, point is, point is, we've had one spike in the price of Trump coin. Would you care to guess when it was? I'd like to guess. I'd like to guess it was when he issued the offer to come have a dinner at his golf club

and get a tour of the White House if you're one of the top 20 investors in the coin. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because what happened was a bunch of people went out to purchase this coin and it became obvious to people who wanted to influence the president, oh right, we could just buy this thing and that will funnel money to him. He's asking us to do that. And so we say no jump. But since then, the coin has floated back down.

So freight technologies, they publicly announced that they were going to float this bond. And simultaneously, they said that we've already put a million dollars into the Trump coin. When they did that, their stock, which has been tanking since Trump took office, spiked. So the marketplace jumped on this and said, oh, yeah, OK, well, these guys have figured it out. They know that they need to bribe the president and merely the fact that they said they were going to try to bribe the president was enough to push their stock price up. Because, again, remember, they haven't succeeded in doing yet.

All they've said is we're going to put together a bond offering and maybe people will give us the money to bribe him. But here's here's what I want to say. They've already lost money. So they put a million dollars, they say they've put a million dollars into the coin, but the coin has lost, it's gone from like $13 to 10. So they're already down 30%. That's nothing compared to the 140% tariffs. I guess the Mexico tariffs aren't, aren't as high as one.

So, but the point in all of this is that the markets are reacting to all of this stuff as though the only thing that is real is the corruption. Right. And the actual reality of whether companies have lost money in the bribes or whether the Trump coin is down or up or whether they'll be able to get securitized debt or bonds or anything. That stuff is immaterial. The market is simply reacting to, oh yeah, finally somebody understands that they have

to bribe the president if they want to stay in business. Therefore this company we can reward with a slightly higher stock price because they now understand the new American economy. This is a very important point. The new American economy is basically like a combination of like a corrupt oligarchy, like oligarchical capitalism, you know, with a little bit of central planning, with some like middle ages indulgences to the pontiff, like thrown on top of it now. Like that is how Trump wants to reorient the economy.

That's how he's describing the economy when he talks about how he is the owner of the department store and he gets to set the prices. He's describing our economy as one that's centrally planned. Like the market is reacting to like people paying the indulgences and saying, well, okay, that they're going to be a favored company then. Like they're truly turning back the clock to like the 1950s, like the 1550s and like the type of economy they're trying to put together here. And I like the free, have we heard from Paul Ryan?

Have we heard from John? John Thune was once a free market capitalist. Like there's, you know, Rand Paul, God love him, is the only one that seems to- Mike Pence. Mike Pence is talking about it. We'll get back to Mike Pence. But I mean, have the current members on the, of the party, they're all just going along with this. And it's a little bit hyperbole because, you know, we have some kind of vestigial

capitalism still going, but like that's what they're trying to going along with this. It's a little bit hyperbole, because we have some kind of vestigial capitalism still going. But that's what they're trying to reorient it towards. You know, what's funny is there's one outlier in all of this and that's crypto, right? And on crypto, this administration wants to be way out into the future. Total deregulation. Total deregulation really unleashed the animal energies,

the animal spirits of the crypto, which of course is perfect because crypto is nothing. It is of course Trump would be into crypto because crypto is just air. Like there is nothing there. That's hype. That's what he's good at. Right, right.

And there's no underlying value. And here's the thing, Tim, we're gonna talk about corruption at some point. Yeah. It's easy to understand it through the lens of just naked corruption. It's harder to understand at the level of like just mass destruction of the American

economy because that's coming. Like the Bert Lesconi system would be understandable. I could tell Italy didn't thrive under it, but it's like, okay, we're going to give favored companies, you know, some kickbacks, you know, we're going to, like it's what Spear Agnew got in trouble for, right? Like we're going to direct a friendly company, give them the construction project. I'm going to get a kickback. This is like old school corruption.

Yeah. But like the old school corruption of, okay, I'm going to give a carve out to this trucking company because they put money into my shit coin is like being combined with the reorienting of the global economy. Yeah. The mass destruction driving the dollar down, the dollar is down against every major world currency. It's down significantly against some of them. The Asian currencies are getting stronger.

There are some guys in logistics, like Ryan Peterson from Flexport, who've been sounding the alarm on this saying that the end result of this is that China is going to wind up buying American companies out of bankruptcy and that this entire China is going to wind up buying American companies out of bankruptcy and that this this entire scheme is going to end up with China leading the world order. Well that's exciting. Great. Now I can't decide I'm so tempted do I want do we want to do China first or crypto first? Let's just put a pin in China we'll come right back to it. Because the crypto corruption is still going. This is also part of the New York Times story. It was hard to pick which my favorite anecdote was.

I went with the trucking company, but this is pretty good too. Our buddy Donald Trump Jr. was in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. You know, I mean, our real allies. On a speech tour, he called the Trump Business Vision for 2025. He knows which countries to go to for the business vision. Who's going to want to grease the skids? Eric was in the Middle East at the same time, saw it in the past couple of weeks. We talked about Eric's shitcoin deal on a previous pod with the United Arab Emirates where they were doing a $2 billion deal and not, instead of using dollars or

whatever or euro or their own currency, they decided to use the Trump coin. But the Bulgarian one was new to me. Don Jr. was on stage along with a guy named Antoni Trenchev. He's the co-founder of a cryptocurrency firm called Nexo. Was fined 45 million by the SEC in 2023, and they agreed to leave the US marketplace. Mr. Trenchev announced with Don Jr. on stage that Nexo had already talked to the US regulators. You'll be surprised to learn it's re-entering the market. Wow!

America is back and so is Nexo. And the companies and Trenchev and Don Jr. talk about ways that they can do business together. I mean, like, business from like an eighties movie. The kid, the idiot kid of the president goes to a fucking Eastern European country to meet a criminal and the criminal is like, just going to give them a bag of cat, like the whole thing is just so on the nose. It makes Jared's stuff look respectable. Yeah, high class. Right, high class. And it makes Jared look smart. Like, you know, Jared Kushner only looks smart standing next

to the Trump boys. So here's one of the things that I find interesting. Trump's first administration had massive corruption, but it was on a very bespoke scale. It was like handcrafted artisanal construction. So for instance, Donald Trump owned an office building in San Francisco, 555 California Street. And one of the tenants there was the Qatari government, which rented an entire floor of office space and just left it empty. Right? Qatar knew that they had to get him a cut. and they wanted to get Donald Trump a taste so that he would listen to them and be amenable to them.

So they would rent an office space in a floor of a building he owned. People who were coming to visit DC and were going to conduct business with federal government knew that they needed to stay at the Trump hotel across the street. But I mean, how much money are you really getting there? I mean, the rack rate on a hotel room there is like, what, $850, maybe $1,300 for a nice room, office space. And plus, there's all these other middlemen taking cuts out of it, right?

You got to pay taxes. Trump 2.0 realized that you could industrialize and take to scale corruption if you owned platforms and currencies. Because then people don't need to physically currency, currencies. People don't need to actually show up at a physical location to deliver you the bags of money. Right? And they can do it at the scale of billions of dollars at a time, right? They could say, yeah, we're gonna conduct a business over using $2 billion of your currency

and you'll get whatever the blockchain percentage says of it. And I wonder, Tim, if there's any going back, right? Like if the future of corruption in America, if everybody will aspire to that level then, right? Like if the future of corruption in America, if everybody will aspire to that level then, right? And it'll no longer be enough to be Hunter Biden painting, you know, doing a Jackson Pollock and then charging somebody $100,000 for it, right? Or does it get bad enough that I mean, the optimistic vision is that you have like a post-Watergate backlash type, you know, where it's focused more on the financial side of it. There's a period of reforms.

Some Democrat, maybe even some Republican runs as like a reformer, and that's like, you know, how they get kind of outsider cred. I'm not like optimistic about this scenario, but like that, it is possible, right? I don't know. Jonathan Rausch, when he was on a couple weeks ago, felt like that the opposition should really dial in on corruption and learn from Navalny, learn from these opposition parties and other places where there are authoritarian leaders.

We're like, that has been a strategy that has worked. I mean, if you take all this together, we've talked about all the Trump stuff, but the Times article also gets into all the people around him are making bank, like unimaginable bank, like just this douchebag Jeff Miller, who I used to know in another life was just a Kevin McCarthy Republican, went full in with Trump, has 39 new corporate clients this year, including crypto firm Tether. I mean, this guy is going to be like, you know, buying a mountain and an island home. Jason Miller, you might know him. He doesn't have a chin and he's not paying his child support. Maybe he started recently, I guess, for a while he wasn't paying

his child support at least. He registered- What was his monthly retainer? Go ahead, read his monthly retainer for that. Yeah. Oh, I know. The Indian government is paying him 150K a month. A month. A month. The Indian government is just like, I mean, you can't even pay the bags of cash at that

level. I mean, it's briefcases, it's like suitcases of cash that are going to this fucking piece of work. There's an argument, right, that all of these guys feel like this is the moment to get their beak wet. It spirals out of control. The economy tanks, they get even more shameless about it. They realize this is our last chance, right?

And that there is some kind of backlash to this that where corruption is kind of the at the heart of it. How do you like that optimistic vision? Your face doesn't seem like you're sold on the Jonathan Roush plan back. Look, anything is possible. I could be wrong. The Nuggets won last night. They were down 14. They only have four players.

This is not a JVL is always right. Money back guarantee. But on the other hand, I look at this in. I think these things are all hard to explain to people. I think the average person does not even understand crypto or finance or any of this stuff. Trump has pretty successfully convinced everyone that everybody's corrupt. So what does it matter if he does it too? And also we're so polarized that any meaningful change requires supermajorities.

And so I just don't think you get anything meaningful done. But I can be wrong. Here's a really interesting question, though. As our tech overlords would say, Trump's coins have really disintermediated the classical lobbyist. Because if the way this worked was, in the olden times, you had Senator X, who was the head of whatever committee, whatever committee you needed to get into to get them to mark up a bill on behalf of your industry.

So you hired his ex-chief of staff because you knew his ex-chief of staff could call in a favor and say, Senator, could you just cut that paragraph for us? Yeah, we got a red line on this thing in the energy and commerce bill. Well, I don't know how much loyalty Donald Trump has to Jason Miller. Does Donald Trump really think that he owes Jason Miller? I actually think the opposite. I suspect that Donald Trump chafes at the idea that Jason Miller is getting $150,000,

making money off of him and his name, getting paid by those Indian guys. Why shouldn't those Indian guys pay Trump and not Jason Miller? Great point. We should post this video on Truth Social to make sure that Trump has a chance to see it because he should not, he cannot be okay with this. That like fat fuck and he's getting laid off of Trump and he's getting money, and he was a total zero if it wasn't for Trump.

That's a great point. But I mean, I think this extends throughout the whole world. And there are going to be a couple of places where maybe if But I mean, I think this extends throughout the whole world. And there are going to be a couple places where maybe if Stephen Miller decides he wants to cash in, Trump would be willing to grant a favor. But for some of these lesser hangers on. Or if you're just trying to get them to send a tweet, you can pay off Jason Miller to get them to send a bleat out that's like, you know, on some to promote your book or something

like some of these lower level stuff for sure. But for meaningful stuff, it seems to me that if you want to get something out of the Trump administration, you're gonna have to pay Trump. And so what do you I think a lot of these companies are caught fighting the last war thinking that like, oh, if we just hire some Republican lobbyists, they'll help us out when the answer is they ought to be pushing that money directly into Trump's pockets and they can do it now because he owns the coins. So shine. Just don't pay Jeff Miller corporate.

If you're in a corporate lobbying office right now, do not give a damn sent to Jeff Miller, please. I wouldn't do that. Honestly, I would go buy Trump coin, right? And make a big deal of it and talk about how great it is. So Shine, Wired is a big piece about Shine, the fast fashion company, which decided they were going to get in heavy on this.

Like a Chinese Amazon for cheap clothes, basically, for people who don't know. Timo, right, basically. And they have gotten nothing. They've got nothing to show for all the money they've spent on Republican lobbyists. They got fucked actually. I mean, because they got rid of the diminished exemption.

They didn't even get kind of an even Steven-like level. They got totally screwed, yeah. I have to think that might've been different if they had pushed that money directly into Trump's pockets. Although- Tick-tock, look at the tick-tock. Yeah, look at the look at TikTok, although maybe there are going to be places where Trump doesn't care. Like maybe if you're you're Chinese, he's going to screw you no matter what. But maybe not. Again, TikTok, right, suggests that if you're willing to make him rich, because here's the thing, Trump is going to walk away from this. Okay, I'm sorry. That's me being optimistic.

If Trump were to walk away from the presidency at some point, for whatever reason that would be, he's going to do it being wealthier by tens of billions of dollars. Tens of billions of dollars. That is a level of wealth transfer and corruption that normally you don't see except in authoritarian regimes. And this takes us just back one more time to the rash question. Okay, so you're not optimistic that we are going to go through a period of comity and reform and institution

building. I could be wrong. I'm also not really seeing it. Could though there just be more of a narrow political backlash against it? Is it possible for Trump to get just too many gold coins or is he insulated from this? Because I actually am not sure. I think he might be insulated from it. I think it's regular people's economic pain that's more likely to be his downfall than

people caring about this. I think they like people look at him like Scrooge McDuck. They're like, who cares how many more coins he gets? Yeah. And they like that about him, right? I think it's more likely that he's vulnerable on like the $2 instead of $30 than he is on the, well, he just got $2 billion in World Liberty Financial Coin transactions.

I agree with that. I'm not gonna stop fucking talking about it because it's insane and because it's hard for people to really real like process just how much money he's making. And so it's important for us to be translating it to folks. But I just, I agree that political potency is one of the other side. Ready to win Mother's Day and cement your reputation as the best gift giver in the family?

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somebody that is now a reader of trade publications. But before we do that, I want to listen to our marble-mouthed Ponce secretary of the treasury, Scott Besant, who was on CNBC yesterday. For some reason, this person is calming the markets and I can't fucking fathom it for any, I just, I cannot wrap my head around why people find this comforting, but let's listen. I think we could see substantial progress in the coming weeks. We'll see that as I think it's Steins Hall, that which is not sustainable doesn't continue. So 145%, 125% tariff levels are the equivalent of an embargo.

And we're reading every day what's happening with factories in China. And from an academic point of view, I can tell you that the history of trade battles, we are the deficit country. The surplus country always has the most alerts. So they need to make more gestures. What is it that you're looking for?

And is that happening? Is there a negotiation about the negotiation? Yeah, we'll see over the coming weeks. And we'll see what President Trump wants to accept. We don't know what our goal is. We don't know what the status of negotiation is. Stein's law does tell us, though, that something that is unsustainable won't sustain. And so I just figure that eventually it'll all work out.

That's the adult in the room. And he's the one that we were all happy about. I, you know, Tim, really, you gotta understand, that's all art of the deal. You think so? Of course it sounds like he's an idiot. He wants to sound like he's an idiot because that's good negotiation. It's all unfalsifiable.

Okay. All right, here's what we know. 40% of containership capacity between Asia and the United States has been canceled. That's good news for some small business owners who are like hoping that their material doesn't come in because they can't pay for it or else their business will go under.

Well, their business is gonna go under anyway. We're creeping up on a 50% level of cancellations because it's accelerating. What this is gonna mean is we're headed towards stagflation. I mean, that's what this is, right? So you get a scarcity in consumer goods that will push prices higher because they are scarce, but it also means economic disruption. It's going to mean unemployment going up. And when unemployment goes up, you're going to have wages falling. Who's going to lose their drop? Dockworkers are going to go first,

truckers, people in logistics, then the small business owners. I'm sorry, not the truckers that paid off the president and $20 million, but the rest of the trackers. So you better get in while the getting's good. Yeah, maybe. So I want to read you a little bit from Ryan Peterson. So Ryan Peterson runs a logistics startup called Slack Sport. So what it is, is it's a software company that helps track freight globally.

And so they help people move their stuff from the factories in China to all the way to the shelves in Sheboygan. And he has, for the last week, been on a media blitz. You should actually, you might even go on this show. He's been going on everything. He might even, actually, he might consider this show. Right, no, no, I think he would even consider,

the only thing he might not is he might be worried about being perceived as anti-Trump. But, I mean, he had been running around saying that Donald Trump is creating a tsunami that is going to destroy the American economy, so maybe he would be okay with it. So here's what he what he told The Wall Street Journal, if they don't change the tariffs, it's going to be an extinction level asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs kind of events. Only these aren't

dinosaurs. These are dynamic, healthy businesses. So Flexport has visibility into about 1% of all US trade, which is a tremendous number. You hear like 1% and you're like, well, wait a minute. But his software touches like 1% of everything. So he really is getting a global picture of what looks like. And here I want to read a little thread that he did here, a couple of them that are worth. So the US imports $600 billion worth of goods from China every year, 95% of that at Ocean Freight. Those goods sell at retail for $2 trillion, right?

Which tells you about where the value chain is what they talk about at B-School, where is the most value accruing? And the most value actually accrues to the end stage retailer. That's why they mark up their goods typically about 3X. If the tariffs on China continue at this level, we will see a $2 trillion hit to economic activity in our country, the failure of tens of thousands of American businesses and the laying off of millions of employees. But that's not the worst part.

That's not the worst part, right? So when the brands fail, these are American brands, again, I'm just reading from Peterson, they will be purchased out of bankruptcy by their Chinese factories who thus far have built everything except a customer-facing brand, which is where most of the value capture happens. Consumer goods companies typically mark up goods, three X or more to support their fixed costs. Now the factories will get to vertically integrate and capture the one part of the chain

they haven't yet dominated. Because the Chinese could then afford the tariffs. Well, no, I mean the tariffs are gonna last forever. The Chinese are gonna, right, because their products are getting marked up three X. So unless it's a 300% tariff, right? Like they've got a. Well, no, I mean, the tariffs are not going to last forever. Right, because their products are getting marked up 3X, unless it's a 300% tariff, right? What they're going to do is they're going to own the most valuable part of the brands.

Right now, the Chinese own the least valuable part, which is the manufacturing, which is why the manufacturing is based over there, is because it's the cheapest, because it's the least value add. And we're going to hand them vertical integration, which once, once it's gone, you know, then you've got nothing. And this is, again, this is Donald Trump's, I just assume it's idiocy. We won't actually hand them vertical integration because then we'll, well, then we'll, uh, tariff them even more.

Keep tariffing higher and higher. 280%, 400%, 400%. A million percent, Tim. It's a very strong number. It's a very powerful number, a million percent tariffs. Unless they have Jeff Tass or whatever his name is, the Tick the Billionaire TikTok investor. So unless they have an American investor,

then we might let them have vertical integration, but the rest of them will just tear off. We've often said that if Trump were an actual Russian asset, he would he be doing anything differently? I think we can say if he was a Chinese asset, would he be doing anything differently? Like China is gonna wind up in a much, much stronger place at the end of this than

they were at the beginning. And there will be pain. They'll have a lot of pain, but they are actually going to get something for their pain. We're not. Yeah, they've got a lot. I mean, they've got protests and stuff in their factories. Like they're going to have to deal with all that. Like they've got, they've got, they're going to have worker issues over there.

We're already seeing some protests. Yeah, I think that's true. But again, I mean, the Chinese are able to manage and weather those sorts of things in ways that a liberal society is not, as we saw during COVID, where they basically shut the country down, right? Yeah, and there are a lot of anti-China people, myself included, who were thinking that like the way they shut the country down versus COVID could end up being like the butterfly wing flapping that caused problems for the, you know, could end up being like the butterfly wing flapping that caused problems for the for you know, she right because the people are not going to accept

it and that eventually there would be that that didn't happen. Turns out that's not how it worked out. Why is the market so sanguine about all this? We have experts like this, you know, issuing these sorts of warnings. Do you have a theory on that? Is it sanguine? I mean, it's trending down. Keeps trending down. The bond market looks bad. The dollar is weakening. There's a lot of volatility that's kind of within a certain band of. Yeah. Well, that's because I mean, so the market is really taking the temperature of right now. Yeah. Right. And so the market will, you know, like if, if the market says, you know, the stock market looks and says like, oh, look, these truckers have figured out how to bribe the president.

I can make that trade today because today we can make money on that trade. That's really all it's about. And it trends down over time, but it's not really long-term thinking. The bond market is the one that's looking at seeing all the risk right now. The bond market is freaking out. And the dollar's weakening. We got a Fed report yesterday, I think the Dallas Fed, looking at anticipated orders and mergers and acquisitions.

And the whole American economy is grinding to a halt. It's because nobody can make any plans. And this is the insanity of the Trump. Even I hate to take it seriously because none of it deserves to being taken seriously. But the serious version of the tariffs is, well, it is important to American national security to get some certain types of manufacturing bases back in America. This is like the Gretchen Whitmer trying to steel man the thing, right? But to do that, you need stable, consistent,

predictable business environments so that people can make investments. And none of any of this has been stable or predictable. So you can't even steel man this to the degree to make it look rational on any level. I love your Merger's and Acquisitions comment. I felt like I was an American psycho or like Wall Street or something. I was sitting in a fancy New York hotel bar a couple of weeks ago and a guy comes up to

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Sad Sarah's not here, our other co-host on the next level, because she would really like this better than you probably, but can we sound like 1990s Republicans for one second? Sure. We do have some concerns about the national debt that is related to all this. I had missed this. One of America's closest allies, Japan, was threatening to fire off the ultimate financial weapon against DC and trade talks, dumping the US debt. Japanese finance minister Katsunobu Kato, whose country is the biggest holder of US treasury, said on Friday that selling the assets is a card on the table in tariff negotiations.

While we're doing worst case scenario outcomes and spiraling, the fact that we are carrying all this debt if we have interest rates rising and other countries that are holding our debt pissed at us doesn't put us in the strongest situation. Tim, do you know who the five largest holders of American debt are? JV, obviously, I don't know the answer to that. Japan with 1.1 trillion dollars. Do you know this off the top of your head or did you prepare for the podcast? No, I prepared for the podcast, Timothy.

Japan at 1.1 trillion, China at just under 800 billion, the United Kingdom right behind them at about 720 billion, then Luxembourg just around 400 billion, and then Canada at about 380 billion. Mark Carney coming to the light. So we have actively worked to piss off and go to war against four of the five biggest, well, I guess three more, more than who are you not including Luxembourg in the UK? You don't think Luxembourg feels any affinity for their friends in Denmark who are being, who are being, I'm just saying not massive, not active, but we have, you know, we have actively gone after Canada by threatening to annex them militarily,

China by starting a trade war with them and Japan by doing all of the trade war stuff that we've done against them. If these countries begin to weaponize that debt by selling off, which would drive the prices down on T-bills, that would create enormous pressure on the American budget because then we would need to sell even more debt because the debt's worth less to finance things. And if that happens, here's me catastrophizing.

I worry- You haven't been catastrophizing so far with your predictions of stagflation and Chinese buying up the companies that are going bankrupt. Those aren't predictions. I'm just telling you what's going to happen, Tim. Donald Trump What is his move? Right because we understand now that he runs the economy the way he runs his businesses

Basically, I declare bankruptcy his move is declaring bankruptcy and to renegotiate his debts Yeah, and he's already said like well, maybe we'd have to renegotiate our debts Maybe the people who are foreign holders of our debt are only entitled to 80 cents on the dollar for their treasury bills. I mean, if that happens, anything like that, even talking about that in a serious way, I mean, Katie, bar the fucking door, because that would be the absolute end of the American financial order. And that is the stuff end of the American financial order. And that is the stuff of like great depression.

Okay. Well, let's check in on how things are going over in the military. Pete Hecht stuff made an announcement yesterday that he, uh, he's ordered the military to cut the number of the highest ranking officers by 20%, cut the national guardsmen by 10%. Why Tim? Because GIs over generals. It's a resource allocation thing, Tim. Okay.

Well, we're also cutting 10% across a similar reduction in the national guard or those kind of the elites, I guess, of the military as well. I don't know. We'll see. Meanwhile, he also got into a little bit of trouble because I guess he went rogue early in the administration, canceling weapons shipments to Ukraine, even though Donald Trump hadn't like asked for that per se in a meeting and the other members of the, what was it called? Huthy PC small group that were not read in on it. I guess he didn't send me signal messages.

And then they had, you know, I guess backtrack on that. But you know, he's still around. So what do you make about what's what's happened over at the Pentagon? So, I mean, it's pretty clear that this is a purge. And here's what I want people to understand. So he, Hank says, when he made this announcement, said that this this was he positioned as doge, right? Efficiency. We are going to be a military that relies on the grunts and more we need more grunts and fewer generals. All these generals are chest puffed out, don't know what it's like to get their boots dirty like me, Mr. TV host. And so he has a resource thing. So there are 38 four-star generals, just 38 of them.

That's it. If he wants to cut 20%, that means he'll fire eight of them. That means if those resources could support maybe 70 grunts. Oh, come on. support maybe 70 grunts. Oh, come on. Like at the unlisted level. That feels high even. Even that feels like, right.

But the point is like, you know, in a million man military, we have a guy who's claiming that this is about, you know, whoa, it's gotta mind our P's and Q's here on the budget. This is about one of two things. Either he is looking for an excuse to purge DEI generals, or he's looking to purge people who he believes are going to be a problem in the future because they are unreliable on the question of Donald Trump. I suspect it's the latter of those two.

Might be some overlap in those categories. There could be some overlap in those categories, but it is utterly arbitrary. Again, the idea like we need to cut our forces of four star generals by 20. Again, there are only 38 of them. This just means there are eight people he wants to fire. This is not a like, you know, well, we're going to sit you down with the bobs and have you interview

for your own jobs because we really got to be efficient here. And this is a persistent feature of all authoritarian attempts throughout history, right? That the guy who wants to be the maximum leader, the very first thing he has to do is make sure that the senior most levels of the military will be personally loyal to him. That's what this looks like for all the world. Okay. Things are going good there. Let's check in on the Department of Justice. We've got a US attorney fight. We've mentioned several times Eagle Ed Martin, but I do,

I want to draw a little bit closer attention to this because something really caught my eye yesterday. Usually these confirmations of us attorneys are not like controversial deals. I mean, Trump has put Alina Habba, the garbage, the garbage, she's garbage, but also the garage, like the parking garage lawyer as an attorney general up by you up in New Jersey there, North New Jersey, almost New York City. And she doesn't seem to be having any problems, but Ed Martin's having some problems, partly because he went on Russia Today like 82 times to discuss with Tom Nichols.

He had some associations with neo-Nazis. He called extraordinary. He forgot to include the fact that he was on the V-Dare, which is a white nationalist site. He was on their podcast a couple of years ago. Anyway, Trump puts out a bleat saying that Ed Martin's going through the approval process to be U.S. attorney according to to many but in particular Robert F. Kennedy Jr His approval is imperative in terms of doing all that has to be done to save lives and make America healthy again

Why would the US attorney? for District of Columbia Who has like real law and ordered responsibilities and has like massive like responsibilities? You know assuming that they cared about corruption and public corruption and all that Which they don't why would RFK jr. Care about this and the best theory I could come up with JVL is that Ed Martin had sent a letter to a medical journal editor Probing whether or not their journal is too partisan when it comes to various scientific debates So I guess they want

this guy in essentially so he can bully like universities, medical journals, anybody that does not go along with like whatever, the anti-vax, anti-DEI, anti-woke, any members of their agenda. They want this man as US attorney to bully people, his association with white nationalists, January 6 rioters, et cetera, be damned. I mean, not be damned, but because of it. Because of it. Right. And this is one of the things we see, and this is not a new observation for me, is that

the most reliable and pliant people are often the most compromised. And so a guy like Ed Martin has no individual standing, right? The only thing he has to offer is total loyalty. And so people like that are useful. Every authoritarian regime has people like this, right? And I think that RFK sees that and understands it. And it's not good. It's not good. I mean, you know, the administration is digging in on going after Harvard. Like a high class, like a Ted Cruz type, right? Like a Harvard graduating lawyer that didn't go into politics, but is in, you know, as a FedSoc person, you

put them in a US attorney slot. They're not going to put their name on it. Maybe they might do some ridiculous stuff, but they won't put their name on some letter bullying a random medical journal because RFK wants to. And if they're like, if they need to leave the job, it's fine. Perkins, Cooey or somebody will hire them on the way out. You know, like they'll be fine. Like Ed Martin has no other like, you know, potential options.

Like this is it. Like he has a mega loyalist, a mega hatchet man. This and a speaking slot at CPAC. Like that's, that's all this guy has, but guys like that again are useful and guys like the, the Ted Cruz type are dangerous to a regime because they can't be counted on 100%, maybe 98%, maybe even 99%. But you do have to worry that they wind up like,

that lady lawyer at Justice Department who resigned instead of pulling the Eric Adams charges, right? And they do not want people like that. To this point, you also wrote a triad yesterday just about the use of violence in authoritarian regimes and who gets to use it and who doesn't. And this is all obviously like part of the system. You want US attorneys who are going to look the other way when it comes to if there is a police officer, an FBI agent or something, somebody in DC that roughs somebody up on

behalf of the administration or the other way. And you wrote kind of about the importance of this to aspiring autocrats in the context of the Ashley Babbitt and the George Floyd situation where we have now, the government is now coming to a settlement with Ashley Babbitt's family. And Ashley Babbitt, for people who don't know, was the woman that was charging into the Capitol through the broken glass, was warned, and then was shot by Capitol police and eventually died. On the other side of this, there's push for parting, Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd, kneeling on his neck.

Just talk about kind of like that whole sort of universe and like why all of these cogs are necessary for maintaining power. So this, I mean, I think often people like us look at this and they just think, oh, it's hypocrisy. But that's not quite it, right? Hypocrisy is actually in a way good. Hypocrisy is the, what's the saying?

The tribute that vice pays to virtue, right? And that's not this, right? The same people who want to see Derek Chauvin pardoned, because they believe that A, he didn't kill George Floyd, and B, even if he did kill George Floyd, he didn't do anything wrong. And there are a lot of them. You should go over to

the free press where Barry Weiss publishes them all the time. And then at the same time, that's those same groups of people see Ashley Pabbitt as a martyr who was killed by a terrible, bloodthirsty, bad cop. Right? And you think, oh, that's hypocrisy, but it's not it. Right?

This is fascism. And what fascism does is it sees the use of force as properly only belonging to them. And once they get to control government, then they want to use the government to apply force to others. But until that point, until they get the takeover, what they want to do is try to prevent the government from using force to stop them.

And this is just a worldview. Like, you know, the liberal worldview, and I don't mean like democratic liberal, I mean like big L liberal worldview, is that the government has to have in a society basically a near monopoly on the use of force. And because that power is so awesome, it must be scaffolded in by a bunch of transparent and clearly applied laws that don't change around,

and the rules of which are pretty rigid, right? You have to have due process. Everybody has to understand what the structure of the rule of law is. The rule of law has to apply basically the same to everybody. And the fascists just don't agree with that. That's not their worldview. Yeah, this is to me, and you're using force here in the most literal sense, right? Since it's the, like, force of violence and death of George Floyd and Ashley Babbitt.

But it's the same principle as what we were just talking about with Hank Sutherland Martin, right? Like, they want to have a US attorney that will use force in the way that they can to bully universities, medical journals, whoever. Like, try to bully them and stop them from, you know, speaking out against the administration. Like, hey, Seth, like, you want to have people that you can rely upon in the military command when orders are made, et cetera, right?

Like, this is happening, like, across the whole federal government. Yeah, everywhere. And this is, again, I just don't know that there's any reason to tiptoe around the F word anymore. We're not there yet. But that's, that is the purpose and direction of all of the things. Whoo. Everybody been having fun yet? All right. We got to do a little politics at the end. Do you have anything else on the crashing of the economy, incipient fascism?

I got it. I got a couple other things. One of the other things that we have been seeing just as an indicator of what's to come is big corporations pulling their earnings forecasts for the year. Last week we had a couple airlines pulling theirs, a bunch of airlines now. Not great. This is due to both immigration and the economic situation. And yesterday, Ford pulled its earnings projections.

Let me let me just tell people who aren't familiar with this. When publicly traded companies pull their earnings forecasts, it's not because they're not sure exactly how much money they're going to make because things are so good. It's not because they're like, boy, you know what, we might make so much money next year that we can't even begin to guess. Can you predict it?

It's the opposite. It's that things are in free fall. You know, we're going to get there and I- That's like Jason Miller's earnings projections. He's like, I can't even forecast who the hell knows, right? Palau might next year decide to pay me a million dollars a month. Yeah. And I am, I mean, the thing I am more curious about than anything in the world

is whether we get to regret from the people who did this to America. Ian, I sent you a little thing right before we got on air. I don't know if you want to talk about it or not. Okay. I was going to save it for dessert. We're going to save it for dessert. We're going to save it for dessert. We got to do a real quick politics. It's a politics podcast.

I mean, it's turned into a fascism podcast, but it's also a politics podcast. It's very fast. Tomato, tomato. On the Republican, should we do the Republicans first or the Democrats? I just have one little thing on the Democrats. We'll move past it fast, but I just had, I would hope that maybe the person that runs the DNC's Twitter feed might possibly listen to this

or might have a friend who does. So just as a friend, this is not anything in the scale of incipient fascism. It's not that big of a deal, but like, you gotta be smarter. Like in our opposition, we just you gotta be smarter like in our opposition We just have to be smarter the Democrats posted this last night Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala and it's a picture of her standing in this dress with my car

If Kamala wants to go to the Met Gala, she can go to the fucking Met Gala Kamala did the best she could did everything she could didn't work out. I do not begrudge her She should live a fulfilling life. She wants to go to the Met Gala fine. She wants to do other things fine with me. The DNC though, is in service of like, electing Democrats and opposing Trump and doing a like page six Kamala Harris stuns at this fancy gala post. It's a no. Don't do that. Bad. So, uh, in the writer's room at wrestling, so if you're in the WWE writer's room, uh, and you are mapping out storylines, the question that is always asked, the fundamental question is, who does this put over, right? Putting over in wrestling parlance is, who does this put over?

Putting over in wrestling parlance is, helping make them more popular with the crowd. And so whether it is like, and then Bruiser Brody hits another guy, hits George the Animal Steal with a chair. Well, the question is, well, why does he hit him with a chair? Who does that put over? And that is always the question.

If you run the Twitter feed at the DNC, before you hit send on every one of your tweets, you should be asking yourself, who does this put over? Because a tweet like that is absolutely useless. Well, it puts over the other side. Like, what do you think the response is going to be to that? There'll be a handful of common super fans are like, yeah, it's Queen. But mostly it'll be people dunking on you. So you're putting over the other side. You're giving them something to dunk on you. Why don't do that? Don't do it. Be best. Geez. It's like what a little bit better to some, some silver linings, Brian Kemp and Mike Pence. You've

been the biggest Mike Pence advocate in the world. I want to say something about Brian Kemp. I, he's too conservative for me. New listeners, sometimes people like they lump us all together, us Republicans, like former Republicans. You know, I was a squish. My friend Amanda, we always had this joke, former colleague of ours, Amanda Carpenter, she was always on the like Tea Party side and I was on the squishy side of primaries. Like we were never friends, like we didn't really know each other until we both were like Donald Trump is fucking awful and came together to do the bulwark etc. That was always a squish. Brian Kemp is not my kind

of guy. Like his policies on a range of social issues in particular are just not not my cup of tea. But that said, he maintained his integrity throughout this whole process. You might not like some of the policy views he put he signed in Georgia, that Georgia's doing pretty well as a state, but he maintained his integrity the whole time he ran for reelection in 2022, Trump tried to primary him, you know, he did go to a Trump event, like he had a couple of things I wouldn't have done, but overall he was never out there doing Lindsey Graham, like post-hoc apologia for Donald Trump.

He never wavered on the 2020 election being won by Joe Biden. He confirmed the, et cetera. He did essentially what you would want a conservative Republican to do. And all these guys that did suck up to Trump, that did trade in their integrity, went back to him. Like Brian, we could use you now. Like your little independent streak might help us in 2026, because it's probably going to be an ugly year for Republicans.

You run against Jon Ossoff. I bet we could win enough of those suburban Atlanta Republicans who have been disgusted by Trump to vote for you that we can get the Senate seat. And yesterday, Brian Kemp said, no, no thanks. And I can't get inside Brian Kemp's head, but what I assume based on talking to folks around him and Andrew Edgar also talked to some folks, it's just like A, being in the center right now sucks. They don't actually do anything.

They haven't passed any laws. But B, you can't run for Senate without Trump as president and maintain your integrity. You would have to go along with some, you would have to alibi Trump on at least some element of all this crazy shit we've been talking about. There's just no path to doing it otherwise as a Republican. And so he's not doing it. And so I want to say good on you, Brian Kemp. And in the same category, I'll give you the floor for Mike Pence. He received the JFK Profile and Courage Award last night. Dreamy Jack Schlossberg combed his hair. He issued sex jokes. He presented Mike Pence the award.

You're not ready to do it. You're not ready to do it, you're not ready to attaboy either of them? I wanna, can we talk about Kemp for a second? I mean, I don't wanna belabor it if it's not interesting. But I agree with like 95% of that. Okay. And yet, he didn't go far enough for what the moment demanded.

I agree. I think the moment demanded more. I have sympathy for him in a way I don't for like Chris Sununu. Because I think Kemp is weirdly more principled than Sununu. Oh yeah. I mean, Kemp, again, he maintained his, all I said was he maintained his integrity. I didn't say he did everything right. He didn't lose Cheney.

I'm not ready to build him a statue. Sure. But like he was like, Kristen Nunes is like going on CNN, like doing the panels spinning for Trump, like you never saw Brian Kemp doing that shit. No. And I, I, I wished the Kemp would have done more. I think I wrote this piece like four years ago. In a rational world, Kemp would have been the future

of the Republican Party. And the fact that he's not tells you what the Republican Party is. Not only is he not the future, he doesn't have a future really. He doesn't have a future. Mike Pence, I think has only gotten like better and like doubled down.

Okay. Here's, here's where I'm going to be able to only give you 95% because I did read his Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Trump the other day and I was excited. I was ready to be excited. I was ready to get hard and it was like, it was limp. I know it was like I had five paragraphs of throat clearing before you got to it. But anyway, go ahead. But the guy, I mean, the guy did almost everything

we could ask for, with the exception of endorsing Kamala Harris, though it's pretty obviously voted for. Mother did at least, for sure. Mother did at least. I'm pretty sure Mike Pence wrote in, you know, whatever, Jack Kemp or something. Can I ask a question about it? So what is RFK's wife, Cheryl Hines? Is that her name?

Yeah. Did you catch her trying to shape Trump's hand at UFC and Trump, you know, bypassed her? I saw this on Twitter. I didn't do a Zapruder film analysis of it. So it was very clear that he snubbed her. She wanted to shake his hand. And I just thought to myself, woman, what are you doing? Why are you eagerly trying to shake the hand. And I just thought to myself, woman, what are you doing? Why are you eagerly trying to shake the hand of this guy who you say you hate? And you go look at Karen Pence.

Go look at Karen Pence. Why is Karen Pence the Republican with the most moral clarity in this moment. I don't know. Maybe it's making me reconsider evangelism, though I guess she'd be alone on that one. I don't know, maybe something in the water in Indiana. It's something.

I'll take theories. All right, we're gonna give people dessert. It's been rough. You've made it a full hour. You know, it's been a good show, a long show, and we have a little bit of dessert if you're into schadenfreude, which I think some of you are. I have a sense that some of you might be.

And I'll just set it up here. In March, Trump administration canceled in-person classes at the National Fire Academy. That must have been a woke Academy. It trains the United States firefighters. The Academy is a big part of Emmetsburg's identity. Where's Emmetsburg? Maryland. Emmetsburg, Maryland. Just over the line from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. So real Maryland. Not, it's not like we're not training black firefighters in any city in Baltimore. That's right. Like we're in Emmetsbury. Frank Davis, what does Frank do there?

Talk to us about Frank Davis. Frank is the mayor of Emmetsbury. Of this town of three, as well as the captain of the emergency medical services at the local firehouse, the Vigilant Hose Company. He says that the administration has, MPR reached out to him, is still reviewing the Academy's operations and he's hopeful it will restore classes. But Frank, who had been a big advocate for Doge and a big advocate for Trump, said now if the administration doesn't re-up the fire Academy's funding. He's gonna see Trump somewhat differently.

It will change my outlook to say that they're not being fair. Frank doesn't think they're being fair. JVL, do you have any thoughts about this story? This story in NPR is filled with people in Emmitsburg who voted for Trump and love him and wanted him to cut and who, and Frank says, I'm probably going to get shot for this, but he's doing what he said he was going to do. I thought he said Frank was from the Pennsylvania Maryland border.

I met him in Ploomour. I don't know. Got it. So it sounded more like he was from like Greensboro. It will change my outlook to say that they're not being fair. So Davis, they're just going to cut it and not caring what they cut. Here's what I these fucking people in my my level of contempt for the Frank Davis's of the world is boundless

because his view of whether or not the Trump approach to cutting government is good or not is determined entirely by what happens to his pet project. Fuck you, Frank. Fuck you. You can't look around and tell that like if your fire school doesn't get to do in-person classes, then you will say that it's bad. You can't, you can't look at the national institutes of health and see the destruction of

vaccine research and say that, uh, oh yeah, that's bad. It has to happen to you, you provincial fucking burger. You mouth breathing surf. My God. You know what? And this is why this is why this country is fucked because idiots like this, who, of course, is that you've got to see this guy, the picture of this guy in his polo shirt, in his quaffed silver hair. And of course, he's the mayor of a town of three thousand people in real America.

And he he will determine whether or not it is good that Trump is doing things like making it so that firefighters can't be taught how to fight emergencies. Because this place is, as they say, it's like the Army War College for firefighters. And, you know, another Trump voter who looks at this and says, we are, this is another guy, Dennis O'Neill, another Trump voter, who says that the National Fire Academy takes men and women out of their comfort zone and exposes them to real serious tragedies and forces them to work through what kind of decisions they're going to make.

We are on a very long, slow path to self-destruction, he says. Every day that this training is unavailable to the locals is one day closer to a disaster they can't handle or won't know how to handle. But if Trump decides that they get an exception, then everything will be fine. Well. Because the world doesn't exist outside of their field of vision. And here's what bothers me the most.

Tell me, girl. So the populist view is that it is the elites who are cloistered and who can't see beyond their own borders. And it's the old New Yorker cover, right? Where it's like, you know, the Hudson River and then New Jersey and then like a little bit of blank space, then California, right? It's like, oh, these people can't see outside their bubbles. No, you know, it's the biggest fucking bubbles in the world.

The people of Emmitsburg. These are the people who are so provincial and so cloistered that they have no idea what is happening outside of their field of vision. And yet they are the ones who determine the future course of the American empire. Great. Great. Good fucking job, guys. Hold on. Let we read one more. John Beck, who serves as fire chief of the Waynesboro Volunteer Fire Department nearby in Pennsylvania, has applied for a weekend leadership and development course at the Academy in July. It would be his first one, but he doesn't expect it'll happen now.

He also says that online courses don't cut it. Beck, who runs a landscaping company, works for free as fire chief. He voted for Trump and supports cutting waste and making government smaller. But Beck doesn't see how training first responders is wasteful. We're only 100 days plus in, Beck said of Trump's current term. I wish things were going differently. Beck doesn't regret his vote yet. I'm not 100% there yet, he says, but it may not take much more. Mr. Beck, look around you. Look around what is happening

to America. Look at USAID. Look at the kids in Africa who are dying because they can't get medication. Look at what is happening to soybean farmers who don't have places to sell their crops. Whether or not you get there should not be dependent upon what happens in your tiny, insignificant slice of America. The world is bigger and more important than you, sir. Well, people, now you know why we cloister JVL to the next level podcast for the real sickos and the secret podcast. Or if you're liking this, you can get it if you're a Bullwork Plus member, go to thebullwork.com

slash subscribe. You know, here, I take a little bit of different view. Welcome to the warm embrace of the resistance. I want to welcome you to the warm embrace of the resistance, Frank Davis. You know, you are welcome here. We honor your experience at the National Fire Academy and everything that you do to protect us from the threat of fires. And Mr. O'Neill, I thought you were very insightful in one point. We are indeed on a long, slow path to self-destruction. It's just, it's a much bigger self-destruction than you realize. JVL, thank you

for coming and doing this with me today. Was it too much? I thought it was just enough. I thought the Goldilocks, thought the porridge was just right. And coming off that Nuggets win last night, man, I needed a cigarette. This, okay, see this coach Mark Dagnall, they did this thing. Shout out to Scott Conroy. That is second thing that NBA coaches do now, which is when you're up three, you foul all the other teams. So they can't shoot a three to tie. And that goes against the spirit of the game of basketball.

It goes against the spirit of the sport. The basketball gods rained down vengeance upon Mark Dagnall for trying that strategy. And so I needed a post-game cigarette and I needed a post-game, a podcast that was a kind of a cigarette and spirit. And you were that for me. So thank you so much. You got it, brother.

Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace. Gotta be dead before you're gone There's only things I've got in And I'll be happy so I won't be dead And I'll be cheering that you're going down And I'll be laughing, I'll be laughing How many feelings can you steal? Gotta be part of your appeal

Gotta be part of your appeal I can suit you cause you're wearing thin Like you and I did for once again Cause all these days have gone in And I'll be happy so I won't pretend And I'll be cheering as you're going down And I'll be happy so I won't be dead And I'll be cheering as I'm going down And I'll be acting A higher depth And I'm so happy

In looking at the Of your demise When the ship is going down I'll go out and break the tab A higher depth A higher depth A higher depth I'd go out and break the tab, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brepp.