The David Pakman Show - Republicans suddenly break with Trump as prices surge

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

-- On the Show: -- Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, joins us to discuss the right's obsession with him, the laptop scandal, and his new crypto project -- U.S. diesel fuel prices reach record highs due to global supply disruptions, escalating costs across transportation and consumer goods -- A viral image allegedly showing Donald Trump kissing aide Natalie Harp triggers debate after a sharper version turns out to be AI-generated -- Seven House Republicans side with Democrats to pass a resolution limiting presidential authority over the military conflict involving Iran -- A federal judge halts efforts to place Donald Trump's name on the Kennedy Center, prompting Trump to threaten to freeze renovations -- Donald Trump publishes social media posts criticizing recent Supreme Court rulings and claiming his assassination attempt was a political plot -- David introduces a text messaging line for subscribers to establish direct audience communication outside of social media algorithms -- On the Bonus Show: Travel and book updates from David, and much more... 💳 PDS Debt: Get your free assessment & find the best option for you at https://pdsdebt.com/pakman 📄 UPDF: Get 5 apps in one seamless workflow for up to 52% off at https://davidpakman.com/updf 🧽 Blueland: Get 15% OFF sustainable cleaning products at https://blueland.com/pakman 💻 Sponsored by Private Internet Access: 83% OFF + 4 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/Pakman 🧠 Try Brain.fm totally free for a month at https://brain.fm/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com -- Get David's Book: https://bit.ly/m/attention -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow (00:00) Start(01:16) Soaring diesel prices threaten US economy(08:56) Viral Trump kiss photo raises AI questions(21:29) House Republicans vote to curb Trump's war(29:04) Judge blocks Kennedy Center Trump renaming(39:39) Hunter Biden Interview(1:29:26) Trump condemns Supreme Court and FBI(1:36:54) David launches texting platform Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming up on today's show, there is an economic number exploding right now. And even if you've never bought a gallon of diesel in your life, I haven't. We are all going to feel this one. Then a bizarre viral image appears to show Donald Trump making out with Natalie Harp on a golf course, except one version is AI generated. The other is unverified. And this is exactly what I've been warning about. We also have Republicans unexpectedly breaking with Donald Trump.

Iran, seven House Republicans joined Democrats on a war powers resolution. And then a federal judge tells Trump no again in the increasingly bizarre battle over putting Trump's name on the Kennedy Center plus extraordinary new posts from the mango menace about the Supreme Court and the Butler assassination attempt. Hunter Biden will join me unless that gets canceled between now and when it's scheduled. And I'm finally giving you my phone number. I will explain all of that and more today. I am back from Washington, D.C. And let's do a show today. Why not? There's an economic number exploding right now. Most Americans are probably not watching it, but you should be. We all should because this is going to really affect us. Diesel fuel

has again hit a record all time high in the United States, not gasoline, diesel. And if you go to the AAA AAA's highest recorded average price indicator, you see that once again, this was the case on Monday. This was the case last Thursday. Again, today, September 16th, 2026 is the day of the highest ever diesel price the United States has ever seen. $6.31 on average. It is over $7 a gallon of diesel in many parts of the country.

Now, many of you might be saying, David, I have an electric vehicle. David, I've got a gasoline powered vehicle. Sweet, sweet gasoline, not diesel. I don't drive one of those coal rolling diesel trucks. Well, you are completely missing why this matters because you might not be buying diesel directly, but just about everything you do buy has diesel. somewhere in the price because the truck bringing food to your supermarket runs on diesel. The refrigerated trailer carrying your goat meat and goat milk and vegetables and frozen food

and all of it. It's all running on diesel. The tractor harvesting the crops that the diesel truck bring to the grocery store is running on diesel. And the construction equipment building the farmhouse where the diesel tractor is stored, which then goes on to the diesel truck to get to the grocery store. The construction equipment that built the farm is running on diesel. You get the point. The delivery trucks, although Amazon has a bunch of these electric ones, but in general, delivery trucks and, you know, trains and diesel is everywhere.

And it is as extraordinarily expensive as it has ever been in nominal terms. Remember, there was a brief period where in inflation adjusted terms, it was slightly higher. A year ago, diesel was under $4 a gallon. It is now 631 and 310,000th of a dollar. And the Energy Information Administration's weekly survey indicates that this could go even higher. Now, if you're a trucker filling 200 gallon tanks, so $200 total, you are talking about more than an extra $500 for just a single fill up. They are not going to absorb that cost. That is not going to disappear.

And so some combination they might absorb at the trucking company. And maybe the farmer absorbs a little bit and maybe the manufacturer or the retailer, but it all gets passed down to consumers. This is the real trickle down. And we're seeing the effects already because you've got railroad fuel surcharges on grain shipments. They're up over 150% in the last year. Fuel surcharges are now about 11% of rail transportation cost for corn and soybeans compared with just 5% last year. So that's more than doubled as a percentage of the total price. And it's happening right as farmers are starting their corn harvest and their soybean harvest. So you have farmers paying more to operate their equipment and paying more to move the crop and the processors are paying more to move the product and supermarkets are paying more to receive it.

And this is how the diesel crisis affects you, even if you go, I've got an EV and I walk to my grocery store. Now, the Atlantic is reporting that there is a gas, a gas station, a gas and diesel station in San Diego, California selling diesel for $9.99 a gallon. We, now that's not the average, but it is almost so expensive in San Diego that if it goes up any higher, the little gas price sign that they have at the station is not going to have enough digits if it goes to $10 per gallon. And it probably will by tomorrow, to be quite frank. Now, this gives you sort of like some idea of the level of the crisis. And Donald Trump is arguing, who are we going to blame? We are going to blame Ukraine and Vladimir Zelensky fighting a defensive war against Russia. Now, Ukraine has been attacking Russian refineries.

There is no doubt that that has some effect on the price of energy. Russia is normally a big diesel exporter and their refinery capacity has been damaged. And it is true, Russia has restricted diesel exports. But energy analysts quoted in the report say Ukraine is not the primary reason. Now, first of all, Ukraine is fighting a defensive war and they're doing anything they can against a far bigger country and there is strategic value to attacking those refineries. But the bigger picture is that the war with Iran has disrupted oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

And so Middle East refineries have been damaged or gone completely offline. There's a major Saudi pipeline that's been disrupted. And yes, Russian refinery capacity has also been hit. So we have a real problem on our hands. Now, American refineries are not just sitting around doing nothing either because U.S. refinery utilization hit 98 percent. Our American refineries are doing it basically everything they can. This is the highest level since 2018. They are running flat out.

And the reason that diesel is still this expensive is because of a global supply problem. And so the idea of a quick, you know, Russian. Ukraine ceasefire as instantly fixing this is completely unrealistic. Even if attack stopped tomorrow, the damaged refineries would still be damaged. They don't get fixed overnight if the attack stopped. And it could be weeks of a sustained ceasefire, if not longer, to finally start helping diesel markets. So these numbers could get even crazier. Now, meanwhile, the Middle East disruptions would still exist even if the Russia stuff was cleared up. And the part that people should really understand is that diesel prices are now entering a season where demand usually

gets stronger. We think about gasoline demand going up in the summer as people do road trips, etc. Harvest season for agriculture uses massive amounts of diesel and then winter increases demand for heating oil. Heating oil chemically is more like diesel than it is like gasoline. So this is not just there's a trucker angry at a truck stop. This is the entire. entire economy, food, shipping, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, home heating, and you start seeing it in places where nobody even thinks about, oh, diesel prices are related to this. And so that's why this is a massive economic story.

Why is everything suddenly costing more? Well, the tariffs are part of it. But part of the answer is the fuel in the tank of the truck that brought you your stuff. should consider this when they go to vote in November and mail and ballots are going to be going out imminently. This is of critical consequence to this economy. All right. There is a picture going absolutely viral that shows Donald Trump kissing his aid, Natalie

Harp on a golf course and getting a little handsy with her. Now before anybody runs with this as proof of anything. We have to talk about what we actually know. This is one of the problems I write about in my forthcoming book pay attention, which is out in six days. This is a problem we are going to have in general on the internet and in the political world. Now, the answer right now about this picture is we don't exactly know whether it's real. And I can't come to you today and say the entire thing is simply AI fabricated. However, I also can't come to you and say it's been proven that these pictures are fake.

So let me explain what's going on. The picture of what appears to be Donald Trump, I don't want to say fondling, but certainly getting handsy with and making out with his assistant Natalie Harp. The picture that started circulating was very blurry. And it purported to show a golf course and embrace a kiss between someone who seems to be Trump and a blonde woman that seems to be Natalie Hart. Now, we don't have a confirmed photographer attached to the picture as of this moment. We don't have a confirmed date when the picture was taken.

We have no independently confirmed location. Nobody has come forward so far with an original camera file or some kind of chain of custody for the image. That's problem number one. Now, then things get even stranger because after the blurry picture came out, a much clearer version of essentially the same image started circulating online. And that version has a pretty spectacular problem, which is look at the woman's gloved hand. It kind of seems like she's got six fingers. Now, there were some tests done of the sharper picture. And there was strong evidence

that that picture was AI generated. There was one report from Hive that that sharper image is 99.9% likely to be AI generated. Open AI's verification system detected a watermark associated with their own image tools. So then we can go, oh, so it is AI, right? Well, not really because it could be the case that the sharpened image is coming up as AI generated or modified because AI was used to upscale and sharpen the image, but that the underlying blurry image may indeed be real. And so this is where the story becomes really interesting. It doesn't settle. Even determining that the upscaled picture might have some AI stuff in it, that doesn't

tell us whether the blurry picture is real. So then the blurry version of this image was tested with multiple systems, including Hive and Open AI and Google's tools. And all of those systems said, hey, you know what? The blurry image does not have signals indicating that it is AI generated. Now, does that mean that that picture is real? No. AI detectors are not these magic truth machines. And what may have happened is that an AI picture was generated and then somebody went into Photoshop or Gimp or Canva or whatever and reduced the resolution of the original AI generated image to make it blurry. And that algorithmic decrease in the resolution may have allowed the picture to evade AI. detection sequence. So that's like one possible sequence. Or you could have the opposite. You could have somebody starting with an authentic really low quality image. And then all you do is upscale it.

So it is a real image. But the upscaling invents these weird details like six fingers on Natalie Harp's hand. Now, we do not know. And this is why establishing which is the first image is really so important. Now, a lot of investigation has been done. What's the earliest version? of the image. Well, it seems as though the blurry version was posted on threads on September 14th. And the sharper version that has been detected as using AI only surfaced later in one trail that was been that was that was sort of put together. But again, this doesn't prove that the original image is authentic and it doesn't prove that the original image is AI generated. This is the world in which we now operate. Now, there's another thing about the picture that makes me a little skeptical,

although this is really circumstantial rather than forensic evidence. Think about what we're supposedly seeing here. It is the president of the United States standing on a golf course in an intimate moment with Natalie Harp. And somehow the two of them are essentially by themselves. And there's someone with a camera positioned far away enough that the picture looks almost paparazzi style. It's kind of hard to believe, right? I mean, presidents don't you. usually casually wander around golf courses completely unaccompanied. Their secret service, their staff, there's caddies, golf course personnel, vehicles, et cetera. Now, that doesn't mean the scene is impossible. There could be people right outside the frame or, you know,

maybe a long lens is being used and it's compressing the distance and the photographer maybe is in the bushes or something like that. But if this were an authentic photograph, the obvious first question is who took the picture? We haven't gotten an answer to that. Second question is, where were they standing? What golf course? We don't have the answer to that. How did this photographer get into this position to get the shot? What's the original? These are all really important questions and there's not a single photographer saying, yeah, I took this picture. It's a real picture. Now, there is also a danger, I believe, in going too far in the opposite direction. Natalie Harp regularly accompanies Donald Trump on golf outings. So that in and of itself is not weird. That's

independently documented. They're appearing together in legitimate pictures, though, doesn't tell us whether they were really making out on a golf course. So the conclusion is very unsatisfying, but this is exactly the problem that we are now going to be facing. I open my book, pay attention with an anecdote that some of you may remember when there was a picture of Donald Trump with a walker, a mobility aid, a walker walking down the hallway of the White House. This was years ago. And I opened the book with this anecdote. And it spread far and wide. And it was used by Trump's the tractors as proof that he is declining physically and has a medical problem. And the picture was completely AI generated. And in the book, I talk about how the fact that it was AI generated did not

really matter in the end in the sense that those who were most eager to share it already believe the conclusion is true regardless of the image's existence, which is Donald Trump is declining medically and physically. And at the end of the day, the correction was seen by. relatively few people. And so there's a bunch of issues that almost make it irrelevant whether the picture is real or not. At this point in time, we don't have authentication of the blurry version. AI detectors failing to say it's been manipulated doesn't prove that it's real. And we are left in the position of saying, well, can we get an original image? Can we get a name of a photographer? Can we get the metadata? Does anybody else have video or pictures from another angle, some way to

independently confirm whether this is real. And the entire episode really previews a world we're entering where even seeing something with our own eyes isn't going to be enough. A real image could be called AI. That happens all the time. An AI image can be degraded until it becomes difficult to determine whether it originally came from something that is AI. A real image can be AI enhanced. And the enhancement is what adds these fake details, even though the original image is real. And sometimes the most accurate answer available is the one people hate, which is we don't know. I can't tell you at this moment whether the source image is real and whether Donald Trump is having an intimate affair with Natalie Harp and whether they were making out and getting handsy. It's an 80 year old man we're talking about on the golf course.

We just don't know yet. And we don't know can lead people to use these uncertain moments cynically for their own gain. We need a way to protect ourselves against this sort of thing. One of the most frustrating things about debt is how it starts to feel normal. You plan around payments, you delay decisions. Every paycheck is already spoken for before it lands. Our sponsor, PDS debt, can help you break that pattern. What PDS debt will do is work with anybody who's struggling with credit cards, personal loans,

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I might have something to announce in Austin, Texas coming up soon as well. And of course, thanks to everybody who has been supporting the book and the show and all of it. Something interesting is starting to happen around the president. And this is now the second version of this that we've seen in just a few days. Earlier this week, or maybe it was late last week, we talked about Fox News, sort of taking the tiniest step away from comfort. complete and total loyalty to Donald Trump. And the story involved Maria Bartaromo, Peter Navarro, attacking Fox, Trump world effectively

saying, listen, if you're not completely with us, you're against us. And now Fox News itself is reporting on another crack. And this time it's coming from inside the Republican Party. What we saw in the last few hours is seven House Republicans joining Democrats to pass a resolution attempting to rein in Donald Trump's war. powers in Iran. And I want to emphasize who is reporting this. Fox News.

Fox News's headlines says seven Republicans rebel against Trump vote with Dems to rein in Iran war powers. Now let's be precise about what happened. Every voting Democrat supporting the measure, supported the measure, seven Republicans joined them and the final vote was 220 to 204. Republicans were Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, Brian Fitzpatrick, Nancy Mace, Thomas Massey, Marianette Miller Meeks and Zach Nunn. Now this is not a Republican party-wide revolt.

I'm not pretending that it is more than 200 House Republicans still voted against this. But the seven Republicans were enough to change the outcome. And now we have a pattern that we can observe. The House has repeatedly considered efforts to limit Trump's authority over the Iran war. And this was the third House vote trying to end the war. And this time the resolution actually passed. And there are Republicans who aren't just like, oh, I'm vaguely concerned. These are people who are saying we need to do something about it.

Thomas Massey, one of the seven revolting Republicans now introduced articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, including the allegation that the administration has violated the war powers resolution by continuing this war without congressional authority. So quaint, right? So put this now next to the Fox News story from earlier this week. In that story, Fox made this very limited editorial decision that a lot of Trump allies didn't like. And immediately Peter Navarro was on Newsmax going Fox isn't really MAGA anymore.

And now Fox News itself is reporting, hey, Republicans are rebelling against Trump on Iran. And these are different stories. But the underlying dynamic, I think, is really important to. watch. One of Trump's political strengths depended on this expectation of loyalty, total loyalty. And it's not like, we mostly agree with you. It's loyalty 100%. And that creates a very interesting problem. Whenever somebody inside Donald Trump's own political ecosystem or political world disagrees with him, which is that a network can support him overwhelmingly, but they make one editorial decision Trump doesn't like and they get attacked. This is the way cults work. And a Republican

member of Congress can vote with Trump 99% of the time, as most of them do on almost everything. And they become a problem as soon as they go, well, yeah, we shouldn't be in this war and Trump doesn't have the authorization to keep it going. And Iran is probably becoming the clearest place where we're seeing this disagreement. The Republicans supporting the resolution argue that Congress, not just the president has constitutional authority over war. And they're right. And the Trump administration argues, no, you know, the president has the authority to do this. He's the commander in chief. If you restrict the president at all, it'll affect national security. You don't want to do that, do you? So this is a very substantive disagreement. This is not, you know, I mean, men and women's

sports or whatever cultural war thing. This is, this is a real disagreement. And it comes as the war is now into month seven with reporting that it has now cost more than $38 billion and it's costing a lot more every single day. So seven Republicans, seven is seven. It's not 70. It's not half of the conference, but this is how you start to see political change. And you don't wait until everybody breaks at once. You look and you say, well, where is disagreement tolerable or acceptable? And first it's four Republicans and then it's seven. And then it's a Republican introducing impeachment articles against Hegsef. And then it's Fox News openly saying, hey, this is a rebellion against Donald Trump. And the language of it is very interesting. Trump world has demonstrated even a small act of

independence can become a loyalty test. And so now the question is, does Iran remain this narrow exception? It's total loyalty other than there for seven Republicans? Or are we starting to see more Republicans figure out, hey, you know what? I can pick my spots to oppose Trump and I can do it strategically. And I can do it in a way that then in my reelection campaign, because all of the members of the House remember are up for reelection every two years, can I do it in a way where I can still mostly be loyal to Trump so that he doesn't attack me?

But then I can go to my district and I can say to my Trump's skeptics. constituents, hey, you know what? I didn't agree with Trump on this. And I voted against it. And I'm focused on bringing economic prosperity to my district, even if they're not actually doing it, right? Obviously, these are all lies and propaganda, but I'm thinking about it from a political strategy perspective. Is that something that would allow Republicans to bridge this gap between, you know, total loyalty to Trump is going to hurt me in my reelection campaign, but denouncing Trump is going to hurt me in my re-election campaign because then Trump will start firing off messages on troth sensual against me and trying to hurt me in my reelection campaign,

although it's getting a little late in the game for that because the election is so close. Is it possible that these narrower disagreements because Trump is so busy flipping out about other stuff could create an opportunity for Republicans to find spots where they can say, I'm not with Trump on everything such that it could help them politically. I don't really know the answer. But what I can tell you is I care about the objective facts. I just gave you the propaganda analysis of what Republicans might be able to do with this. But there's a much more important thing, which is all of these Republicans are voting to rubber

stamp whatever Trump wants, 92 to 98% of the time. And so let's not allow. I'm telling you how they might propagandize around this. But then I'll give you the truth now, which is let's not let them do it. Because for the most part, they're all rubber stamping almost everything that Trump wants to do. And there is much of the problem as Trump because they could have stopped Trump. If Republicans had gotten together and they had said, listen, we're not doing it. Go and try to get primary challenges against all of us. You're not going to be able to do it. We are not going along with this and this and this. That would be a more respectable and responsible Republican Party. That's not what we have. It's what we should have, but it's not what we have. And they do deserve to be punished electorally in November. Let's see if it happens. All right.

In a normal administration, what I'm about to tell you wouldn't be a story. Because in a normal administration with a normal president, the president of the United States would not be having an escalating legal battle over whether his own name can be plastered across the Kennedy Center. But that's where we are today. And I'm glad to report to you that a fact that a. federal judge now told Donald Trump again, no, you're not going to do it. You can't just rename the Kennedy Center after yourself. You can't put a giant inscription honoring yourself on the building

as a workaround. And you can't rename the grounds after yourself either. And the reason is really straightforward. Congress created the Kennedy Center as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. We have federal law. And federal law limits the addition of new memorials there. And so Judge Christopher Cooper ruled back in May, the board can't just rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. You can't do it. And Trump's name had actually been installed on the facade. And a court said, you've got to remove it. So then Donald Trump's allies came up with another idea and they said, okay, fine. Maybe we can't rename the Kennedy Center. But what if we put an inscription on the building? And it says restored and renovated by Donald Trump.

Ha, ha, ha, exactly. Ladies and gentlemen. That's a high energy Trump grunting in pleasure about this. And then what if he also renamed the plaza after Donald Trump? And the judge has now said, you can't do that stuff either. He wrote, the board can't install memorials to Trump or anybody else without approval from Congress. And he said that the inscription is simply an attempt to do a runaround against my previous ruling.

And this is where the story becomes completely extraordinary. Trump's response then is, well, maybe you don't get the renovation of the Kennedy Center. And maybe we shut the entire thing down. It is a toddler pooping in the sandbox when they are told, little Jimmy, it's time to go home for bedtime. And they go, well, if I can't play in the sandbox, I'm shutting the whole thing down. Look at what Donald Trump posted here. Quote, by the way, this of course was supposed to the truth social. The board of the Kennedy Center today agreed almost unanimously to close the building for safety

reasons and so that it can begin the process of reconstruction. The closing will take place immediately. However, the renovation and reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the board's approved name. If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the reconstruction and renovation of the Kennedy Center will not take place. The attorneys from the DOJ will ask for an expedited appeal. In the meantime, $17 million raised by President Trump has been put into the Kennedy Center account

to keep it afloat. Thank you for your attention to this matter. This is the president explicitly connecting the future of the future. of the renovation to whether they let him put his name on it. And the New York Times is reporting that the Kennedy Center's Trump Aligned board voted again to just shut down the entire thing. Now, is it untrue that there are physical problems? No, there are.

There's water infiltration. There was an incident where a five foot piece of ceiling plaster fell. Those are legitimate safety issues. They can be remediated. But Trump is saying separately, even if the building needs renovation, which it does, the The renovation will not happen if ultimately you don't put my name on this thing. And so this is not the building is unsafe. So we've got to renovated.

It's the building needs hundreds of millions of dollars in work. If the court doesn't let me put my name on it, I'm going to stop the entire thing. And we're going to shut it down. And remember that Congress supplied the renovation money. Congress, your tax money to renovate this, not related to the name of Trump on the thing. And the Kennedy Center originally justified putting Trump's name on the building by saying, well, he secured the funding. I don't know about that. Then the court said, well, that doesn't give the board legal authority to rename it.

It is a congressionally established memorial. You can't change the name. And now the response is, well, we'll make all of it part of the fight for my name. He's pooping in the sandbox because he's not allowed to play in it. Now, there's also a financial argument being made, which is that Kennedy Center officials say the institution is really in trouble. And of course, what's the reason it's in trouble? Part of the reason they're in trouble financially is because since Trump installed the loyal board and tried to rename the thing, a lot of acts canceled their performances. And a lot of people said, I'm not buying tickets to this thing.

It's no longer a neutral cultural institution. It is now yet another tool or arm of the Trump administration. That's why they're having the financial problem. So then income Trump and he goes, well, I raise some money to keep it operating. $17 million. And the Justice Department lawyers are going, you know, Trump is important to fundraising here. And if you don't let us put his name on it, if you don't let us do the inscription, it could drive donors away. Trump getting involved in this in the first place has driven donors away and attendees away and performers away. So this is one of those things where why is he even involved? Why is. Why is. Presidents would not normally be involved in the specific renovations of a reflecting pool or the specific renovations of the Fed buildings as he's tried to get involved.

And remember when Jerome Powell was the Fed chair, he showed up and tried to intimidate or the Kennedy Center. This is not normal. And he doesn't have the legal authority to do this stuff. He is simply trying to slap his name on anything he can. And what he does is he publicly threatens to cancel the whole renovation if the courts don't let him put his name on the building. It is a toddler. It is a functional, barely functional, adult, elderly, really, toddler.

And it is globally embarrassing and humiliating. Other countries see this and they go, what is your president doing? And he just insists that these are the ways he wants to spend his time, which should be a reminder to all of us, this guy doesn't really want to be president in the sense of doing the job. He wants to have the title. He wants to play golf. And he wants vanity projects where institutions or people pledge loyalty to him. And he has developed a politics where unfortunately, as we previously discussed, a lot of his followers have come to see politics as entertainment. They don't expect much from government, but they have all our tax dollars. Shouldn't we get things from that that they do

to help people? No, they just want to be entertained. They want Trump's name on stuff. They want to hear me see memes and hear talk about Venezuela as the 51st state or Canada or whatever. And that's basically the full scope of their. Oh, and own the libs, of course. Well, this is what you get. And it is pathetic and humiliating. Plastic pollution demands systemic action. One big difference you can make is reducing single-use plastics in your household waste. Our sponsor, Blue Land, makes it easy. They've got eco-friendly power-duo laundry tablets. These are pre-measured mess-free tablets, no plastics, no microplastics. As is always the case with Blue Land's eco-friendly cleaning products. You don't sacrifice results when you go green. Bluelands Power Duo laundry tablets have a dual-layer design.

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separate accounts. My audience gets 83% off. So it's 203 a month plus four extra months for free. Go to PIAvPN.com slash Pacman. The link is in the description. Well, Hunter Biden is here today. A very much anticipated conversation. Hunter, I have to tell you, you know, the last 48 hours, I'm seeing these videos of Donald Trump asleep again in public. I'm seeing a video of Mitch McConnell being wheeled out and into the Senate with a restriction placed where there can be no audio because his staff does not want the, his voice heard,

whatever voice he has. And I just can't help but think of the incredible double standard here on the health of elected officials as a sort of litmus test in thinking about what the last couple years of your father's presidency were. When you see that, do you get angry? Do you laugh? Is it surprising? Is it expected? I mean, like, what, what do you make of it as you see these videos of Mitch McConnell and Trump's asleep two, three times a week in public? Well, you know, what I think is that their hypocrisy knows no bounds. I mean, it truly doesn't. And I'm a, I lost the ability to be surprised a long time ago.

And, and, but I think of it in two ways. One, there is the, just the, the, the, the obvious hypocrisy of, uh, uh, elected officials that are in support of Donald Trump that that just conveniently move on from all of their past statements about other people, including my dad, when it applies to Donald Trump or anybody in their circle. But the real concern that I have, and I don't know how we fix, is the media, is the quote-unquote mainstream media, whatever that is today. Yeah. I remember in-depth reporting beginning directly after the midterms in 2022 into 23 about questions of my dad's age. Based upon no, nothing other than he literally lost a step,

meaning that he was getting old before people's eyes. But I don't remember any. instances in which my dad literally was, you know, fell asleep in front of a press conference in the Oval office. He does that on a regular basis. I mean, everybody says that he didn't go to the 9-11 memorial in New York because they wouldn't allow him to speak. Well, I think that the reason that he didn't go to the 9-11 memorial, and is this, is that each one of the former presidents was required to stand for the entire reading of, it was ours. And it was a big deal. And one of the reasons that I knew to be a big deal is because I think that there was a question of whether Laura Trump could do it, because she's not in, I'm not like, this is nothing out of school, I think.

But you had, you know, three people in their, basically three octogenarian couples that were there at the 9-11 memorial. And I think that he literally just knew that he couldn't stand for that long. And that's why he didn't go to the 9-11 memorial. And if you look at him, it is not some kind of subjective Trump derangement syndrome, is that he has serious, serious health problems, just by virtue of looking at his hands, looking at the bruises that come and go, remember that one on his neck, and remember that period of time where he was missing, basically, for a five to six-day period and everybody acted like, oh, what are you talking about? He's, you know, he's just, you know, busy working in the residence.

Working in private. You know, there's never been a time. And I, I think it's, you know, I mean, it's kind of like this open secret in D.C. that Donald Trump has serious, serious health issues, exactly what they are, I don't know, but it's playing out right in front of us. And they don't do anything. I mean, they talk about it.

They say, oh, well, we talk about it. But to the degree that they did it to my dad, is, you know, and I think health is a valid issue. I always said is that I think one of the things that I think that we didn't handle well, is that one of the my dad's, I think my dad's greatest strength as a politician, purely as a politician, was his pure authenticity. You get what you see with Joe Biden.

He is the man who he appears to be both in front of the camera and outside of its frame. And when we became defensive about it, I think it did him a real, disservice. I think that it's a it's something that everybody can relate to in their own lives, in their own family, is to have someone in their life, a parent, a grandparent that's getting older, that by the way, it's still the wisest person in the room and more capable of making a decision about everything from, you know, what they're going to serve for Thanksgiving dinner, to how they're going to resolve a significant family issue as it relates to, you know, your brother that's deep in his addiction.

And that was my feeling about my dad, is that he wasn't running any marathons, but at the same time, there was never a moment that anyone questioned from his core group of inside advisors within the White House or the people that he dealt with outside of it, the world leaders that he was constantly in connection with

as it related to all of the things going around the globe. that came away saying that Joe Biden didn't have the faculty to be able to make the decisions required of a president. Where were you the night of the infamous June 27th debate? What was what was your sense or analysis or interpretation as that debate went on? I was right here. I was, I have this. If I'm not at the debate with my dad, it's very hard for me to watch those things in a group setting.

And so I was, or even with anybody in the room, and so I was alone in the room watching it. In the moment that he came out, I knew something was off. And that's the thing, too, is that I always point out to people, there had never been a time before nor after that debate that Joe Biden appeared as he did in public that night. And like a deer in the headlights for the first three minutes of the debate, which then set the tone for the entire debate,

which was by any accounts, you know, there's no sugar coding how disastrous it was. And the disaster wasn't in the, in anything other than this, is that people saw that something was wrong, that this was not Joe Biden. And I always point that out to people. They never saw that after and they never saw it before, that extreme,

And I can't explain it. And I don't know of anybody they can necessarily. You have been attacked by, I guess we'll call them critics. I don't even know if that's really the right word, but along all of these different lines. There's been the Burisma stuff. There have been your personal relationships. There has been addiction. All of these different sort of branches of attacks against you.

And some of them you've addressed, I kind of think, at least to the satisfaction of your take on them. Now, to pick one of these things, I think you've said that on the Burisma thing, while there's no proof of any kind of the corruption you've been accused of, that the optics were probably not so good. I mean, like, is that generally speaking your perspective on that right now? Yeah, David, I, you know, I've talked about this at length and I've written about it a lot. is this, is that I served on the board openly of a Ukrainian natural gas company, of which I was preeminently qualified to serve on. Would I have gotten asked to be on the board if I was not Joe Biden's

son? Probably not. But also, would I have gotten asked to be on the board if I was not a Yale law graduate that had my own law firm that had a was the chairman of uh of many um boards that were far of greater importance and larger than that and also a uh an attorney at boy schiller flexner of council and uh doing corporate governance yeah no so both things can be true at the same time and the other piece about the breesma thing is this i got paid to be on the board and i and i and And one of the other reasons that I did it is because I was paid well to be on that board. But I was only on the board for about a year and a half, I believe, when my dad had any position of power. And that was at the end of his term as vice president.

And from my perspective, I knew my dad, I believe that my dad was not going back into politics. Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States. and the Biden family would be able to go off and, you know, and build a family foundation and do things that we really cared about that didn't have to do with being in elected office. And so I think people have understandably conflated this idea that I was in the midst of my addiction when my dad was president, that I was doing business deals when my dad was president,

that I was, that I had something, that Brezma had anything to do with when my dad was president. I didn't do anything. I painted. I picked a profession when my dad was president, which was, in my estimation, the furthest thing that I could possibly pick from politics. I spent no more than, I think, probably 30 nights over four years at the White House for the simple reason that it was like very difficult to be there and not become in even further distraction. And so it is, part of the reason that I'm out here is not to defend my honor,

but more than anything, is to defend my, my, my dad's, is that my dad had never, ever had anything to do with a single piece of business that I was ever involved in in terms of being benefiting from it in any way. And you know why you know that? Because you have 22 years of my digital footprint. And you can go through. through it right now. And if you can show, and by the way, it's everything, every email, every text message, every voicemail somehow they got everything. And I get, I, there's not a single email which you will find in which I say, hey, dad, I need you to do this on my behalf of a client of mine. I think that's exculpatory. I don't think that's, it certainly isn't what they

have tried to make it out to be. Wouldn't, I mean, to play devil's advocate, wouldn't people say, listen, Hunter's not a dumb guy. He would obviously just speak in person about those things. for example, right? For 22 years, I didn't communicate with a single person in any way in that manner. I think that that would make me out to be a criminal mastermind. And two things can't be true at once. I can't be both a criminal mastermind and the near-do-well-fail-son addict that couldn't tie his shoes that they pay me to be. And so here's the other thing, though, too.

Is it talk about transparency, you have what, 35, 50 years of my dad's tax returns that he's made public since he's been in office. You've never had a single legitimate claim of corruption as it related to my dad in 56 years. He was a United States senator for over 36 years. He was elected for six terms, a seventh and then became vice president. And not a single, single legitimate claim of any corruption whatsoever. That's what they do, David, is that, you know, everything with them is projection or confession. And one of the things that Donald Trump knew from the outset in his team is that the way in which you attack a person is that you attack them at their strength.

And you create this impression that their strength is actually their weakness. And that's what they attempted to do by dehumanizing me. And that was the other piece of it, too, is this kind of Putin-esque eliminationist rhetoric, that they have been so successful at weaponizing, which is to say the most horrible, accuse someone, your adversary of the most horrible crime that could be imaginable. And even if only 5% of people believe it, it makes it much easier for the other nine. to believe that you're capable of bribery and influence peddling and all of the things that they tried to make stick.

Let me button up one thing you said, and then we'll move on to the post debate phase of the Biden presidency. So earlier in our conversation, you said, you don't really know and you don't think anyone really has a sense of what happened on the June 27th debate. I have in my notes and I don't remember which piece of writing or interview. what it was, but you said something along lines of it may have been the metastatic prostate cancer affecting him. But you're not sure about that, I think. Do you think that any, so first of all, what do you think about that as today it stands?

And then do you think any kind of cognitive decline had anything to do with it? No. Okay. So the, I'll take the last part first. No. The answer to the cognitive decline is a complete red herring. that I don't think had anything that, that I, whether I know the metastatic bone cancer and the stage four prostate cancer that he was diagnosed with after he left office, did it have an impact that night?

I have seen people clap back at me as it relates to that, doctors saying, you know, you know, yes, it would have been present, but it would not have, it would not have. you know, presented in that way. Here's what I think about it. Is that unbeknownst to us, my father had cancer, which was clearly at that time present and rapidly growing in his body

out of his prostate and spreading, which is what metastasis is metastatic bone cancer. So clearly there was a, significant health issue that was unknown and not being treated in any way. How that impacts you, how that impacts you with the combination of any other medication that he may have been taking or the lack of hydration or lack of sleep. I don't know. And I'm not a doctor and I don't even play one on TV.

But it seems to me that at least for me as a son, it gives a, it, it gives a, a, it gives a potential of an explanation because all of the other explanations are much darker and more conspiratorial, which I don't want to latch on to because it can never be proved and they make you look like you're crazy. And so all I know is that he's never presented that way since and he never presented that way before, which was the central question. And he proved that after. Remember, he did, They said all of these hurdles for him afterwards. And the first hurdle was the George Neffinopoulos sit down interview for an hour and a half. And then he went and he did that NATO press conference with, you know,

well over 100 journalists from around the world. And he sat and answered every question for, I think, close to two hours and gave a kind of tour-to-force history of, you know, international relations and NATO relations. And then he did the NAACP keynote speech in Las Vegas. And then he got COVID right after that. And that was the, you know, and then the decision to pull out came more than anything from that. Yeah.

I didn't see the NAACP speech. I think, you know, my view as an observer from the outside was the Stephanopoulos interview in that press conference. They were okay. I mean, like, I think the difficulty was, I don't even know how to say it. Like, there are things that just. kind of happen as people age, there was a microscope on him at that point because of June 27th. And so everybody was watching those two events, the Stephanopoulos interview and the press conference,

through these extremely vigilant eyes because of the debate. And it's hard for me to disaggregate. Like had the debate performance not happened, would both of those have seemed completely fine? What level of scrutiny? I don't know. Like my takeaway was sort of like they were okay. They didn't prove he needed to get out, but they also, they didn't seem like 10 out of tens

to me. I don't know. What's your recollection? My recollection at least with the NATO press conference was a 10 out of 10. Really? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think if you go back and look at the reporting on it and actually watch it much is kind of toward the force of his understanding of what was happening in the currently in the historical grounding for what he was saying was I think pretty impressive. That was the strongest part to me. I remember at the time saying what is really clear is that he has a deep understanding of foreign policy that his opponent completely lacks. Like that came through. And I think that was the strongest aspect of it.

And I guess the truth of the matter is that, you know, what we also all forget is this, is that if Kamala Harris had won, what Joe Biden had did would be seen as one of the most courageous and selfless things ever in presidential politics. I don't know of anyone that ever willingly stepped aside. And all of this talk like, well, he would have been, you know, pushed or, there was no mechanism by which the Democratic Party could take the nomination away from him. That's right. And they could, you know, all of the talk are going to challenge him up to the convention and so forth and so on. It was really meaningless.

He would have still been the nominee if he had chosen to stay in, which I don't know many people. that would have had the humility and the grace to do what he did. And so I think that we have to wait for history to write that chapter. But all I know is this is that when the time came after the diagnosis of COVID, in which he came off that plane and he looked like he had COVID. And I mean, it was, that would not have been a problem. all of, June 27th, that had not happened, obviously. But when he had the time to sit and reflect,

and he was really out for a good 36 hours. Like, I mean, it was like a pretty severe case of COVID in that distance. And when he learned that there was going to be a kind of a rallying a movement within a small group of senators to do it. He had a choice to make. He said he was gonna rip the Democratic Party apart or whether he was going to pass the torch at that moment. And all I remember is being really proud of my dad

in that moment and thinking, like, I don't know of many people that have the humility and the strength to be able to do that. And he did. And so, you know, I, I always say to people, I don't know what they expect of me to do anything other than. I'm not defensive about my dad. I think that there are totally legitimate questions.

I think that I'm open to answering everyone that I can as a son. I was not a part of the administration, famously so. My interests were rarely ever taken into account, not because of my dad or my mom, but because of the machinery and the importance of the independence of a working White House and the goals of an administration were not to protect Hunter Biden clearly. And but I also, you know, when people kind of like are in some way kind of like shocked the way that I talk about, you know, Jake Tapper or other people. I think that there are legitimate questions. I just think that there is

just a weak journalism. I think that there is a I think that that a lot of people that had a lot to say as if they had a real insight are just totally full of shit and we're

and don't have a perspective that I respect. And so that's one piece of it. The other piece of it, he's my dad. I love him. There's nobody that I, you know, love more in this world than him and not out of some sense of duty or other thing. Is that because I truly believe that he was a singular president in the way in which he and his humanity was reflected when he was in the Oval Office in terms of really, truly, deeply caring about the people that he represented? There, this is sort of like a, let me build up what I'm going to here. There are some reports that after the debate, you were adamant about him staying in the race.

And I've more recently seen you say, you believe that had he stayed in the race, he would have defeated Donald Trump. Now, my read of the data, and I'll turn this over to you, my, my read of the data before he dropped out was that looking at the critical seven swing states that ultimately decided the election. election, he was doing worse than Hillary Clinton in five of the seven. And of course, Hillary lost in 2016. So that was a concern to me. Now, when he got out and Kamala Harris became the nominee, she was then doing worse in seven of the seven swing state. So I think the data is he probably wasn't going to win, but the numbers got even worse

with Kamala Harris. So kind of two part question, what is the quantitative case for he would have defeated Trump? And were you adamant that he stay in in that period between the debate and getting out? Yeah. Well, I think that number one is that one of the, the, the most consistent factors in my dad's political career going all the way back is that people constantly underestimate him. And that whether it was in 1972 as a 29 year old and defeating a five term, you know, incumbent in the state of Delaware to, the impact that he had on the ticket for Barack Obama in 2008, to the 2020 election itself, in which 81 million people showed up. Now, a lot of people kind of dismissed that as being some kind of an anomaly or that it didn't have anything to do with Joe Biden. I believe the opposite.

I believe that it had everything to do with Joe Biden. I believe that it had to do with him because I believe this. I believe Joe Biden gave permission for a woman in St. Paul, Minnesota that is a waitress and has a gig job on the side that has three kids that goes to mass every Sunday

that is personally opposed to abortion, but is not a zealot about it in any way. It gave her permission to vote for Joe Biden because you know what? She looked at her. Joe Biden, she saw her family. She saw her father. She saw someone that knew that when he looked at her, he saw her and respected her and respected her views. I think that in every way in all of these issues that were, that remember, the singular issue in terms of ad buys from the Republican

party in those swing states were almost entirely focused on the issue of trans. transsexual and women trans and sports and all of these things. I think there was over 300 million or maybe it was 3 billion, I don't know, that was spent exclusively on that issue. Those are the issues that you could not, you couldn't beat Joe Biden around the brow with. Because I think people looked at him, and although he was, he did more for that community or many of the other communities that at least I care about. and I think that you do also than any other Democrat

has ever been able to do for the singular reason that I think people, normal people, looked at him and they said, you know what? He understands it about as much as I do, but I embrace his empathy. I embrace his take on it. He's not shoving it down my throat. And so it's a long way for me to be able to say this.

is that, of course, I'm biased, okay? And I don't have the data in front of me, and I know that you've gone over it exhaustively. But I do believe this, is that when it came down to making a choice, is that just four years before, people looked out and they said that they get to make a choice

between probably the two most diametrically opposed human beings ever to exist in each other's space than ever before, definitely in American politics. Joe Biden is the anti-Donald Trump. And I think that what you see in the numbers at the end of 2024 is that where were those 81 million votes? We sunk back down to some of the highest levels of turnout. And by the way, I've gotten a lot of grief, the idea that I am somehow being dismissive or critical of the vice president Harris.

I love Vice President Harris. I love her husband. I think that she's an incredible human being. I think that she will make a great candidate. I think that she would make a great president, okay? But I think that there's a lot more that goes into a presidential campaign than just the candidate. And what people never appreciated about my dad, in my opinion, was his ability to reach a teamster in Scranton or a firefighter in Northeast Philadelphia or a devout Catholic schoolteacher in St. Paul. in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

That's my take, but you know, we'll never know. So you don't necessarily dispute. I mean, like, you're connected to this in a way I never could be, right? Because this isn't my family. It's just kind of the reality. I look at it and I go, listen, in 2020, the polls were basically good in the swing states. And he won a bunch of them. And in 2024, the same polls were not looking good.

And ultimately, they looked similar for common. Kamala Harris and they did ultimately reflect the results. For me, I look at that and I go, that's kind of the ball game. You're saying he might have been able to pull it out somehow. He might have been able to persevere somehow at the end of the day. Well, look, here's what I'm saying, David. I don't know. And, but I don't think that the, if you, if that's the case, then all of it was based upon fundamentals. It didn't have anything to do with the personality or whether Joe Biden was too old or whatever. Kamala Harris was an incredibly dynamic and experienced candidate.

Way more experienced than Donald Trump, if it weren't for the single blip of him being, have been a disaster as president four years earlier. So if those numbers are correct, and I don't know of anyone in the Democratic Party who would have taken the nomination that necessarily would have changed that dynamic,

I would say that the number one indicator of winning in a president election is incumbency. That's the number one indicator of. And so, therefore, the one thing that we took away from, that was taken away from our chances of winning was that. And I, I don't know how much I adhered to it, but I, who's the professor that has predicted? Basically every election. Oh, Alan Lickman. Yeah, Alan Lickman. Yeah, Alan Lickman. And I, and I, And I looked at, you know, his analysis of it. And all the way to the end, he said, you know, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

The Democratic Party is shooting yourself in the foot because the fundamentals that have governed from his estimation of his 13, you know, what I believe. He calls them. Yeah, exactly. You're taking away, you know, two of them or three of them by, you know, switching horses midstream. Now, again, you know, I think that some of the questions are clearly can never be answered. And in all transparency is that it's really, really difficult to argue against your analysis based upon that data. In the same way, I would say, if that data was correct, it would have been correct for any Democrat. running based upon inflation, based upon all of the things.

And by the way, it's another thing that almost every, every, you know, armchair, you know, analysis that's done by, you know, the talking. Like people like me. No, no, but I'm, I'm really, I'm not, I'm not putting you in that category at all. And I'm not putting you in that category because I don't think that you in any way are beholden to kind of some, you know, DC inside. I think. And as far as I know,

you know, you're not having dinner regularly at Cafe Milano with, you know, CNN producers. I don't even know what Cafe Milano is. Yeah, exactly. And so good for you. That's a great restaurant, by the way. I love it. But my point being is that, you know, there is a, we're never going to be able to answer question. But and so a lot of this I think is, is kind of like why. Why are we doing this now?

Why not left history make the decision about whether do Biden and spend all of this time focusing on literally the most corrupt human being that has ever held office in the United States of America? And and simply make this case, particularly as it relates to the midterms, okay? Yeah. Forget about whether this, um, forget about whether this, um, whole idea of Joe Biden and this, that, and the other thing. Let's celebrate the things that Joe Biden was able to achieve, the incredible successes that he had over the course of his administration in terms of passing legislation, more legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson was able to get passed in that period in a period of time. The record run on employment

numbers and putting people to work and jobs in terms of bringing back infrastructure and manufacturing to the United States, the PACT Act, the Chips Act, all of these things that he was able to accomplish. And starting to bring down and brought down to, by record numbers, in terms of the decline in inflation in that four-year period of time. Our ability, his ability as an administration to put shots in arms. Remember, there was the unsolvable and immutable issue of, like, how would we ever, you know, vaccinate people and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, get this incredible, you know, breakthrough into communities to allow us to go back to work and open up schools and things like that. All of those core competency issues, NATO, the defense

of Ukraine, the expansion of NATO for the first time in its history with Finland and Sweden, all of these things, okay? And right now, what we're dealing with is literally both the most corrupt and most incompetent administration, I believe, in history. I think the only thing that even remotely comes close is Andrew Johnson after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And I think that the consequences, if we do not course correct immediately, are going to be as significant as the path post-reconstruction that Andrew Johnson let us down, which was horrific for this country. And so my point is that right now, in terms of the mid-terms,

we have only have to say one thing. Forget about Donald, don't forget about Donald Trump. It's all about Donald Trump, because the entire Republican Party has not done one single thing to impede his most corrupt instincts, whether they were personal or in terms of how he is enriching the people around him. Not a single thing.

I don't know of any Republican other than maybe Thomas Massey and a couple others that have stood up to him. And they have been obliterated by MAGA. There is no Republican Party. There is Donald Trump and he's a dictator. Are we going to stop him or not? That's the key question. Listen, Hunter, I know you've got to go in

few minutes. I want to ask about what one other thing. I've been watching with great interest, this media tour you've been doing, speaking to interesting folks, left, right and center, in person over Zoom. There was initially speculation. The reason that Hunter Biden is doing this is to build to some kind of political campaign. Recently, there has been this controversy over this coin, this crypto coin that was launched. The idea being the media tour was to build a social media following to launch the coin. At launch, the coin went way up in value. It then crashed in value. Controversy over a contact list from Andrew Callahan. What's going on with this coin? Does it relate to the media tour?

Look, I launched a meme coin. No, it does not relate to the media tour in any way. I started the media tour all the way back over, well over a year and a half ago. with Andrew Callahan and then slowly build up to going on X in May of this year. Here's what my thinking is. I'm a staunch believer in cryptocurrency, okay? And I understand, yes, I am, I'm probably outside of my demographic in terms of being a progressive in the belief in cryptocurrency. And part of that has to do with the fact that I read a book called it.

internet of money. And in a period of time when I was the chairman of the board of the US, UN World Food Program, and we were trying to institute microtransaction, the capacity for digital micro transactions among refugees in places like Lebanon for Syrian refugees and in Dadaab and other places, modeled after what was the organic growth of micro transactions that is in the largest, quote-unquote, slum in the world in Kibera in Kenya, where I spent a lot of time and a lot of thought about how to be able to do this. And so when I say cryptocurrency, what I really mean is the legitimacy and revolutionary technology that is the blockchain, which will become a fundamental piece of, in my estimation, of how we are adopt and are able to interact with AI.

in a meaningful way that it doesn't just obliterate our reality. Okay. So that's where I start off at. And I also start off at this. It's meme coins are trolls. Meme coins are joke. They have no inherent value. They do not have any.

They're as, they're a collectible. It's just like, but a whole, 100% do not buy this coin unless you're involved in, understand that you're basically getting into, you're a hobbyist. You're getting into a,

into an, an economy that is both from a novice's idea, it looks opaque, but it's all on the blockchain. It's all there. You can see exactly what happens in this. And it's no more different than, for instance, people that trade in Pokemon cards. I mean, it doesn't have any inherent value. There's no cultural significance to it other than the cultural significance that anyone would apply if you collected bottles of wine or literally art for that matter. Well, I guess the art and the wine are different because there's been either skill or craft that went into making.

So here's the thing. So here is the commodity. The fundamental underlying commodity of it then becomes about attention. In an attention economy, is in a world in which $9.6 billion, we did a calculation, $9.6 billion was made off of connecting three words together. Hunter Biden's laptop, okay, in which my sworn enemies have made literally billions of dollars off of me and the attention that they applied to me, not the attention I asked for, okay? This literally was the troll to do the opposite.

And it was also a troll on the Trump coin. And it remains that way, by the way. So what I was able to do is create a coin in which the fundamentals of all of these other celebrity particularly the Trump token, is this. 80% is to intiters, and almost all of the wallets are opaque. You don't know exactly where the money is going to or who it's going to or how it's being distributed. And it's called max extraction.

And that's exactly what they did. They just appropriated from their retail followers and the people that are their supporters, and they put it into their pocket. And my coin is the exact opposite. instead of 80% it's 30%. And the other 70% breaks down this way. I gave away 20% and continued to give away 20% of the entire coin. That was the Andrew Callahan thing.

I called Andrew up and I said, hey, listen, if you got an email list, I can basically give a no strings attached. They don't have to do anything. All they have to do is click a link and follow the link and they can claim the coin and cash it out immediately. and, you know, pay from everything from the groceries to potentially the rent. That was it. That was the entire thing.

And so my substack list got that. And I can't even get my substack list to go through the link and claim it. It's about 1% I think or a little bit more that they've done that. But there's no strings attached to that. So the idea of giving back to communities that have supported me and my message is the number one thing, 20%. But it sort of sounds like you're saying. Like when this Data Vault CEO, Nathaniel Bradley says, this is a rug pull.

You're sort of saying, but wait, here's the thing. Let me just address the rugpole thing. Oh, yeah, go finish your question. Well, I was just going to say it sounds like what you're kind of saying is the entire meme coin thing is sort of a joke. That doesn't mean people didn't really lose money, but like it's not about this coin. It's about the whole meme coin thing. Yeah, here's the thing.

It's not only a joke. It was the entire issue. Just go back and understand that this is with people that have all of these opinions about about this. they don't take the time to fundamentally understand the origins of meme coins. Meme coins literally started as a joke with Dogecoin. It started as a joke and the speculation on alt coins. And it fundamentally turned into basically a collectible, a trading.

It's a way for people to interact and go. So if I talk to anybody basically over the 80s, maybe I agree with that. But I talk to anybody between the age of 18 and 35, particularly men, is that they fully understand this economy and they're fully engaged in it not not everyone but many of them there are over 10 million meme coins in existence today there is a a multi multi-billion dollar economy that that exist and in the same way that and many other collectible economy what's the value of a pokeymon card the value of the kokemon card is inherently fundamentally only the ink and cardboard

that it's printed on but it's the belief in the in the in the in the in the korean card card. in that community. That's what it's going to be. And they can give back to community. And so here's the idea is that if you do it in a fair way, it allows you to sustain, attain, to maintain the attention of a certain community that I think people in our, at least, I'm not pinning you with my beliefs, but my political persuasion have we've totally given up on. We say, oh, a bunch of D-Gens.

They don't know what they're, you know, they're a bunch of degenerate gamblers and traders and things like that. Well, millions of people, millions of people are actively engaged in cryptocurrency across the board. From Bitcoin, which you can make the argument, is no more than a meme, to all the way down. But by the way, you could make a real argument that there's a hell of a lot of stocks out there that are meme coin. I mean, basically no different than a meme token that have no. They bear no fundamental relationship between their underlying value in the price of the stock. And so regardless, however, I created the tokenomics of a coin that gave away the vast majority of the coin to community. So there is a component of which I maintained the attention of people by making 30 predictions over two years.

Democrats win the Senate. Democrats win the House. and silly ones, like the Eagles win, they're not silly to me because I, you know, fly eagles fly, but the Eagles win a season over. And if that happens, if the prediction comes true, it's the first coin that's ever had it in it. If the prediction comes true, you burn the coin, which means the whole community's value goes up, okay? And if it doesn't come true, the money goes into a wallet that then is just

contributed to charity after a year period of vesting. No one in the inside me has benefited from this coin in any way. That was going to be my last question. And I really want to respect that they said you had to go five minutes ago. I know, but this is more important to me. What do you think you'll make from this at the end of the day? I don't know. And it will all depend upon what they call the FDV beginning at six months.

And then there is a linear vesting period that occurs over. the course of the next 18 months for two years. So I'm in it with the rest of the community. It is totally dependent upon that value. Could you make 10 million bucks at the end of the day? That would be nice. I would love to. And that's the other thing. It would be really, really great to be able to do well. But the only way that I do that is if the rest of the coin does well. And everybody- So it's possible, conceivable based on the economics.

100%. It's conceivable based upon the existence and the longevity of the coin. But here's the thing. I really mean this. Yeah. Don't buy the coin. I don't want anybody that's listening to this that can't, that, that, that doesn't understand that this is literally no different than a, a baseball card. And, you know, one year, you know, you know, A-Rod is, you know, like, hot when you go to the conference, you know, you go to the baseball convention in one year, you know, and you buy it for, you know, $3,000. And the next year you go back and, you know, he's a pariah because he said something stupid. so the cards only worth $2,200. It's no different than that.

It's purely a collectible. It is not a security. It is not for people that have any idea that they are going to make money off of this or not. And the troll is this, is that I don't believe that he gets to take over every single corner of our universe and capture the imagination of people

and then completely rape them of their dignity. I don't believe that. And I believe that there is a really, really, strong and loud community. And you know this online, whether it's crypto Twitter or otherwise. And which we, not we, I'm not gonna impress this time. Many people that progressives completely dismiss

as being, you know, like, you know, like what, having, and I don't see them as being as being partisan. They're largely libertarians. And I, you know, think that that however they also understand a future that is in my estimation is inevitable as it relates to the value in the the the fundamental structure of the blockchain as it relates to cryptocurrency all right we are going to watch it i really appreciate you being so generous with your time hunter biden thank you for talking to me today thanks david i appreciate it buddy see if you're someone who can't work with

music on. Check this out. Most music asks for your attention. Lyrics, familiar melodies, dramatic changes, songs you want to go and skip. Music by Brain FM is built around the opposite idea. It is sound that supports what you're doing. Our sponsor, Brain FM creates functional music using patented audio technology designed to influence brain activity associated with attention so that you can better focus. Brain FM is the only music app funded by the national. Science Foundation. They have peer reviewed research, which has found Brain FM can increase activity in attentional networks and also improve performance on attention-based tasks. You can choose modes for deep work, learning, creativity, motivation. They have an ADHD mode for people who benefit from additional stimulation. So even if you've always thought I work better without music, Brain FM is worth testing against silence. Try it yourself. Anyone in my audience can try Brain FM totally free. for a whole month at brain.fm slash pacman. The link is in the description. Well, Trump had another one of these mental episodes and his posts took a very dark turn.

And he erupted after another massive legal humiliation. And of course, if you constantly try to do things that aren't allowed, you are going to suffer disappointment when someone tells you, hey, sir, you can't do that. And when it's the Supreme Court telling you, they don't necessarily come to you, with tears in their eyes, as Donald Trump likes to say. Take a look at what he posted. Quote, Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the court system took forever to give, and then blamed it in part on no time left to implement a solution

to our totally corrupt and out of control mail-in-voting disaster, which is a laughing stock all over the world. And where we are the only country that has to endure such a nation destroying scam, Justices Alito and Thomas legends both strongly disagreed with this horrible, highly political ruling. It is a big loss for Republicans in America itself and makes cheating by the radical left Democrats on mail-in ballots a much easier thing to do. And now they have an open field to do so.

The Supreme Court has really let our country down. Certain justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats and are too. are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save America. Their horrible decision on tariffs will be costing the USA for many years to come, trillions and trillions of dollars. They didn't even state the money does, money paid does not have to be paid back, much to the benefit of entities that truly hate our country and have been ripping it off for years, unnecessarily costing us immediately billions of dollars.

Likewise, the Supreme Court, but okay, it's a complete insane. It goes, I'm not going to read the whole thing. It just goes on and on and on and on. And there is so much wrong here. You know, this idea that the United States is the only country dealing with mail and voting is completely false. Now, whether we are or aren't the only country doing something, it's total, it's a red herring to say something is bad if we are the only country doing it.

There are many times where Republicans will go, we're the only country doing something because we're the best. But here it's because we're the only country doing it were the worst, but it's not true. Because plenty of countries use postal voting. It's just it's not even worth discussing because the United States is not unique in that way. He says, well, the Supreme Court is making it easier for Democrats to cheat. That's not true. Nothing.

The Supreme Court did legalized fraud or doesn't order fraudulent ballots to be counted. It just says, listen, you can't impose this new mail-in ballot requirement involving the United Postal Service, the U.S. Postal Service weeks before an election. You just can't do it. And they even said you might be able to implement this in a slightly different way given more time. We're just saying you can't do it like this. Trump says, well, you know, the justices are scared of Democrats. There is no evidence for that. It's a 6 to 3 conservative Supreme Court. Three of the justices were appointed by Trump. And when they rule for him, he regularly says they're brilliant and courageous. They rule against

them and suddenly they're cowards being controlled by the radical left. Give me a break. Now, then he gets to the tariff thing. He goes, you know, the Supreme Court is costing the country trillions and trillions. It's totally. It's just completely fabricated. Remember that tariffs are not checks from foreign countries. They are paid by the American importer. And most of that cost is just being passed down to consumers to me and to you. And that's it. He rants against birthright citizenship. And he goes, that also is a huge problem. And it's caused corruption. What corruption? The, court didn't invent birthright citizenship. Biden and Obama didn't invent birthright citizenship.

You just can't change the longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment with an executive order. You could actually amend the Constitution. I don't think you would have the support for that. But there's a pattern here, which is Trump loses a case. And instead of arguing the law, it's the court is corrupt. They're afraid of Democrats. They've been captured by Democrats and they're destroying America.

a court that is one third made up of people he selected. Okay. Then Trump turns to the topic of Biden. And he goes, everybody knows the crooked Joe Biden FBI didn't do what they should have with respect to the lunatic who shot me in Butler, Pennsylvania. By the time I got into office on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone. New info was just found. Why wasn't it seen long ago? This was all a Democrat plot to get me out of the election that failed.

Dirty cop Christopher Ray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt and certainly for the things he said. Okay. This is very, very serious. Trump is saying the Butler assassination attempt was a democratic plot. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. The FBI conducted, I have the numbers here. They conducted a thousand interviews roughly.

They went through the shooter's phones, computers, online activity, physical evidence, video, movements. They found no evidence of a co-conspirator at all. And the bipartisan congressional investigation found that there were security failures, but they didn't find a Democratic assassination plot. And Trump's own FBI director has said, we found nothing that suggests the shooter coordinated with anybody. So when Trump says Democrat plot, he is stating a dangerous conspiracy thing.

theory for which there is zero evidence. Now, then he goes, well, information was missing, altered or corrupted or it just disappeared. What evidence of that is there? Because we know the FBI recovered devices. They gathered records. They reconstructed the full movements of the shooter. They interviewed a thousand people. Could they have missed something?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, could there have been security failures? Clearly there were security failures. That is very different than proving evidence was destroyed as part. part of a political conspiracy involving Democrats. Trump also says new information now has been found. Okay, we'll put the information out.

Finding new information doesn't prove a democratic plot. And it doesn't magically establish that someone sent the shooter. Now, Trump also says Christopher Ray should pay a price. You can criticize Christopher Ray, and that's fair. You can criticize the investigation. You can criticize the security failures. None of that gets you from there were failures to Democrats plotted to assassinate Trump. That requires evidence.

And there is zero evidence of that whatsoever. Now again, we're in one of these like, hey, we're not forgetting about the state of the economy. We're not forgetting about the Epstein files. We're not forgetting about half a dozen major failed promises from your administration, including no new wars in the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine will end within a day. Energy will be down 50%. Wage growth and job growth will just go completely crazy. We'll have 5 to 6% GDP growth. None of that has happened. And Trump going, the Democrats try to assassinate me. We're not forgetting about all of the failed promises, sir. I have a major announcement. We have developed groundbreaking new

technology that allows me to communicate with you without having to beg an algorithm. Please, Show people what I said. This new technology is called texting. We now have an official David Packman Show text number. You're really texting me when you use this. Now, all joking aside, please, algorithm. Okay. All joking aside, I'm really excited about this for a bunch of reasons.

One of the things I've talked to you about over the last couple years is that almost everything we do goes through some kind of algorithm or recommendation. I upload a video to YouTube and I kind of hope YouTube's algorithm will decide to show it to you. I post something to Tic Tacs or Instagram and we just kind of hope like I hope these algorithms show it to you and put it in your feed. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. And we don't own any of our data on any of these platforms. I've got 3.6, almost 3.7 million subscribers on YouTube.

If YouTube shuts me down, I have no way to get in touch with any of those 3.7 million people. Because of the pressure we've been seeing from the Trump administration, all I'm doing, especially in advance of this election that may not go well for Republicans and may really trigger Trump, I'm doing everything I can to make sure that we own the relationship with the audience and as much as possible that we own the data. And this is the most important distinction. Meta owns Instagram and Facebook. TikTok owns TikTok.

Google owns YouTube. They decide what gets shown to whom and when. And if anything changes, we have zero control. With substack, we own our list. And I've explained that. With texting, we own the data. And we have a direct way of communicating with those who choose to sign up. So basically what we're doing is this is limited because texting costs money.

And so we're going to limit it to like my top followers. You can now get onto this text system so that you can text me directly. and I can text you. Now, there's another experiment we're going to try with this. We are going to see, can we in a sense fix the YouTube algorithm? Now, let me explain what I mean by that. When we publish a video on any platform, but YouTube is one of them, the early response to that video really matters.

And the way that it works on all of these platforms is you upload a piece of content. And in the first 30 to 60 minutes, what YouTube or others do is they will show the piece of content to a very small sample audience. It could be 200, could be 300 people. We don't really know because it's a black box. And based on what people do in that first short period of time, whether they like it, whether they watch the whole video, all of that, the algorithm will say, ooh, this one's got something. Let's now show it to a huge portion of the people on our platform.

Or let's completely bury it. Okay. So at some point, we're going to run an experiment with this texting system. A few minutes after we publish a video that, especially one that I suspect YouTube will bury, I might text you if you're on my list and I would say, hey, we're going to try something. Open this video, hit like and let the video play. That's it. And we are going to see if 2000, 3,000, 4,000 of you in that first half hour do that,

will it push the video into the broader YouTube algorithm? One of the questions we get all the time is, is YouTube suppressing the show? And I want to be precise about this. Sometimes videos perform badly because people aren't interested in them. That can happen. Sometimes the title's no good. The titles, the thumbnails no good. Sometimes YouTube will test it and the audience doesn't respond.

There can be algorithmic fluctuation. But what if we can take thousands of people who we know want to see it? And in the first 15 minutes, the video gets 4,000 likes. What will that do to the algorithm? Will YouTube go, oh, people do want to see this? Let's recommend it. Or does nothing happen? Is there some algorithmic suppression?

So we're going to test whether we can demonstrate that the problem here is the recommendation system or something else. That's why we want to test it. And I believe that the texting system will give us a way to coordinate that at scale. And it's funny that we have to go outside the algorithms to test the algorithms. But that's what it is. So if I'm doing an event in your area, I can let you know with the texting. If there's an important announcement about the show, I can let you know.

But if there's something you want me to cover, you can also text me. And that is a great thing. You're not going to hear from us seven times a day. You know, it might be a text a week or a couple texts, something like that. And again, you can text us. And I might even respond to you from time to time. Now, let me address one other aspect of this. I'm going to give you the number in a moment. We're also putting it on the screen. Some people got a text and they were confused. They got a text for me. It was really me. And they were confused. For years, there's have been scammers in the YouTube comments impersonating me. And those scammers will go, congratulations, thank you. Please text me on WhatsApp or contact me on Telegram. And I have told you many times, I am not going to solicit you in YouTube comments to contact me on WhatsApp. I am not communicating with people on Telegram. And that continues to be true. So I understand why people said, David, now all

of a sudden you texted me. This must be a scam. This is completely legitimate. There is one official number. We're going to put it on the screen right now. It is regular texting. It's not WhatsApp. It's not telegram. It's not a number being posted in the comments. If you watch the show and you want to be on my texting list, just send a text to 646-531-4333. You'll get a message just asking to confirm that you want to be on the list. And then that's it. So this is the official text. system for the David Pacman show. If you got a text yesterday from the 646 number, that is real. We are not going to solicit you to text us on WhatsApp or Telegram. It's really me. Okay. Not spam. Do not contact me on WhatsApp or Telegram. All right. Once again, you can send a text to

646-531-4333. We've got a great bonus show for you today. Canada has been invited to become the first associate member of the EU as geopolitics continues to realign in the era of Trump. Thomas Massey launches an effort to impeach Pete Heggseth. And I love it. And there is a blue state that is surprisingly now part of the Senate battleground for 2026. We will talk about it. It's a new tossup.

Get instant access to the bonus show at join packman.com. And remember that my new book is out in six days. you can order it at Davidpackman.com slash attention.