TRASHFUTURE - Move Fast and Break Democracy feat. Vincent Bevins

Episode Date: February 11, 2020

What happens when the DNC is an ouroboros of grifting fail-children? What happens when you try to improve voting with an app, and the app can’t stop crashing? In this week’s episode, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum join journalist Vincent Bevins (@Vinncent) to discuss the Iowa Democratic Caucus disaster, or how to not make people trust an election result. Vincent has covered elections in 15 countries and has some thoughts on why American exceptionalism makes America terrible at the basic concept of representative democracy. Vincent has a book coming out called “The Jakarta Method” that covers the persecution and mass killing of leftists during the Cold War. You can pre-order it here, and you definitely should: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vincent-bevins/the-jakarta-method/9781541742406/?lens=publicaffairs If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *FUNDRAISING ALERT* In this episode, Riley mentions a fundraiser for a migrant assistance organisation in the US called Al Otro Lado. That fundraiser is complete, but if you have money to spare they can use the surplus for other cases of children escaping literal slavery. Donate here, if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/unaccompanied-minor-seeks-asylum?utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_lico+header *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/  *COME SEE MILO*If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  *BRISTOL LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see us perform at Bristol Transformed 2020 -- we’ll be performing on the night of Friday, March 6 (with more details to come later). Get tickets here: https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/#date=2020-03-06&event_id=58254 *LONDON LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be playing at Vauxhall Comedy on Wednesday, March 11 at 7.30 pm! Tickets are £12, and you can get them here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-tickets-91817874735  

But why did you design that app the way you did? Hello, it is me, app designer. I work very long and hard on programming app. Go smoothly, works exactly according to plan. Hello and welcome to this week's free episode of TrashFuture, that podcast you're listening to right now. It's me, Riley, coming at you from the basement in London. I'm here with Milo. Hello, it's me, Nate. Good morning. Hello, here again. And also, and from Glasgow, we have Alice. Alice, how you doing?

Doing well, not literally in a basement, but in a figurative basement, the basement of Scotland. The Austrian mind palace. Truly, the podcast studio is the basement of the soul. And you're also joined by Vincent Bevinz, who has been a foreign correspondent in South America and Southeast Asia for the last decade, veteran of elections in 15 countries and author of the book, The Jakarta Method. Vincent, how you doing? Good, how are you? I am very well. Thank you. And we are here to discuss by extraordinarily popular demand what you have been blowing up our mentions about for the last several days.

Yes. When is the Iowa episode coming out? Why won't you do an Iowa episode? Are you working on the Iowa episode yet? Iowa episode this, Iowa episode that. Yeah. So we're finally going to do an entire episode where we talk about nothing, but the state of Iowa and its history. We don't touch on the Caucasus at all. Yes. This is just a Slipknot episode and nothing else. Are they from Iowa? They are from Iowa, yeah. They're the hometown heroes of Iowa. From America, currently, one of their albums was literally called Iowa.

So that could be the episode in its own right. Just play the whole album. Just track by track. It'll be like Pink Floyd. If you play Iowa at the same time as this episode, it syncs up. Yeah. All the bunny voters at the caucus is just wearing like ridiculous masks and costumes. The left is being very intimidating with its Slipknot t-shirts and insane corpse masks. Hell yeah. So here's basically what happened. Bernie Sanders won the Iowa Caucus. In the run-up to this, the Democratic Party used an app called Shadow to tabulate the results of

the Iowa Caucuses. His app was untested, function poorly, broke immediately, and gave Mayor Pete room to declare victory, which he then did. Obviously, much doubt has now been cast upon this though. Rat modes. He is rat modes. Yes. He went full rat mode. An even momentary investigation of Shadow and its parent companies revealed an environment openly hostile to the Sanders campaign, staffed entirely.

It's called Shadow. I'm still not over the picture of their staff, their team that they released ahead of time, which is just like this collection of wonks with Hillary still with her stickers on their laptops and stuff. Amazing. You're telling me that was a hostile environment to Bernie. They're wanting to turn the corn subsidies into soy subsidies. Anyway, yeah, it was staffed entirely with people from the Hillary campaign and with many

links to the Pete campaign. Bernie won when all the votes were counted, but this didn't stop every news outlet in the country from calling it for Pete anyway. But that's not what we're focusing on today. No, we have Vincent here who is, as I said, a veteran of 15 elections to talk about. Yeah, he's not one of single ones, suspicious. Yeah, I am. I want to talk about precisely how an election works, how it can be facilitated, what the standards are, and also for us to talk about what I'd like to call the venture

capital model of democratic consulting and why Bernie Sanders poses an existential threat to essentially this large and largely fraudulent industry that has grown up around the Democratic Party for the last, I don't know, since Tammany Hall, essentially. Certainly since the Clintons. I mean, I think this is sort of that iteration of it. You send the data out when you shave it and send it back. So basically, part of the, there is a huge albatross hanging around the neck of even vaguely progressive politics in America. And it's this Democratic Party consultant nexus where people like Robbie Mooc and John Podesta charge Hillary Clinton's donors millions and

millions of dollars in order to tell her that she needs to wear a hat to appeal to suburban moms. I'm sorry, but Robbie Mooc is a soprano's character. I refuse to admit that that's a real person, surely not. That's someone who should be working, like should be busting out Davey Scatino on like a Tuesday afternoon. Well, first of all, I'm surprised that the Clinton crime family didn't just take Robbie Mooc out in the pine barons after she lost. But like, the thing is that they're so expensive and they're so shit. Like the, I'm just chilling in Cedar Rapids video probably cost 11 trillion dollars. Well, that's how much it costs to chill though. I don't know how much you have to get

like the like drink koozie and everything. It's very expensive. Robbie Mooc, they said he was an interior decorator, but his video looked like shit. Oh my, I mean, I would say also that one of the things that I remember from just sort of from the reading the post mortems from 2016 is that the the the Clintons least not not not emphasizing first that the Clinton crime family is is we're doing irony when we see that, but they are they are they are really redacted. I mean, they are extremely dumb and bad, but I wouldn't necessarily want to simultaneously doing irony and not doing irony. Yeah, that is the thing that we do. Shroding his podcast. There's there's an it seems that there's an absolute emphasis

placed on loyalty and not on competence. And that I think because of the Clintons having been successful in American politics has filtered through the DNC to the point where like you just have a lot of people who are liked but aren't necessarily good at their jobs. That's my take, obviously, like happy to be completely wrong because that happens a lot. But it does strike me that like you're seeing some of the the the backwash of that, I suppose you could say. This is basically an entire party that is now made of backwash. It is it it is all backwash and we have to get Bernie to finally recharge our glass with some new liquid. But all that's changed, although, is that this nexus of useless grifters like Robbie

Mooc and John Podesta has evolved with the rest of the economy. And it's now all about giving money to well connected Silicon Valley style grifters instead of well connected McKinsey style grifters. Well, like Robbie Mooc was like the bridge for that though, right? Like he was the one who was like, oh, we have we have the algorithm and the algorithm tells us where to campaign, right? He was a he was like this but slightly before its time, right? Oh, indeed. And so I'm just going to get a little a little bit of context in and then we'll we'll sort of progress from there. So where we end where we ended this where we ended this saga or at least the the tech part of this saga, the startup venture part of

this saga was the following was with shadow saying that number one shadow is an independent for profit technology company that contracted with the Iowa Democratic Party to build the Iowa reporter app. And its functions were as follows as reported by Mother Boy. Was it really called Iowa reporter app? Yeah, Iowa caucus app. It was very blandly named. They could have called it baby, but you couldn't get it in the of the iTunes store because it didn't meet all of the requirements for apps. No, it was like it's it was a very it was very shoddily built. Shadow wears Iowa reporter app 01 final dot exe. I just you know,

you open it up and it like starts playing chiptune music at you. Yeah, they got bonsai buddy to count all of the all the votes. I love getting my Mayor Pete stuff from her fucking lawnmower. Not virus. So here are the four core functions of this app. So for at first, once a precinct chair logs in using a pin code, they're able to read some basic information about how to run a caucus. So it does a Google search for you. You're then enter the total number of attendees. That's not basic because I think I speak for everyone when I say that no one understands what a fucking caucus is. It's like a sort of weird game of musical chairs

where you like ruin an election. Yeah, more or less. That is what it is, right? They have to move around. I don't you have to move around. Basically, you have to literally show up in a room and they say, okay, all of you who want to be with this person, go stand in this line and they count the numbers in the line. They determine there's a threshold on whether or not those the candidates are viable based on the people they've gotten. And then you have a second option to realign. If your candidate isn't viable, you can opt to not vote again, or you can vote for one of the ones who were declared viable. So it's basically it legitimately is like, it's like doing line dancing, except it determines an election. It's a system of voting

so good that it's used only in a few states in the Midwest and the weird cantons of Switzerland where you just like do it every year to stop women from voting. Everybody marches down to the town square with a ceremonial hall bird or something. Yeah, in Switzerland, the unviable candidates are shot out the front of a clock. But also, this is actually, if we throw to Vincent here, I mean, this is a very strange method of choosing a leader, but it absolutely would be perfectly appropriate to do and say Bolivia, for example, right? Yeah, I mean, no, not definitely certainly not. I mean, a lot of the takes that I've seen on the internet in the last few days were sort of like,

you know, if this were to happen in South America, you know, this would be unacceptable in the US government, send the military or the OAS would stop them. And I think that people are saying that sort of in a provocative or almost sarcastic way. But it is absolutely unheard of to have this kind of an outcome in any kind of a country, whether it is the rich first world or a quote, unquote, developing country. I mean, in Bolivia, at the end of last year, one of the reasons for the OAS issuing a report that the bill of an election needed to be redone was the delay in the votes. This is, you know, and I think there's a very good reason why you should not have delays in votes. I mean, I think it was a solid criticism to make of that flawed election, of course, ended

up justifying an actual coup, which led to the deaths of many people that protest and clash with police. But I mean, people seem to be saying this in the United States as if they think that, oh, well, actually, we all know that, you know, elections are this bad everywhere. But really, really, they're not. This is quite, this is really American exceptionalism at its finest right here. So with that in mind, I'm going to go through the actual functions of this app. The precinct chairs are asked to enter the total number of attendees at a caucus. The precinct chairs then enter the vote totals and how many rounds. Then the app does has internal methodologies to calculate how many delegates each candidate is supposed to be awarded.

The app then sends those calculations to a Google Cloud back end, the back end being controlled by this private company, Shadow. Boy, so it just goes into a Google Drive somewhere. Yeah, we though. So basically, we run the podcast. It's okay, though, they say it's a can view but not can edit. All right, like it's secure. Is that I mean, I honestly don't know is that how worked I mean, was it in an entirely secret server for a while? Was it out of it was in the back end? All the results were in shadows control. So there was a point at which it could have been modified. I mean, I'm not claiming that that could have happened, but I'm saying that even the supposition that it was possible would be a huge problem for most. Yeah, I mean, especially

if the initial results are going off of what's been reported through this app or through this system, I mean, if there was a disconnect, I suppose that they would then have to turn to the sheets. But I guess the problem is that those tally sheets are just a tally of like a temporary thing where people are standing in line. It's not like you have ballots that can be secured and counted. And so if there's a discrepancy, you then have to go to the sheet. But if the sheet's incorrect, or if there's some discrepancy, I don't know how it gets resolved. And it just winds up making people less trustworthy of this. They were very safe in the Dropbox folder. I normally reserve for my vintage Sasha Gray video. So as it turns out, essentially, the way to understand

videos can be vintage now. The way to understand this is that a bunch of Takfiri Hillary dead enders had access to the calculation methodologies and the tabulations for Iowa in such a way that they could had they chose to do so potentially have have fucked the caucus. However, buddy, they won't even let me fuck it. However, we this shadow was all is a for-profit technology company that was owned by a nonprofit organization called Acronym. And this is fucking turtles all the way down. Acronym is also where we have a lot of the sort of former high-level Hillary Clinton staffers, for example, working. However, Kyle based from the small town of Outer Heaven, Iowa. Kyle Tharp. Kyle Tharp. You are kidding me. Come on. A company called Shadow owned by another

company called Acronym run by a man called Kyle Tharp. This is a spokesperson for Acronym. Kyle Tharp. At one point. We've got to put our best players out here. Get Tharp on the line. So just excellent. There's also a woman in this article mentioned from the Nevada Democratic Party called Jane Kleeb. Like a really shit bond villain. Kyle Tharp and Jane. Why do people with these names keep being Democrats? What is it about them? I don't know, man. So Kyle Tharp released a statement on Monday asking you not to make fun of his name and downplaying his company's affiliation with Shadow. Acronym is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors. One of those independent for-profit companies is

Shadow Inc, which also had other private investors. So we're now going to actually explore this relationship in detail over the next hour, which is kind of like the congressional committee meeting in Godfather part two. A bunch of portraits going up under a corkboard called Clinton Crime Family. Allegedly. Parody. Allegedly parody, but I don't know. I mean, not a little bit allegedly, but mostly Clinton Crime Family. So let's talk about the Democratic Party Venture Donation Nexus. So where did this app and technology company actually come from? How did it end up in the Android-only phones of some percentage of the Iowa caucus precinct? It's through this weird nexus of like Democratic battle mages with like they're all doing like a

cult data shit. Essentially, yes. So. Damn, Democrat Cummins. I never thought that someone would do worse in the UK basically letting people regularize their EU citizenship status in the UK by doing it on an Android app that was untested, but they've actually managed to do something even less responsible. They've given it to the stonecutters. Or in this case, the ancient and mystical society of no burnings. So the higher ground is one such organization. It is a startup incubator, specifically for progressive-ish Hillary Democratic establishment politics. The founders of higher ground, Shomik Dutta and Betsy Hoover created the investment firm. Yeah, Betsy Hoover. Fucking hell. Yeah, definitely. This is a parade of fucking names.

Betsy Hoover created the investment firm to provide financing and a launching pad for new companies serving the Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. This is specifically to counter stuff like Cambridge Analytica and like the Trump Breitbart nexus of political strategy. Well, entirely failing to take into account that for right-wing billionaires, that's just a good investment with an actual cash return on a good investment. And so they have this entire media think tank Natsek ecosystem behind them manufacturing what's common sense. And we're going to explore a little bit of what higher ground, which is one of like the organizations for creating this new kind of like

shadow industry around the Democratic party does. So here's higher ground slogan, which should in the context of the rest of his episode in the last few days, be seen as extremely ironic. Here's the slogan. We're in the business of saving democracy. Oh, so setting out there's still fairly like humbling. Someone's got to save it. What are you going to not save it? Yeah, you have to save it. And look, pen and paper was the problem. I just didn't have enough apps. I just think it was weird that on the letterhead, they put their mission as we are going to turn Iowa into a failed state.

In all seriousness, how are all of these companies and groups so fucking insufferable? First of all, a company called Shadow, which is like, why the fuck? Then a company called acronym, which is like almost like they're making a joke about how insufferable tech and the company names are. But by coming up with a tech company name that's even more insufferable somehow by being called acronym, but not actually being an acronym. And then this fucking show, we're called higher ground because we're about taking the higher ground. And our mission is to save democracy. Oh, what have we done? We've built an app that ruins democracy. It's literally just three different variations on the truck marked flowers by Irene.

Every one of these is named like coincidentally fucking Air America Enterprises or something. Is that number? I'm curious. I mean, because I don't know if it's actually suspicious or not, but what is there in this official explanation for why it's called Shadow? Is there like, do they sound cool? We're going to be invisible. We're going to be seamless. Is there a reason or we don't know? We don't know. Okay. So the higher ground, we're starting at the very top, which is donors who run startup incubators for like to receive all this funding. So higher ground has started with $15 million committed from different investors, including Reed Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn,

whose main political idea, which we discussed on like the third episode of this show actually. Also, another name just incidentally was making billboards that you could vote on. His new political party that was going to be the alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans was going to have policies that you could vote on and billboards also that you could vote on. Isn't he a weird libertarian guy too? I mean, aside from the voting billboards thing. Wait, how do you vote on a billboard? You vote for what a billboard will be, and that's how that party's policy gets decided. So why don't you just vote directly for the policy? What does the billboard come in and

vote for the billboard? You're helping pick the advertising for the party. Oh, I see. So what if you did like a really awesome billboard for like a really bad policy? Like a messy AF billboard, but it's like, you know, bring back the death penalty. Well, I mean, it's America, so you can't really bring back. Yeah, you can't bring it back. So also hypothetically, other investors or not investors, but donors, donors, stroke investors, what the Democratic Party has done is blurred the line. So the founder of Ron Conway, who went early back with Google, Facebook, and so on and so on, Chris Saka, an early investor in Uber, and Elizabeth Cutler, Chris Saka, an early investor in Uber, and more importantly,

Elizabeth Cutler, the founder of SoulCycle. Oh, don't tell me SoulCycle, I co-op in this. Come on, Pete, you're almost there. Don't snuck off now. Oh, my. So a few of the companies they have funded are as follows. FactBase, or factba.se. Yeah, the Swedish website, Factba. Which is called a... And by the way, this is for saving democracy. So Vincent, take some notes if you want to save democracy. I don't see what's wrong with FactBase. It's one of the favorite websites. What is it with obvious CIA fronts funding stuff called the base? So FactBase is a transparency engine allowing any PAC campaign organization or company to

efficiently track and search every word a person has ever said publicly or online in real time. That's just Twitter search. They've just automated low key Nash. This lets you immediately identify discrepancies, changes in position, tonal shifts, and areas of weakness. Every word spoken by your opponent makes your campaign stronger and the opponent weaker. RoboNash. Fucking hell. But this just... Was this used? What is it? It was funded. It was certainly funded by them. I'm just laughing because I'm thinking about you think you can turn this incredible arsenal on somebody like Roger Stone. And you gotta look at this Twitter history. It's just him adding Ryan's Prebis with rinse penis over and over again.

A hundred times. Oh, did you see the woman who got like a printout of her tweets that got vetted by an employer? And it was just like this sheaf, this miracle on 34th Street sack of documents of every tweet she had ever done, including like the word ass. She liked to tweet that used the word ass. It came on his flag. It flagged as problematic. This is also like the most maya Pete shit ever, right? I mean, I know maya Pete himself didn't come up with this, but it's like, it's incredibly maya Pete because it's like, oh, everything your opponent says is a weakness because it just gives more data with which to gotcha them. It's like the ultimate presidential candidate is someone who stands for nothing

and has never said anything in his entire life, just like maya Pete. Like this kind of like, oh, I'm just I'm just standing here being a being a boy standing in front of a lecturer and asking them to love him. I'm just I'm just I may just be a simple country idiot, but I'm here. I'm a simple country CIA officer, but I'm here to run the country. Yeah. What can I just interrupt to say that I feel like there's there's a hilarious sort of trick being played here with regard to maya Pete trying to voice himself as this as this like country every man. I'm not like like redneck, but you know what I mean? Like sort of like I'm from middle America when I'm from Indiana and and South Bend is a college town. His parents were both tenured professors at Notre

Dame. Like he just describing himself as sort of being like this red state every man is such it's such an obvious dupe. And it's like, it's killing me because I mean, if you don't know anything about the state of Indiana, then you feel like, oh, it's a red state. I think Mike Pence is from there. Clearly, everyone must be like that. But like Notre Dame is a really good at school and a really expensive school to go to. And like his parents were extremely well compensated. So but and that's the kind of thing that you could use fact base to highlight and then, you know, beat your opponent by pointing out their hypocrisies. Yes. All the hall monitor, the way that you win an election. Yes. So they funded an app that automates calling the manager,

but also low key Nash. Finally, proving maya Pete's privileged background by finding a picture of him with the hunchback. They also they also funded an app called same side, which is a platform to activate supporters who are, quote, already doing cool things in music, art and culture. Activate how like in the fucking movie? Like a thing on your phone that tells you to go pick up a sniper rifle. If you if you have like a beat poetry night in, you know, downtown Dubuque, then yeah, you get activated. What does this push notification say? And then avalanche strategy, which creates resonant communications, leveraged on advances in cognitive science that inspire action and support of progressive

candidates, causes and companies. Okay, now it's metal gear solid again. This is a strategy of an avalanche. Hell yeah. But that's how Nicholas Jones has sex. Am I right? One of the just to sum up like higher ground, they seem to be a company that wants a company, a nonprofit incubator that wants to counter the influence of like Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart, Fox News and so on and so on. By doing by just giving money to the most paltry, obviously, faulty either in conception or vague in execution companies to have ever existed, by the way, which by the way, which also already also offer their services to private companies. Is there any point in their literature where it says really, really big disrupting democracy? Is

that they have to use that language at all? Because it's like it is the one thing that you do not need to innovate around, right? Like everybody to vote, you count up the votes and then the winner wins, right? You don't need to have sort of they're saving democracy not disrupting gang. We're saving democracy as we pull up in our big saving democracy van, and the back door flies open and Salvador Aendo's corpse rolls out. We're just going to extraordinarily render every Bernie delegate from all of the caucus sites. Mohamed Musadek alive in Serbia and developing apps. But here's the thing. A lot of these are advocacy platforms or campaigning platforms.

They're not simply sort of they're not providing like just like a caucus infrastructure. So that's where we get to the last one. Groundbase or the last one I'm talking about, Groundbase. Groundbase is an opinionated technology platform for organizers, activists and advocates to organize their voters, volunteers and donors. The core platform is a CRM which is just a customer records management armed with organizing tools and an API that connects to other platforms. So basically, that's a very fancy way of saying it's a spreadsheet that has connections to other databases in it that you can connect to other databases. It's a slack. It's a Hamilton slack for Epic Hillary memes.

But it was and Groundbase was basically a texting platform that was criticized as slow, cumbersome, difficult to use and ultimately failed even after it got its $100,000 in funding from higher ground. So it's an epic Hamilton clap back meme stash that doesn't work. What people needed was another way to text because you can't text now. You know what this is? You know what this is? They paid however many million dollars for the bit in that video where Kelly wrote on this texting and Excel. If you just want to sort of follow this just now, we have the investment initially made by a bunch of Democratic donors

that would ordinarily be made to the DNC or similar like PACs, which would then go to consultants who would make like TV ads and then put them out on TV. That money is now being channeled into those. That shit didn't work either, but that now this money is being channeled through things like higher ground labs. So we followed a little bit of that money to shadow, to Groundbase rather, and now Groundbase is going to jump ship to another similar organization called acronym, which we'll now explore. So acronym was actually, before we do that, because this is where we get into caucus technology, Vincent,

earlier we were talking about how democracy essentially doesn't need an app. Like pen and paper is more or less fine. Right. Yeah, I mean, like I was saying, it's very simple what you do. I mean, so in all the elections I've ever been in, which is a lot of them, what you do is there's a very simple, transparent way that every single person in the country votes, and it's entirely universal. And then you get all the results in two or three hours. And everyone in the whole world, there's like, there is sort of best practice for democracy. And the one country that doesn't do this out of some combination of sort of believing in our own

bullshit or sort of it ends up serving the powers that be whatever explanation you want to have for is the United States. And when the rest of the world watches this, and I'm not talking, you know, just in, you know, Western Europe or things are sort of well organized, this is just, it's insane the way that it looks to a lot of my people, my friends in South America or Asia. I mean, it just, it makes the United States look really bad. It doesn't, I mean, there's already a lot of doubts as to legitimacy of the U.S. system worldwide. I mean, I think arguably it's in a very fragile state right now. But this kind of thing does a real amounts of damage because like I was saying,

you really all you have to do is get everyone to vote the same way and then count it. You don't need to disrupt this technology. I was just thinking about this from the perspective of having voted in the U.S. and then voted here in the U.K. like it's shocking how much better run it is here. And it's like, I voted in enough states where I remember some states where I had to wait in line for nearly an hour, like in Alaska for early voting, and then places like North Carolina where there was almost no line, but it was voting into a machine that then it print out at least. But if I'm not mistaken, there are some states in America where there is no print out.

No, we have it state by state. It's the different states of different technologies, which was the entire issue with the 2000 election. And in the 2000 election in Florida, you actually had to push through the piece of paper and then they had a court fight as to how to count differing levels of paper pushing. Whereas I did elections in Brazil at times, I did elections in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. Or every voting station had international observers and everybody could say, oh, yeah, you vote in the machine and then it comes out the paper and then they count it all. And you do a spot count of the paper. You compare it to the electronic tally. And if there's any discrepancy, which there never is, then you do it again.

But in the United States, obviously we have this piece of paper that was written 5,000 years ago that is more valuable than viable. Our constitution is like, and everything we've ever done in the United States can never be questioned if it's been done for 20 to 30 years. But yeah, you don't need to change these technologies. But the thing is that doing it with pen and paper isn't cool. Whereas if you have an app, then a guy who's called Trent Meyer from San Francisco can come in on a skateboard and can say like, what if this election was, you know, modern? That's true. Pencil and paper does not empower the Kyle Thops of this world very much. Like for our American listeners,

so just put it into perspective, I registering to vote in the UK, I was able to do it over email and just submit the information I need to to register, get on the electoral register. And then I showed up at the polling station, they confirmed my name on the register, I got handed a piece of paper and a pen, and I made an X in a box next to the party I wanted to vote for and then put it in a box that then got sealed later when they had the full thing. And look at how that turned out. I know you're wrong. The result fucking sucked. But that was so much easier than anything. I mean, voting in New York, you literally have to go into a thing where you have like a scantron form,

and then they have to put it into a machine and have it scan for you. And at every step, there's a machine that could break as one could go wrong. And they're always cues. Whereas I just didn't have that experience here. But the thing is, yes, all of this may be true, we may be able to vote effectively with pens and papers. But if you have Democrat brain, then when Kyle Tharp comes in and says, Hey, I've got this mostly broken spreadsheet that basically doesn't work and got like $100,000 of donor money dumped onto it. The worst app is better than the best organized pen and paper system. And they're willing to spend enormous amounts of money on it.

And there'll be zero fallout from when things completely shit the bed, like what just happened. So acronym was founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan. And as we'll see, it exists as kind of a similar vehicle to higher ground. But rather than funding lots of new products, what it does is it purchases and then is a non-profit umbrella that sits over lots of for-profit tech companies and consulting firms. This sounds like a fucking scam. Why does a non-profit company own a bunch of for-profit companies? That's actually, there is actually a particular rule where the tech companies, in order to try to be viable, to be viable between election cycles have to be able to

make a profit. Now, I agree this is obviously crooked, but there is a reason to do it. It's crooked in a recognized sort of loophole way. This is, I imagine, also going to be extremely crooked on top of that. It's allegedly very crooked all the way down. So late last year, acronym unveiled a plan to spend $75 million on digital advertising to counter Donald Trump's advantage in early battleground states and months earlier than that. It also quietly invested like a million dollars in ground base, the tech firm that then renamed itself Shadow. Well, they were going to start a huge like ground-based group chat where the avatar was a

dick and it was going to be called like President Liar and Gibbo was going to give everyone the inside track on how Donald Trump was a big naughty boy. Is it worse if it's like if you're just doing this as a scam or if you look at an Excel spreadsheet that uses 18 gigabytes of memory because it's full of Epic Hamilton gifts and go, here is a million dollars. Do more of this. God, I hate Hamilton. Just every time the name of that musical comes up, I've just get triggering memories of the time I was forced to watch it. Oh, yeah. Here.

Yeah, here. And everyone there was American, which is hilarious. Like we've left America to go and watch a musical about how great America is and no problems here in a different country for some reason. I mean, nothing could be more American than that, to be honest. Yeah, I think most musicals actually learn into all Americans there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, wait, is Iowa a reporter app.exe.virus just ground-based but with more memes? Well, sort of. So, ground-based, Shadow and ground-based are technology companies that

developed apps. Ground-based is main technology was this texting platform center in fucking Derby shit. But equally, what you also buy when you buy a technology company is like the team. And so, they have the epic soy face guys we saw. Yeah, all those epic soy face guys also would have come on. But also, you get like all their IP. It's just in this case, the IP sucked. So, the Caucus app itself, again, this has been reported, was largely built in the basis of tutorials and was solely existed as a way to enter information onto a form and then have that information calculated into delegates and put onto a back end. So, they basically could have done it using Google Sheets and had a pre-filled sheet,

but they spent 70 grand on an app. Well, I think they did it using phones for like a hundred years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they could have got 32 in the righty town. If I'm not mistaken, there was a guy who legitimately, because the app wasn't working, sent his people to drive to the Democratic Party headquarters in, I guess, in Iowa City or in Des Moines, and they were turned away at the door and he's like, no, no, no, we're using an app. I'm going to try to...

It's just dentists from, it's always sunny in Philadelphia trying to make the Uber in the St. Patrick's Day season. No, you're not having the experience I want for you. I'm going to try to explain this in gamer terms since we're going with Metal Gear Solid for this. This makes ground-based the Shagohod and the Iowa Reporter app Metal Gear. I think this ground... No, it says ground-based, I guess, no, Reed Hoffman is the Patriots. And then Tara McGowan is Big Boss. Okay, sure. So who is Tara McGowan?

She was a former Obama campaign aide married to a senior strategist in the Buttigieg campaign and ran the Hillary super PAC called Priorities USA during the 2016 White House campaign. She's basically as close to near-attended as you're able to get while not being near-attended. God, do you remember that tweet that was like, there's no such thing as the Democratic Party establishment? Yeah, exactly. No, she's the acronym establishment. These things are quotation marks extending around the world different. And also the vast majority of the staff at acronym and app and shadow, which,

by the way, shared an office. So all of the talking about, oh, we're distant, I just invested them. It's like, no, they're the same and we'll get to how they're the same. Or also like staffers from Hillary's 2016 campaign. So despite McGowan's urgency on spending all this money to counter Trump, how much do you think she spent of the $75 million to counter his advantage in early battleground states? You said it earlier before we started recording.

So now the question is, did people listen? Yes. I wasn't listening to anything you said so far today. What do you think it was? I don't know. Not all of it, right? No, certainly not. Specifically, one order of magnitude less. It was $781,000 on Facebook and Google ads.

In fact, that's two orders of magnitude less. Maybe the other $74 million was just on like Christian Mengel. It was all just the ads. MuslimSingles.com. So that is then a presumably still in some bank account somewhere they can use for other stuff. But the thing is, it's very hard to audit these complicated webs of organizations. We just don't know. You know, we know who might have donated to them directly.

You can see kind of what their ad buy is, but you don't know all the money they have access to, who they can spend it on behalf of. That is the unironic bit of the Clinton crime family thing. It is. It is. It works very similarly to a racketeering or corrupt organization. We can't see where any of this stuff goes. Hang on.

So this is basically barone democratization. So this is from a profile in Aussie that I dug up from a couple of years ago. Aussie being this company that threw the Aussie festival where they had like... Oh, why remember? No. They had like common speak with Hillary Clinton about how like, you know, apps were the future of blockchain and that's democracy or whatever. Are you going to be the president of the fucking future?

Acronym is a non... This is from Aussie. Acronym is a non-profit, but it has a web of for-profit companies beneath it. A campaign consulting firm owned by McGowan called Lockwood Strategy. A political tech company with a peer-to-peer texting product. Shadow. Oops. Oops.

Looks like it wasn't that dissociated. Looks like it was pretty much in a command and control relationship until last week. And a media company investing heavily in local left-wing leaning outlets called FWIW Media. So that's where the other $75 million went. It was just on Wonkat banner ads. Oh no, there's more. Like for what it's worth as a economist.

It also has an apparel arm called Rogue Swag. No fucking way. They are like swag. Come on. You guys don't like swag? These new Star Wars films just keep getting worse and worse. And it's supposed to be the like, centrist answer like the Nancy Pelosi clap back to conservative Blue Lives Matter t-shirt company.

Oh god. So it's like grunt style, but like... Epic Hillary stuff. You don't need to clap back those t-shirt companies. They already suck. I love, I love to get my fucking soy face loot box in the mail once a month. So I've actually, maybe we can have this as the episode art. Their t-shirt that they were selling.

I'll bring it up on screen for the benefit of us in the studio. It is a red shirt. It looks completely the same as a Donald Trump shirt. Make presidents great again, but if you were to see this on the street, you would just assume that person's a Trump supporter. That is just what they're selling. You have to get very, very close to realize that it is a bad, ironic take on a horrible shirt. I would assume they're a fan of the presidents of the USA.

Largely forgotten grunge band. Oh no. I never forgot for one day. What do you, what do you say? Oh yeah. I appreciate that. I see you. I value you.

We're here. We got peaches. What's the other one? Oh yeah, peaches. That's the only one I know. We got peaches. We got lump. Lumps and peaches.

Like two tracks off a Fergie album. The tweet that accompanied the ad for make the make presidents great again shirt. Again, the almost unambiguously pro Trump shirt that they made because they're too, they, they Ivy League institutions have tricked these people into thinking that they're clever. And this is sort of the fallout from that. It says we're done with the chaos. Four is enough of Donald Trump suggesting that four was fine, but that's enough now. And this is make presidents great again and amazing.

I was like, when were presidents so great? Like what, what is this shit? Jeopardyre Bartlett. Like, yeah. Like what the fuck? Like, oh, I remember when we had Kennedy who was like just fucking all the time. Like what is that? I mean, I think, I think the answer is you saw Hamilton.

Like there's this weird idea of like as soon as somebody's no longer president, they enter into like the nostalgia hole. And whether it's Republicans were like literally for a young Republican convention, they had to when they had people introduce themselves and introduce their favorite conservative politician, they had to stipulate, you can't say Ronald Reagan because everyone will say that and no one would have any other ideas. Same sort of thing with Democratic presidents. It just feels like there's an extent to which the answer,

the kind of liberal answer to Trump is to say the institution is so great. He's sullied it as opposed to like looking at what American. Well, that's the Biden campaign, isn't it? I mean, it's yeah, absolutely. You can turn back the clock to a time that didn't really exist. And yeah, don't think about it too hard. Just vote. And even to like you have,

but you also have to willfully deny reality when you encounter Joe Biden himself. You have to vote for the image of Joe Biden. Yeah, you vote for the memory of him standing on stage with Barack Obama. I mean, I don't think that is, you know, that could work. I mean, it was, it looked like it was working for a long time. Polling looked like it was going to work for the longest time. Yeah, but then I also love that, by the way, the 538 official polling, like their estimates of the likelihood of who was going to be president were like,

yeah, putting Biden up in front until the second some vote started to come in. And then there was just an enormous reversal, making all of their predictions look completely stupid. It looks like the whole guy's been making some problems down at the app, Jack. Yeah, that poll guy said, I think somewhat ironically, not that that makes a difference, that the needle hasn't failed. We've only failed the needle. Oh, yeah, Nick Cohen, yeah, yeah.

We can't fail the needle. That's the most heroin-adding phrase. Courier newsroom was another one of the companies in the acronym Umbrella. And it says its mission was to generate left-leaning, quote-unquote, political news content that then pays to have that content placed favorably in people's Facebook feeds. And the news sites created by Courier are made to look like non-biased news sources to a casual observer. They were actually doing fake news. You put like pro-Hillary fake news, or like pro like, I don't know, like Mayor Pete fake news.

I think by definition, it can't be fake if it's for a certain like, a certain like strata of like ideas, anything that you say in favor of them, by definition, can't be fake. Like the Washington Post can't do fake news, New York Times can't do fake news. Fake news can only exist to serve Russia. They make the news real. Yeah, so it would be like an imitation version of those. Like you would get your same content as the Washington Post,

but it would be from like, I don't know, the Accela corridor, extremely independent news. And but also remember, like the whole Democratic Party, the DNC establishment thing was hotly saying, they go low, we go high. Well, in this case, they appear to have like a plan to spend $25 million of just someone's money to try to make the like, fake news version of the Rod and Todd press from the Flanders. They're too stupid to be evil, but that doesn't mean that they're can't try to be both. I'm not against going low if it works. And this absolutely didn't. So here's the thing, the complex structure means this is from this is from Aussie still.

The complex structure means that acronym is able to raise money, invest in for profit companies to advance progressive aims, then return profits back to its mission. Tara McGowan said, people don't understand why I'm creating a model that I can't get rich off of, because I don't own the company's acronym does. And that's a huge threat to political consultants bank accounts. However, her political digital consulting company Lockwood strategy, this is back to another source now, received a million dollars in payments from acronyms pack during fall 2018. Oh, so it is a scam. Yeah.

Okay. Now we've gotten to how it's just me paying yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For I don't take any dividends, I just pay myself a huge fucking salary by my consulting company. And the main field on this check just says vibes. And that's the thing, I want to go back to what she said. That's a huge threat to political consultants bank accounts, because it's true. It is because she's replacing one class of political consultant, the Robbie MOOCs, the, you know, where this had to appeal to wine moms in Duluth with a different type of

political consultant who looks and acts like a startup person, but it doesn't have even the basic like skill with JavaScript that a startup person might do. Do you know what's really a threat to political consultants bank accounts? Why are you all so fucking worried? Eating pussy. So, so basically let's, let's trace this money again. Shadow, we start with 15 million dollars from Reid Hoffman. Shadow then receives a hundred thousand of that money to in order to become

it gets fucking soul cycle money indirectly. So soul cycle gives money to higher ground to allocate to startups. One of the startups is, is, is ground based ground based fails, but that is bought for a million dollars by acronym and then, and then acronym then uses that as one of its things that was as a, as a service that it can basically release out to campaigns mainly, including the bootage edge campaign, by the way, campaigns in order to like do digital services for them. But it's just everything about it is so low quality that it feels like one of these scams

where you're buying a high-fi set out of like the back of a van under a bridge and the box is just filled with sand. And it is a, and it is a money go round, right? Because if anyone is spending hundreds of dollars on soul cycle classes, it's the fucking simps who work at these startups and campaigns. You know what this has the energy of? The energy of an ancient like decade old tweet that was a guy who went to Walmart to buy a router like a, like a modem and opened it up and found it had contained a bag of dirt with the

word putha written on it. Well, that was good. That's what he was, that's not what he, yeah. So the basically, I think the thing to point out here is that the right builds products that work like Cambridge Analytica wasn't dark magic or mind control. It was just an effective online advertising and targeting tool. Whereas the Democratic party are losers who just channel donor money into the pockets of their friends and they give us nothing that works.

They give us things that at best what they do, and we're going to sort of explore this a little bit now, is they create black boxes that allow them to put their thumb on the scale of any election that they may want to, should they so choose? Or at least create the impression that they could if they wanted to. Whether or not they could do that competently. It doesn't matter, it still seems like it diminishes trust. But it's all cosplay, it's all theater is the thing. You can do all of that, but you get to dress up as this fucking startup magician.

That's incredible to me, that you just get to be very disruptive and move first and break things and wear the turtle neck and everything. And all it is is vibes. You may as well just be doing sigils and candles and shit. So what we have here is we have a money go round that is certainly self-sustaining and is not going anywhere because it's so entrenched. And we see that the money go round is built to keep all of these terrible technologies spinning. So Vincent, I'm going to throw back to you.

How in what ways does this erode trust and how can we compare this with other systems around the world? Well, the thing about the Iowa caucus specifically, and I don't cover US elections really carefully, one thing that we all know about the Iowa caucus is you don't actually win power from the Iowa caucus. What you win is sometime in the media, you win quote unquote momentum, you get to shape electability narratives that get reproduced in the media. So when they didn't say who won in the first couple hours after it ended,

they essentially canceled the Iowa caucus. And so what that means is that thousands of people that went to Iowa that spent weeks walking through the cold trying to get people to vote, 10 more people, 15 more people to vote for Bernie or Pete or Warren or wherever it was, all of that just kind of got wiped away because they either through malice or incompetence or just the chaos of the world. It all just didn't matter anymore. And that's extremely demoralizing for people to do it.

People that are, I mean, imagine being sort of a 19 year old American doomer or zoomer and older people are saying, well, you got to vote. It's going to make a difference. And you watch these people run around the country and then it all just gets wiped out. And that's what I'm hearing from sort of my younger cousins in California, but from people in South America that I'm friends with, they're just sort of gleefully laughing at the United States and being like, But that's praxis.

No, that's, I mean, I mean, I have one friend of mine. I like, I translated the tweet. It was originally in Portuguese, it was going viral. And I think the tweet was something like, I don't like to see the left being destroyed by dark plots in the United States that end up destroying democracy in the first place, but it is historic reparations for what they've done to us, isn't it? And like, and that's not like, again, that's, that's not something that's just like someone on the far left and in South America would say it's just like sort of well known

that that's the kind of stuff that we've done around the world. And it's also well known that our system is sort of teetering on the edge. Everybody knows that Donald Trump lost by three, three million popular votes and nobody really understands exactly why he's a president. They all understand that it's very strange. And like going back to Bolivia, the reason that I think that the OAS was right to say that Bolivia made a big mistake by halting temporarily the publication of the results, even though it ended up justifying a coup, which was totally

unacceptable. It is right to criticize that because if you have, if you allow any space for people to believe that this is, that the system is corrupt, that it doesn't work, that somebody's cheating against them, whether it's true or not, the whole legitimacy falls apart. And everybody, you know, as we all know, there is no difference between perceived legitimacy of democracy and the legitimacy itself, right? So if you cannot, if people do not know for sure that their vote will count right away

in the way that they know that it will, the system falls apart very, very quickly. And when systems like that fall apart, the winner is never the guy that has the people on his side. It's the people with institutional power that don't need the people on their side. There's a reason that sort of quote unquote destabilization of countries in the global south, and this is what a lot of my, the book is about that I just finished, there's a reason they can just kind of willy-nilly just fuck over a country, not really knowing how it's going to work, because they know that when you screw with

Chile in the 70s, you brought up Iandy a second ago, it's always going to help the people with material power and hurt the people that only have the people on their side, right? And so when you fuck with the very, very fragile legitimacy of a democratic system, it can, the slope is very steep. And then who ends up winning is the people that are already empowering the first place. And the people we wind up losing are the Zoomers. Yeah, the people that could maybe think about trying to vote because they know that the planets are going to be gone pretty soon and they want health care.

But then they say, well, it's not really going to work. And there's, that's another reason that whether or not there is a sort of conspiratorial effort to undermine this thing, when it happens over and over and over again, even if it's on accident, you know that they would change it if it was hurting their interests, right? You know, that people in power don't let systems fall apart when they know that it will hurt them, right? It tends to happen when they know that on balance, they'll be fine. The people that will be hurt or the people that all they have is the people walking through the other streets of, you know, the snow of Iowa, whether for Bernie or Biden,

I mean, although I think I didn't have that many people, but Pete or, you know, Zimmer framing through the snow of Iowa. For what it's worth, I did manage to, I'm very proud of this, do an extremely irony podcaster thing by helping Central Iowa DSA get an order of Lenin that they're going to give to the volunteers who organized that poultry plant. I have been promised that they're going to deliver this medal to them. So who gives out the order of Lenin now? eBay, I guess. I mean, I don't think you would have been a guy this now. So I think, but I think that leads us very nicely into like, into the, into asking questions about

the whole, that there is this, immediately the official narrative was, after this was, don't, don't imagine a conspiracy where there could just be a mistake. And I think that's a completely false choice. First of all, I think that, you know, and one of the reasons I sort of argue that is that apps, generally speaking, are obfuscatory mechanisms. They always hide something. They're a black box and you put something in and then the app spit something back out. So Uber, for example, you put coordinates in and a car journey gets spat back out. Facebook, you put your data in and ads get spat back out. The Iowa caucus app put votes in and spits delegates back out in a certain order. Yes,

it breaks a lot and so on, but there's the black box. And that black box was in the, was in the control of people who had the motive and the opportunity to basically want to fuck with the Bernie campaign. And if you are go, if you're running an insurgent political campaign, like this is part of it, they are going to be people who don't want you doing it, who are going to do everything they can to like rat fuck you. And that doesn't mean you should stop. It doesn't mean you should cry unfair, but it means you have to be aware of it. Which they were, you have to do the thing that the Bernie campaign did of keeping independent totals and releasing those when it became clear that the rat mode had been activated.

What we have here is a black box that obfuscated a group of people with an agenda. And we're basically being asked to be rubes, believing all of these events, all of these mistakes and so on, just simply occurred randomly. But again, Vincent, as you were saying earlier, if you get, if you are in a like, again, in an election that's being monitored by the OAS, for example, and there is a private company that is not just running, not just running the infrastructure of transferring the vote totals, but actually has access to them on their back end, that would be caused to rerun the election just generally, because it would not be trustworthy. That's not far off what happened in Bolivia. I mean, one of the main reasons that the OAS,

and I pulled up the report earlier, told Bolivia that their election was unverifiable was that there was a point at which a short point at which the elections were held in a server that was only accessed by a small group of parties. And then they claimed that the electoral authority was biased, which in the case of the Democratic Party, obviously cannot be, it is a political party. They would not want Donald Trump. You might not see it as biased if you agree with them, but obviously, they wouldn't want a Nazi to run for president in the Democratic Party. So they obviously have their own biases, although those biases are set within the band of mainstream acceptability. Of course, they are somehow a biased organization.

Yeah, and they had this access. Well, I think also what matters is that even if it's not a conspiracy, I would attribute a lot of this to incompetence, but also you realize when you start to peel back each layer, how bad it looks because of that same incestuous donor Democratic Party culture that you were describing that led to these shadow and these organizations and parent organizations and profits and nonprofits and things like that that effectively are just reflections of the institutional culture of the Democratic Party. But when you see the proximity of the app that's causing the election to run haywire to the candidate who's using that chaos to basically steal the narrative or to manipulate

the reporting of the results, and you see the antipathy that all these organizations have towards the person who then winds up actually winning the caucus, when you look at the fact that shadow follows like 78 accounts on Twitter and one of them is an organization that did a huge ad buy in Iowa to run ads against Bernie Sanders, you could be forgiven for believing that it's a conspiracy and it's certainly a snapshot of how much antipathy there is towards Sanders in the institution that's running this election. You know what this is though, it's not metal gear after all, it's arsenal gear. It's sorry, I'm just being too much of a gamer here, but like I can't help myself. It's not like it is sort of an institutional like guts

reflex and it's like, yes, it involves malice, obviously you would have to be stupid to think that it didn't, but that's sort of incidental to its work. Yeah, it's a conspiracy of like the world's dumbest people, right? Like no one likes losing elections more than the Democrats. And if they seriously wanted to rat fuck it so that Mayor fucking Pete got the nomination, like surely even they can't believe that Mayor Pete would win an election, surely they can't look at that man who stands for nothing, says nothing and is adored by like complete morons and be like, yeah. For all of them, it is another job. Like they can just hop from one campaign to another campaign, they'll be fine. And so what's what I mean? Part of this

hostility to the Sanders campaign isn't just that they disagree with him politically, that's part of it. And part of it isn't also that they literally have a frame picture of Mayor Pete with little hearts drawn around the picture in their promotional video. Not a joke, they have that. Yeah, we should really take that down in the studio. Is that if, is that the, their hostility to the Sanders campaign is that he will end the magic money tree for these lunatics. And the good question to ask always about this when you're wondering about a, about a conspiracy or whatever is Kibono, who benefits? What kind of access would these people have in a Sanders administration? And the answer is precisely

near attendant packing up a window and like wandering down to the fucking White House. Tara McGowan would have no place in a Sanders controlled Democratic party. Vincent, you were about to jump in when you said at the very minimum. Yeah, at the very, at the very, I mean, I don't know if it's a conspiracy. I don't know if there's, I mean, I don't know how well it looked like Pete was going to do beforehand. I think that was probably a surprise for everyone. But at the very least, this is a conflict of influence, interest that wouldn't fly in like a small town, you know, water, sanitation plan or whatever, you know, like a bar and grill in like San Diego wouldn't allow, be allowed to have this kind of

conflict of interest because it allows people to get the bar and the grill must be kept separate by Chinese walls inside of trading. You cannot do this. But you know, we're talking about the presidency of the United States of America, it would be very easy to set it up in a way that it's just unquestionable. I mean, the fact that we have to sit around and come up with theories as to what, how much malice or how much incompetence, I mean, I don't, I refuse to do it. Like you, you fix it. Like it's not my job to find out why it's awful. And the fact that it might be a conspiracy. And then I'm going to look stupid if I say that it is. No, just tell me all, just tell me what it is. It's not, you know, it's ridiculous that we have to sit around and ask why did American

democracy break last week? And then also looking at some of the things you think about just basic crisis management. Why when you have this massive huge failure, would you turn around and be like, we're going to mitigate this by releasing exactly 62% of the results? Yeah. And then like, that felt like it was torture. I felt like that was they were trying to make the United States left go in like completely insane. I think I feel like it was like Chinese water torture for everyone in the world that thought it may be Bernie. I mean, because I mean, I'm this is not exactly where I am myself, but it was just like watching everybody. This was so excited about this. And then they believed in, you know, they had some made some difference in like what 62 and then it was like

71. Yeah. 72. And it was, it was, it didn't, and we still don't know, right? Am I right? We still have no idea why they still haven't as I understand certified the results with regard to how they allocate the state delegate equivalent. And so we don't really know. They can't certify and say Bernie Sanders won until that's complete. And they're continuing to drag over. Like I said, the Iowa caucus doesn't matter anymore. It only mattered because it was going to be 48 hours of good coverage for whoever won, which would have mattered a lot to someone like Sanders. And all it took to do this was burning the entire legitimacy of possibly American democracy, but certainly the Iowa Democratic Party to the ground. Maybe democracy. I mean,

I'm not really being hyperbolic. I mean, the last three years, I was in a lot of the countries I was working in in Asia, a lot of them, you know, there's, you don't have this official civic religion where you're supposed to say you believe in democracy. And across the range of countries that I covered out there, some of them were more on the side of the spectrum where they sort of believe in liberal institutions. And others are more like, well, no, we've never believed in that at all. And in the last few years, at what happened in the West has caused every single one of those countries to take two or three steps away from believing in democracy country, you know, after Trump was elected countries that were really kind of giving lip service to saying they believed in

liberal institutions have kind of stopped countries that were kind of like, but ready to get in bed with China that just jumped in. I mean, the as stupid as it sounds, like the the crisis of legitimacy of US democracy ends up being a crisis of liberalism worldwide. And it seems like it's the kind of thing a lot of people have been saying on Twitter within the United States, kind of to be provocative or partisan, but I think it's really, really dangerous across the entire world. I for one, I'm very excited for a jute J Pete Buttigieg regime where he's just like dripping in unearned combat medals for like, but they're all just so when you look close, they're all just like scout badges for like best knots tide or whatever. They're there for when he was

a troop, it was for doing good tech support. Exactly. And he's making speeches about how he's the most woke person who's ever lived and doing some phoenix program shit and making a necklace out of support tickets. Yeah. And he spoke to the ghost of MLK in a dream and MLK kissed his ring and said that he was the true like fucking for successor. So I want to move on also to like how we're being because one of the things that a lot of the Pod Save America realm is doing, I actually listened to the Pod Save America episode about the Iowa Caucus after this happened, because I like to torture myself for you people. As you're essentially asked to believe, you're asked not just to believe, you're asked to act

as though doing anything but buying into the official narrative that this was a mistake on the part of the Democratic Party and Iowa Democratic Party specifically, not the DNC, not the DNC at all, Tom Perez totally above it. And furthermore, that by continuing to challenge this result from the left and by continuing to campaign against this broken money go round of consultants, you're essentially helping like hand the election to Donald Trump. And what I think is like, you know, you don't owe them an explanation for your suspicion. They owe you an explanation for why this happened. Exactly. And so I have some quotes from the johns. It was just an oopsy. Yeah, I have some quotes from the from the johns live from the back page of backpage.com.

One of the johns, no HSEB, the idea that someone would develop an app that swings the caucus one way or the other is absurd. No, it isn't. But it did happen. I mean, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it was an intentional swing or not, it ended up swinging the momentum of the real concrete Iowa caucus as it exists in our political reality. It happened. And equally, I think we've spent what the last hour pointing out that no, there are some very concrete financial interests involved in creating an app that may or may not swing the democratic caucus. Also, people knew in advance that they were having problems with it because I mean, I remember seeing stories reporting on this from the week prior saying people on the ground are

saying this app is a piece of shit. It doesn't work. It's going to cause problems. And sure enough, actually, that's kind of where I'm going to go into a Riley explains corner for a moment. This is Riley explains the venture capital model. And this is venture donation. It's not venture capital, but it's the same business model. But what you get is you have an incubator like higher ground. Incubator is also a Y Combinator in the private sector. Higher ground has a pot of money that it's going to invest. And then what you do is you do sometimes a hackathon, sometimes a code day, you make a pitch or whatever, and you get accepted and they give you a certain amount of seed money. In this case, it was $100,000 for a ground base. And then what you do is you try

to create a based on your plan, you try to create an MVP or minimum viable product. The minimum viable product is basically think of as the code and for the collection of features that will be something you can sell in the market. And the idea is in sprints of about two weeks, you try to build to a minimum viable product as fast as you can, and then get it out and fail in the market. And this is the basic way that venture capital funded industries work, right? But this is completely ludicrous for something like venture donation because you can't go and road test this thing in a couple of small elections and see how it works. It either works or it doesn't work. And when something is not... Because this is where you get the move fast

and break things. It's because of the way that venture capital expects returns on its investments. It's just venture donation expects returns in terms of say voter excitement or whatever. We've been road testing the app on the election of the local women's institute. People are very upset about Barbara's victory. So because it has no customer base to sell to, it can't fail fast and pivot in the market. So even you would see this happening a lot of times with Shadow before it actually had to do anything. It started as a texting platform and then they pivoted to a bunch of other stuff. Then they tried to build the Iowa caucus app as a minimum viable product. That's why it had so

few features. That's why it was so buggy. That's why it couldn't release in the Apple store. It's also why they did it so much on the cheap. I mean, they spent $70,000 on an app. They hired people that were boot camp coding grads and somebody with very little experience in app development. And they wound up using a very shoddily put together, very unstable thing for something that was so incredibly high stakes and couldn't be rerun. I mean, don't get me wrong. I mentioned earlier in the episode, the thing about the EU settlement thing was insane. They did that on an app that only worked on certain Android devices and was really buggy. But that at least, if it didn't work, you could do it again. You can't rerun the fucking

election. Because this is, I'll end the Riley explains corner here, minimum viable products aren't really designed to work. They're designed to be a proof of concept to sell to a larger company that then invests in it to build it to work. So this new turn of Democratic party consultant grifting, which is based on the startup model because they all love Silicon Valley, I will always remember until my dying day that on a list of the most trusted institutions by American Democrats, Amazon was number one. Amazon is the number one most trusted institution by registered Democrats in America. They love it because it gets them all their toys and it's very fancy and very smart. And so this turn is going to as basically the consultants, like at

least they gave advice, the advice was bad, but at least they gave it. In this case, the products don't even work because they're not because the startup model isn't designed to produce functional products. It's designed to produce saleable companies. It doesn't work, but it doesn't work in a more irritating and dramatic fashion. So I'm going to do another pod save This is Tommy Vitor and I've transcribed this precisely. Is this big-time Tommy? Different Tommy. Where this gets ridiculous is you have all these online inspector gadgets who are using FEC filings to see that Pete has paid shadow or this or that, which is completely ridiculous. But why is that ridiculous? It's not ridiculous.

It's ridiculous to care about things or to investigate them. You can only investigate things if you're the Washington Post and you do investigations about whether Nancy Pelosi was really doing an epic clap back or whatever. Nancy Pelosi, my son did not watch Little Women. Please clap back at him. Please tear up his speech. I'm going to make him write a speech so that you can tear it up. Also, Tommy Vitor specifically started this episode pretending not to know the name of the company shadow when he was at Tara McGowan's fucking birthday. Why me? You guys didn't get invited there. It's a hot part of the year. I was invited. I was just doing a thing with my girlfriend. She goes to a different school.

So she's from Canada. Which was the relationship that Tommy Vitor was calling? So was it that Buttigieg had given his campaign a given money to or the other way around? Buttigieg's campaign bought software consulting services from shadow. But the other thing is, all of these consulting services, it's just you're buying someone's opinion and they can just say how much it's worth. Again, just because this might not be crooked doesn't fucking mean it isn't. Yeah, I mean, I do not doubt that these other podcasters have found people on the internet that came up with stupid theories based on insufficient evidence. But that's why you don't have a system which is obviously flawed and then give the public tiny scraps of information

because the entire country is going to go insane. That's where QAnon comes from, right? They're crazy, but they're not. When they imagine the sort of malign establishment working against them, it's not for nothing, right? I mean, they were right about the billionaire pedophiles and they will always have that. Yeah, they were. Like, you know, one nil to the QAnon guys on that one. Yeah, I mean, so when there is an explosion of conspiracy theories, some of which are stupid, I think that it's irresponsible and condescending to blame the guy on the internet that's just trying to patch it together. You should blame the people that are in charge of putting on elections in the most powerful country in history and don't do it in such a way that

everybody thinks, is this, is everything against me? What's going on? But that's the thing, right? And I think that you've sort of, you've brought the nail to be hit on the head, which is that, like, if you think back to higher grounds mission, the missions of all of the, in 2017, the acronyms and higher grounds and the companies that were going to try to bring tech to the Democrats, it was to save democracy and beat Trump. But what they have actually done, the fact that they've done quite the opposite, but lined their own pockets, I mean, again, I know it's hacked to say projection much, but projection, you know, they've just, they have become that which they hate. But that they, they have essentially, again, combined a perfect storm of incompetence

and malice to then basically make it so that we will never know what the real, like, results of the Iowa primary was other than that Sanders won. For a friend of the show, Matt Lubchansky had, I think, the definitive take on this, which was to attribute it not to malice, but to a new concept, which they had invented called malice to. You know, and if you think about this, the, it's obvious Sanders won the Iowa caucus, but we will never know by how much specifically, because of a combination of the political economy of the Democratic Party, which places records and positions of uncountable authority via private companies and keeps on rewarding them endlessly with million-dollar consulting fees. And the people who are even supposed to be like

vaguely commenting on them in the media, these people are all friends. And the only way, the only way that the American left is going to be able to get rid of these people is to make sure that Bernie Sanders is the nominee, which fortunately, that seems pretty likely at this point. I was laughing at the idea of this being a proof of concept for them to sell the app. So by the time that the UK has its next general election, everyone has to install the no labor allowed app. It's fine. They've got 49 other primaries and caucuses to work out the kinks through. So yeah, exactly. The voting is on in New Hampshire is just norm, right? It's a secret ballot. I think it's a secret ballot. Nothing in New Hampshire is normal, but yes.

Well, Pete did jump in the polls. He did. He's now a close second, right? Yeah. I mean, in one count, Emerson, I think kind of overstated Bernie Sanders' lead in the previous polling in Iowa, but Emerson had Sanders up by 11. But there was, I think, a Boston Globe poll that just came out that had Sanders, I think, 24 and Buttigieg at like 23. And Buttigieg had jumped, I want to say, seven or eight points. I mean, that's the thing about we, I mean, people like us watch politics very closely, but the average American kind of doesn't really pay attention to the primary until the caucuses start, which is why Iowa kind of matters, right? If you would have had theoretically either Pete or Sanders or Biden or whatever on TV the night of the Iowa

caucus being like I won, that does matter. That's why everybody goes out to Iowa and cares so much about it. And that's why even if in three months we get the definitive, you know, you know, there's like a super long read in the New York Times where there's a TikTok explaining what happens. It doesn't matter. It's over. It's over. They fucked it up. It didn't happen. At least there is one silver lining, which is Joe Biden coming, what, a distant fourth? Yeah. Yeah. He got distracted by a shapely piece of driftwood. I was going to say, I mean, I understand your perspective on this because I feel like that's the weird byproduct of this whole debacle is that Biden's implosion hasn't really gotten reported.

No, that's what I mean. That's what I mean. I don't cover U.S. elections closely, but I've heard that credibly as a theory that his implosion sort of went under the radar because everybody was concentrating on this thing at the very top of the polls. Whereas if it was just Bernie and then Biden was gone, it might have been like his donors would have been out right away. Because a lot of his campaign at this point depends on who's paying for it, right? I think a lot of his donors don't really leave the house, though. I think they're more like TV reruns guys. I think he gets big money, though. His donors are big, right? He is big. Yeah. From a lot of people who are in oxygen masks and spend most of the day in coffins.

No, but I do think that there are a lot of people who thought that there's a sort of reflex continuity Obama sort of notion with him. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the real Obama and the provisional Obama. This is something I wanted to ask, right? Because in 2008, wasn't the Obama campaign very famously and very proudly sort of a data-driven campaign? Wasn't that something that I don't know how much true it was, but it was hyped up as we're using the internet. We've got this coalition together so I could see how it could make sense. Have you heard of the internet? That's just the thing. I mean, first of all, the Obama campaign didn't, as far as I'm aware, at least the 08 and 12 campaigns, didn't use these third-party services.

It was all sort of built natively. Yeah. They had their on-board data team and stuff. None of which they gave to the DNC, which is hilarious. No, of course not. The difference isn't that campaigns are using technology. They've been using it for a while now. Like we said earlier, Robbie Mooc was a data guy. His data was bad, but he tried to use it anyway. I just can't get over Robbie Mooc. It's more that there is now a specific model, a specific extractive model, that's basically based on the startup economy. Yes. But the point that I've said before, and as has been said before, isn't to say that this

isn't fair or that they cheated or to say, oh, well, we don't care. We can't win whatever. No, it's to understand that maybe the part of the left's job is to end this expensive incompetence that constitutes the entirety of the Democratic Party. Making a bold break there with Matt Brunigs. What if we had a left think tank? And of this sort of research, I've done through a lot of the articles that have been written now and a lot of the articles that have been written and filings that have happened years ago. So that's what this episode has been. It's been a balance of those two things. Democratic unsiders are very rarely named when they're quoted,

because they speak under conditions of anonymity because they're afraid of retribution from other Democratic insiders. There's like an omerta against actually trying to break this thing open into shedding any transparency. So Robbie Mooc actually is a low-level enforcer in Ralph Sifreddo's crew. That's what we're saying. And this gets us to an obvious stitch up against the left of the party that the party's not going to fix because it has no political or financial incentive to do so. You're never going to win by quoting the rules at them. And the point of this is that I believe, I know this is not an opinion shared by everyone around this table, that at this point the left of the party has to understand that it has leverage,

but that leverage isn't the rules. The leverage is to say that if the DNC puts an illegitimate candidate on the ballot in the form of someone who is taking compromise, at least one, compromise caucus, to vote Democrat down the ticket, but to leave the top spot fucking black. Yeah, Daniel Bust. I mean, I have a different take. And actually, Vincent, you heard my take before we started recording. I don't know if I could put you on the spot or I'll give my take on record. I should say that I have no opinions on US. I only agree with the things that I say myself on this show. But I don't know. I mean, the argument, that's a tactical question, right? I mean, your take before was, you tell me. Basically, what I said was that I

think that it really is, I am loath to say do not vote for the president because I think that the amount of damage that the president can do is so great and that the biggest repercussion in my opinion of Donald Trump's presidency is going to be the institutionalization of basically just right wing, grift, almost external to the political process in the sense that you have all of these federal judges and two Supreme Court justices who are basically just there so that change can be illegal and progress can be illegal and that unions are illegal and the left is illegal. The whole point here is they're able to, it doesn't really matter if they're corrupt if they can change the law so corruption is real. And I think that's going to be the

lasting legacy. And so to me, my thought is that's a question you have to ask yourself. Do for one, I mean, does your vote matter? Obviously, your vote matters a lot more if you live in a battleground state versus if like I'm registered to vote in fucking New York State, where I mean, I don't believe New York State has gone Republican in a very, very long time, perhaps not since the parties were the other parties for the opposite. Yeah, exactly. Maybe like Rockefeller or something. Whereas California has actually before, but New York hasn't. But also, my take is, I think you've got to consider that, that's to your right, they have to earn your vote. But I'm loath to say boycott because for the big reason being

watching what's going on with the Labor Leadership campaign here in the United Kingdom and seeing how so many absolute fucking idiot ghouls are thirsting for the opportunity to purge the left from everything and say, the left doesn't have legitimacy. They never had any legitimacy to begin with. They're not actually members of the party. We should purge them all. And knowing how much more venal it can be in the United States, I just have this feeling that if people on the left go down the route of saying, I abstain, the problem is that you're never going to get any better. They will find a way and you can watch MSNBC doing it in advance to blame it all on Bernie, even if it is literally the DNC. And all that does is foreclose an

opportunity for- My feeling is that that's not an opportunity worth having. I think if you, whether that's the labor party or the democratic party, I think if the left does have to make good on a threat like that, and you're just left with fucking 70 Owen Smiths all jerking each other off, that's a dead party. And they can do whatever they want without us. But to be fair, in the United States, it's a lot less likely for a new party to spring up than it is here. But also, Vincent, I don't know what your take is just as an American too on this. I'm American. I'm registered to vote in California. And if you're me and I work for mainstream media in the US, I mean, officially I have no political- I'm not going to ever talk

about what I vote or whatever, but I try to analyze this tactically. I think what it sounds like you're saying, Riley, is that at this point, if the US left or the English speaking left makes a credible threat to say, look, if you screw us over, you're going to lose us, you have to evaluate the effectiveness of that threat based on how credible the center of the party will take it and how much they care, right? So all of that, you all have to go to sort of think several steps down the road and think, well, if we say that, do they think we mean it? Does the center think that the left means that? And then when it comes down to it, is that at that point, some of the US left sort of abandons based on who it means, because I imagine that if the US left were forced

to choose between Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump, a lot of people would choose Elizabeth Warren, even if there had been some sort of fuckups along the way. I think that people mean there's been one caucus. People are really mad at Buttigieg because he declared victory before they're with 0% of the results in. So I don't think, again, speaking analytically, not as sort of a, but I'm not going to know how I'm going to, what I'm going to do. I think that the US left is not going to forgive him for a very long time. I think that, and also, I mean, the millennial left hates him anyway, is just for a lot of reasons that are sort of, a lot of people have a hard time putting into words in the first place.

But I think if it were Warren, I think, which do you think that you would? My thinking specifically is that, look, I'm, my, again, my take is as purely an opinion, of course, my opinion doesn't matter in as much as I don't vote in these elections. Not officially. Purely as an opinion. If my thinking is, I would be loath to reward obvious malfeasance on the part of an institution that was obviously crooked in effect. But the one thing that I say though is that... But what if there is a massive f**k up seven, seven, like on Super Tuesday,

there's a massive f**k up and it helps Bernie Sanders? Well, also, that's the other thing as I'm, I personally have, I personally have politics, not processional preferences. And also to understand that the DNC is not, if they're, the DNC is, if it's engineering f**k ups, it's engineering f**k ups to hinder Bernie Sanders. But also, I mean, look at, look at the Virginia State Assembly elections in 2017. There was literally a race that came down that was tied and it wanted to have to be f**king determined by like drawing straws and it determined the control of the legislature, which determined whether or not they would adopt the ACA, like, or they would continue funding

for the ACA. Like it, those kinds of things do happen and it's absurd, but I mean, like, it legitimately will happen at times. So, I mean, that, that was, it's a huge defensive electoralism. I just feel like it's a question more of picking your battles. I don't like to look at it wholesale. Also, I think a big point that I would just point out that you've proven through this whole episode is that whether the Democrats win or lose, these grifters are fine. They are an institutional problem in the party. If you seed control of the entirety of the party to them in protest, then all that does is just increase their opportunities for grift. But my question then is, if you keep this,

if you keep the wheel turning, if you don't somehow stop this wheel by like f**king up its operations, by making it unturnable, then don't you just allow the slow rotting out of society from the inside out through like general rule and de-court? Not to bring everyone down, but we do still have, what, like, 10 to 15 years to lock in climate change drastic action from a climate change perspective. I do not personally see that much of a difference between Donald Trump and Pete Buttigieg, because neither of them will do it. Donald Trump will make it worse. Yeah. But the fact is, none of them will do enough to stop the catastrophic destruction of human society or at least the massive transformation

of it for the considerably unrecognisably worse in the next 15 years. So at this point, why not make good on the Matt Brunig troll? Yeah, f**king ghost the mattresses, you know? I mean, the fact is, to me, there's not really good answer because... Well, I think that's the reason that this is the question the US left has gone back and forth on for 40 years. It's always never worked. I remember in the Nader election, which led everyone to blame the left for everything for eight years and everybody just gave up on having a left in the US for a long time and they build it again. And I think a really big open question, and I'm very eager to see how this plays out. And I don't think it's really

clear is how much the sort of right wing of the Democratic Party or the mainstream political center in the United States, how much they really are willing to do to stop somebody on the outside. And I think it's probably a lot. My power lacks view, s**t. I worry about... I mean, what happened here? I mean, I'm not coming at this cold because I spent the last two and a half years running around the world and meeting people whose friends and families were all killed because they believed too deeply and naively in the Democratic possibilities of political transformation. I just wrote this book about mass murder carried out against unarmed, leftist movements around the world. And so I have sort of a... That left me quite pessimistic,

but my suspicion is that Bernie might be outside of what is allowed to succeed in the Democratic Party. But then what happens as you get closer and closer and closer, what would they really do and what is the interplay between a left that doesn't want to accept that pushback? I think that's really an open question. I think, I mean, if I were outspoken and open member of the U.S. left, I would probably wait to see how that thing goes out and sort of respond step by step to that sort of unfolding of that process. If nothing else, we can say that things will become very strange and weird. Yeah, it's going to be weird. I think this is one of the... This is the first of 50 votes,

and it's already made me lose my mind, quite literally. I just think about watching the BBC in the way that it covered the general election here in December and seeing the victory Boris Johnson so richly deserves. How often you were just suspending disbelief and like, am I fucking watching like, Juche TV right now, like the way in which it just... In six months' time, whatever happens, if you listen to this episode again, you will disassociate. I'm just telling you, because our listenership has grown significantly in the U.S., and it's just, I'm just telling you, having watched this, coming from an outsider perspective, because I wasn't

born here, I didn't grow up here, watching this happen, you're like, how is this supposed to be a really stable country where everyone's like, oh, look at this great model of their democracy, and you're watching the state broadcasters just come out completely, just batch it, left us right up as down, with thumbing the scale for one political party, and... I don't remember Boris Johnson getting 18 holes in one the first time he played a hole. Boris Johnson rides the white horse atop Mount Bacto. And being told over and over again, no, this isn't actually happening, you're just imagining it. Why are you lefties so crazy? That will happen.

No, but yeah, this is what I told somebody, and they go, oh my god, I think it's true. It feels like they're doing it just to prove they can, right? Like, what are you going to fucking do about it? We're just going to drop it right in front of your face, and you have to tell me that you don't see it. Yeah, and that's where I think a lot of the feeling of Bernie or bust comes from, because what else do they have other than making this, making the Matt Brunig troll credible? Yeah, well, why be a captive audience? Yeah. Yeah, right, right, right, right. No, I think, no, like I said earlier, like if, you know, you have to evaluate the question tactically, it's not really a moral one,

it's like, will they take it seriously? Will they work? How hard will they push back? And then are you allowed to pivot in six? Because, you know, again, I think there will be so many pivots on all sides throughout the course of this election. Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, falling down the stairs as fast as possible to freedom. Finally, some real seventh dimensional chess for us to play. At least Corbin wasn't successful enough for them to have to kill him, is the thing. So I think that that's been going on for quite some time now. So I'm going to wrap it up here. I have a couple of things to announce towards the end. First of all,

you've heard Vincent mention his book. You should buy that book. What's the title again? In the description. Oh, it's called the Jakarta method. I just posted recently on my Twitter, like the presale links. Yeah, so it's not out for a couple of months, but presales do actually help if you want to sort of give a vote of confidence for the publisher to actually push this book. It was kind of hard to convince them that sort of anti-imperialism was a topic that a major publisher should put any resources towards. So yeah, so it's on my Twitter and it's called the Jakarta method. It sounds on presale. We'll link it in the description as well.

Also, I'm going to plug a GoFundMe. A friend of mine from Toronto is working in law. And was working with this asylum clinic on the border in the U.S. and the border of Mexico in the summer that worked with the unaccompanied minors. And one of the kids who escaped slavery has just been put in jail and the judge has spent his bail enormously high because, I don't know, he's a fascist or something. So we're going to link that GoFundMe in the description as well. And the center is called Al Otrolado. So do donate to that as well if you have the time and capacity to do so, because they're doing a lot of work keeping children who have been enslaved out of jail for the crime of having been enslaved.

Well, if I were a child, I would simply not be enslaved. Yes. And in lighter news also, we're going to be at Bristol transformed on the 6th of March. Yeah, on the 6th of March. We have our live show in London. There'll be a tickling for that in the description. Yeah. Also, I'm doing Leicester Comedy Festival on the 21st, 22nd of February, and the Vault Festival in London on the 25th of February in the 3rd of March. So if you want to see me, you boy, and buy some tickets to that, that would be cool. There's a link that goes to all the dates in the description also. Yes. And lastly, about the TF stream, the dates and times for streaming are going to be Wednesdays at around 6 and Saturdays at around 5. So if you're listening

to this on Tuesday, then come see us tomorrow on Twitch. And all times we're on GMT in case you were wondering. Yeah, obviously. So no, all times are Japanese time. They're actually North Korea time. Yeah. That's where we live now, baby. Or is it Myanmar, where they do a half hour gradient? They do in Afghanistan too. Yeah. So Venezuela. Yeah, Hugo Chavez pulled that one. I was living there as well. Oh, yeah. So all the good, all the good countries. Regardless. I got king shit. Regardless. So do check that out and do hang out with us there. And finally, Kami Book Clubs, don't forget, they're still coming out. They're just on the Patreon feed, not paywall. So check out the most recent Kami Book Club I spoke with, Callum Cant,

the author of a book called Riding for Deliveroo, Resistance to the New Economy. So it was a really fun conversation about rebuilding the labor movement. So do check that out. New ones will be coming and they will be dealing with a more eclectic range of topics than just books. Yes. And the themes, oh, sorry, Vincent. Are there any other songs by the United States, the Presidents of the United States of America that we can obviously... Mach 5 was a fucking hit. I've been thinking about it for an hour. Mach 5 from their second album was a great song. It did not get anywhere near as much coverage as their initial album. All I can think about.

Thank you to the Presidents of the United States of America for our theme song and it's called Mach 5. Please come on the show. What do you think they're doing right now? Fuck it. Let's do it. Okay. All right. So it falls to me only to say thank you, Vincent, for coming out today. Yeah, thanks for having me. And thank you all for listening. And thank you for sitting through our very long plug section. And we will catch you on the Patreon on Thursday. Later. We'll survive. Yeah.