Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 425: Hopesick

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

In which we try valiantly to cheer you up!

Bhopal. Well, the impression is not fully fleshed out, and I've been trying it for a week now, and I still can't get it, because there are some nuances to the Australian accent that you have to do beyond just saying, I'm heapsie-sawed. That's a good, although that's the best starts you can have. Once you master, I'm heapsed. That's the gateway. That's the gateway.

And then the rest is just building on that. I've been laughing about an Australian Anton Chagher who's having a conversation with the kangaroo. And he's like, don't put it in your pouch. It's your lucky, it's your lucky Joey. Fuck. Don't put it in your pouch. That's your lucky Joey. don't put it in your past

so Australia and Anton Shigur has a child kangaroo I don't understand the setup I love the impression I'm just curious how what's transpiring this conversation like he takes this

kangaroos Joey uh huh it's a reverse it's a reverse a baby stole my dingo Anton Shigur is stealing baby kangaroo Your sociopath stole my Joey Yes

And it's also in a world where I guess joys are used as currency Because in the No country for old men it's like Don't put it in your pocket And it's like he's in the gas station So I guess In this situation

The kangaroo would be trying to pay for something With her Joey And he's like My question this is it even is it clear in no country for old men where anton sugar's supposed to be from sounds russian or something like that but he's clearly hell he's from hell that's true i guess i guess that's true i mean it doesn't matter he's death he's death personified bro he can be from anywhere because he's the he's the merchant of death don't darn't pitted in your pouch

is your lucky job oh man dude I've been playing red dead redemption too I've been this is the only thing my brain can focus on these days yeah but I've been thinking about like potentially cool

video games and I don't I'm surprised this has never been thrown out there by anyone and if the Jordan Peterson estate is like hard bit for cash and they need some extra cash. I genuinely think a Jordan Peterson video game could do pretty well. Not, yeah, I mean, they're going to need that cash too. It's probably not cheap to treat, you know, meat-borne brain disease around the clock.

Yeah. Like it's... He broke his brain with meat, though. He did break his brain with meat and mold. Meat and mold is what they said. Yeah. Well, I mean, just because, like, a lot of, you know, you play like Zelda, Red Dead Red Dead Redemption, like you got to, like, eat food in these games or else you'll, your health bar goes down, like your HP bar goes down.

You have to do... It's unlike in real life where you can just not eat. You can just not eat, right. Yeah, and your bar won't go down. And you have to do stuff around camp to, like, earn good, on. honor and I'm just like a game where you have to I know this joke is this bit is eight years old this is really coming off the back like we're in the back of the pantry like we're digging out like crackers from eight years ago like stale oros but yeah it's a video game where you have

to make your bed and you have to like avoid your daughter trying to kidnap you to send you to Russia and rehab and you take pills like in Red Dead if you drink you know the effects fuck you up you're like oh I'm fucked up bro that you can take pills and there are cathedrals everywhere with those like as you see like if you're if you take pills it like helps you engage with the world better because you can see a poker part together and I promptly lost everything we had wait what did you said I said I sat down I got this poker part and I promptly lost it all on the first hand. Oh, and Red Dead Red Dead Redemption.

Sorry, I cut out. You must have not. What would the Jordan Peterson version of that be? The poker thing? Like, he sits down with a group of roughhune cowboys and says, I'm going to teach you how to make your bed up with the tuck, the whole thing. The tuck. What kind of, you know, the hotel tuck?

The hotel tuck. What kind of game is this? The Jordan Peterson game. You're tucking your penis in balls? in the Jordan Peterson's thing came on the scene with is telling everybody like the step to being like a perfect male is to make your bed every morning or something yeah yeah yeah yeah well I said that but I think I cut out I lost you

for a second I oh okay yeah he's like that that's why this joke is oh you already oh you already said that oh yeah I already oh my bad I'm about a little few minutes never mind I was speaking to a wall yeah i didn't i didn't catch that part at all sorry uh the bit is in there somewhere whoever edits this perry thanks brother fish that out for us perry yeah just scratch whoever scratch whoever did it worse most likely me just keep them in there that's the jordan peterson game experience

you get multiple conversations going on it's like a robert altman film but everyone's on zanax and multi-meat so yeah i sent you a video of this guy that I think is kind of becoming the lib Jordan Peterson that Scott dude what's his name Scott Scott Scott Galloway Scott Galloway what did you see me the video like the I think yesterday on Instagram or something it's all right oh dude sorry sometimes this dude Scott Galloway that I see popping up he's like he has a strong like live Jordan Peterson vibe oh okay i don't check my instagram as much these days that's all right i've been spamming your instagram like i'm like one of those guys on

facebook that just sends you stuff you don't want to see all the time i was thinking about that the other day i was like i basically just sending terence memes now that's okay i'm trying to you've been your your presence has been your or lack thereof has been noted on the internet so i'm trying to drag you back into the cesspool when you're trying to clearly get out damn Everyone's talking about it? Everyone's noting my lack of presence on the internet? No, I have. I don't know about others, but I have.

Oh, oh, you mean you have? Well, it's one of my... Yeah. It's one of my resolutions for the year to be on social media less. What else you got in that repertoire? I'm going to gain... Don't kill your baby. Don't kill my baby.

Don't let a dingo steal my baby. That'd be crazy if it's... Don't let Anton Schroger make a deal for my baby. It would be, you honestly, I would hate to say this, but you would be marked as a pretty bad parent if you let a dingo steal your baby in America. In Australia, it's kind of understandable, but in America, like what if- Unavoidable, some would say in Australia, in America, though, if you let a dingo steal your baby, there's just no coming back from that.

It's like they don't even have those here, really. Well, you remember when, didn't this happen in Australia? didn't some woman drive like across the entire continent wearing diapers and she peed in her she peed herself the entire way and didn't like killed somebody

she like drove 15 hours nonstop just to kill somebody was that in America or was that in Australia it seems like a very Australian seems like seems an Australian sort of crap yeah she said I'm a he's sorry to piss myself

kill my family well in America I wouldn't put it past Americans to pull some shit like that either but what I imagine a dingo travels 16 hours by plane to America

to steal a baby did I tell you when I saw I saw dingo in Australia I'm sure they're pretty common are they like coyotes they're like totally unremarkable

they're not they're smaller than coyotes really I'm like wait a second so these are the feared hounds of the down under and then one of them managed

to steal a baby one of them man, there's still a baby one time. They were marked for it. Maybe they are all good boys, and then there was one errant dingo that stole a baby, and that ruined it for the one bad apple spoiled the bunch. He just wanted to live. He wanted to live.

They should make a Marty Supreme-esque, uncut Jims-esque movie about that one dingo. It was just, like, chasing it, man. He dared to dream, and he saw only one way to make it happen. But he meets the Australian Anton Chigur in the process. that was who was paying top dollar for the babies he was stealing the babies and selling them to Anton Schroger who was also Australian

but I did I remember seeing I was at this nature preserve and one came up to me and I was like that's like that looks like a goddamn beagle or something like I expected like

some sort of like crazy ass like wolf thing you know what I mean they're cute they're very cute Like a puppy? Look up. They're straight up cute, yeah. Search for puppy dingo.

They're fucking adorable. Yeah, it's like this is the, this is the feared hellhound of the down under. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I guess they do have kind of an imposing sort of like coyote vibe to them, but. What was the liberal Jordan Peterson saying on the video you sent me? Oh, he was talking about, I've been looking into AI bell. outs yeah and he was talking basically saying you know that like what what's going to end up happening here is the whole AI thing is going to collapse and then we're going to be left holding the bag and

they'll bail out the AI sector because all the world's richest people are over leveraged in it and so like like always we're going to have to clean up after them so yeah yeah just just just a good point, but there's other times he'll be like, and the reason that males can't find partners now is because of this, this, and this, and he kind of veers into a little JP territory. So that's why I have a hard time taking him completely seriously. He could be a boss in our Jordan Peterson game. He's like, maybe not the final big boss. I think the final big boss in the Jordan Peterson game would be a Russian, like, His daughter.

Well, yeah, his daughter is a little. His hot daughter that he appeared on the cover of his book and a bathing suit with. Someone, a pronoun, someone with pronouns would have to be a boss in that game. And in a twist, he has to, he has to be the dingo that stills his own baby. That's how you win the game. I just love riffing his bit that is, like, he's so irrelevant at this point. cares. I don't even know where he's, I guess, I guess literally he broke his brain by eating steak, nothing but steak. Well, they, um, he could have got that like there's the

rise of that tick, that tick is back in America, that tick that if it bites you, you get allergic to meat. It's back in America. Oh, that's right. So, yeah, a lot of things going on in pathogens this week. That might be a good segue to talk about other things going on, but the, the, is that is it the deer tick I think so that gives you the meat allergy I think so hmm

I don't mean yeah if you're failed by tick-borne illness it's not doesn't bode well for your public intellectual life it's like this great intellectual giant was brought down by a bug me or you that's fine

yeah you know in fact I give the slight edge to the to the ticks maybe but you do for somebody that fancies them a powerhouse no no you can't go out like that

would you rather be covered would you rather have one tick on you or would you rather have 5,000 ticks on you hmm it depends I guess I guess the only ticks I want to

I care to avoid are ones that carry uh you know like Rocky Mountain spotted fever that kind of shit What about, why is it Rocky Mountain? What about like Allegheny spotted fever? Well, it's here too. It's here.

We have Rocky Mountain spotted fever ticks here too. Yet we're not near the Rockies. Interesting. Prince talked about that in Sign of the Times. He did. His first song, he talks about the climate warming and the proliferation of ticks moving out of their natural territory. He was really ahead of his. time man wow yeah if i if you were here in person i'd hold up a copy of sign of the time so he

talks about that in here uh man did that what else did prince talk about the sign of the time um there was that song about dorothy parker i think maybe he was attracted to his sister or maybe he used dorothy parker to talk about wanting to have sex with his sister or was maybe that was another print song you know what fucking your sister was a pretty consistent theme in music. Yeah. On the tick thing, I'm surprised that none of these

I'm surprised none of these naturopaths like I'm just using that as a catch-all for anybody under the RFK-3 Aegis. Anybody practice is Madison on Instagram.

Yes. Exactly. I'm surprised none of them have proposed. You know how they used to use leeches back in the old day for like bloodletting i'm surprised none of them have proposed ticks for that like i'm surprised none of them have i guess that's the thing because then like the chronic lime thing gets into there because so then i it's in it's in diametric opposition

to the chronic lime that's true that's true but what if you could find ticks that have been vetted they've they've gotten tested ticks that have been tested and they've they've bravely confronted of the stigma and they know their status. And you could use them. It's like an 80-style AIDS campaign or 90-style AIDS campaign, but for ticks and it's just called Know Your Status. Do you carry the Bordidella bacteria or whatever it is that causes Lyme disease? Yeah.

And then you use them for like bloodletting and and whatnot. And then like, then there's like a famous tick that. goes on TV and says they're undetectable. Yeah. And he also plays for the Lakers, the Tick Lakers. Well, where does Chronic Lime come from? Because they don't know where AIDS come from. They have...

Well, isn't it thought that it is a bioweapon? Oh, interesting. So like, well, okay, there's different theories on AIDS. I personally believe that AIDS was created as a bioweapon in a lab, but there is the theory that it came from here. humans having sex with monkeys. So do you think in the tick... Come on.

Come on. Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question. You know how many millennia people have probably been like trying to bridge the primate, you know, homo sapient divide? I mean... And you'd mean to tell me that it just created combustible elements in the 80, or the late 70s, early 80s, come on.

I've been saying this. People think that we're degenerates now because we have a fucked up weird stuff like gooning, but I guarantee. to you, there was a much greater degree of speciality going on prior to 100 years ago. People were fucking horses and stuff all the time.

All the time. Prince talked about that in a lot of his songs, too. Exactly. Prince wanted to fuck his sister and the painter, Michelangelo, more than anybody else. He wrote about that frequently. And a horse

in Newman Claw, Washington, which was used as inspiration for the famous Boeing. CEO and his friend, Christopher Rufo. We've come back full circle. That's right. I should say Prince is my favorite artist, too. Hmm. It's not mine.

Really? No, mine is Brian May, guitarist for queen. That's my favorite. Okay. It certainly is somebody. Do you think in the Tick community, There's a similar, there's a similar, like, theory. Like, all right, one of us fucked, like, I don't know, what would it be?

Like, one of us fucked an amoeba. One of us fucked an amoeba, and that's how chronic Lyme got into. And then there's others that are, like, a little more tinfoil, and they're like, no, dog. It's a bio-weapon brought forth by the, who would be a ticks rival in nature? Do they have any? Deer. I guess possums. Well, possums love ticks.

The more ticks, the better. Yeah, they eat ticks. I would say probably deer. Deer don't like them because in the, like, warming world. You know, we talked about this before. They're finding deer and elk along the U.S.-Canadian border that are covered in up to like 30,000 ticks. Like death by thousand cut style shit.

Yes, but by ticks, because it's climate change, you know, because we're having warmer winters, the tick season gets, Bigger and bigger, the window for him. So I wonder if that was on one of those Spike TV Thousand Ways to Die. The Ticks organized is what it was. The Ticks organized. They're like, look.

Yeah. They're like, look. We can let, you know, one of our infected brothers bite this guy. And yeah, we might give him stiff joints for 20 years and eventually cause him to lose his mind. Or if we band together, we can just drain him of all his blood.

And then they start doing the birdman hand rub And they're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's drain him in the bottle of blood. Well, like I was saying, I'm kind of surprised They haven't seen any sort of naturopaths Suggesting that because dog, they are on some crazy shit. I saw one the other day Of a group of guys eating fermented, raw fermented meat that was covered in flies.

People are out here. What's the purpose of that? I don't know. I guess they think that that's the way you're supposed to eat. Yeah. Where was that at? Who were these? Are these, like, tech guys or something?

It was on Instagram Reels, so I actually don't know. What is the purpose of, like, flirting with disaster in that fashion? You know, because I'll say this. Like, and I'm not looking for any sort of pat on the back for this, but one time I almost died by eating at a Pizza Hut salad bar. and I knew when I was making my sound, that French dressing was like a little too warm for what it should have been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, I ended up disoriented like a day later. Uh-huh. Like, seriously, my fever was so high that, like, I didn't, like, I didn't, you couldn't have, I couldn't have told you my name. Like, it was crazy. And I thought, like, this is it. And I was, like, afraid to tell my mom,

because it's important in this life to not die in a very stupid way. and I thought it better to have died of mystery illness than to be confirmed that I, you know, had in fact eaten out of Pizza Hut buffet. That is true. If you're, like, going out like that, at least go try to, like, shoot up your local governor's mansion or something. Because that way, at least, they'll never know that you had, you were dying from food poisoning from the Pizza Hut salad bar. And they'll, they'll mark you as a crazy. At least you'll have an impact, at least a little bit more of an impact.

If I could have got out of bed, I might have entertained that. Because it's the one time in my life, I was like, yeah, I'm like, this is it. This is like, and then you start thinking how dumb it is. It's like you had all these hopes and dreams and fucking some French dressing, been sitting out for 12 hours is what's going to, or probably the greens. I hear it's like the greens. Anyway, bars are for drinking. You shouldn't eat salad at bars is what I learned.

And to this day, I've stayed away from it. Right. I was going to make a pithy little quip about not the worst thing the French have done to our... But the internet is too slow. The internet's too slow for me to insert a pithy quip. We got to talk to these guys about this shit. Speaking of the naturopath, homeopath stuff, I was thinking the other day, like, what about an airline? what about an airline that because we all know like flight at this point is kind of in a weird transitional stage like they're still figuring out like if they want to actually fly planes or just be credit card companies and uh 2012 25 was the highest number of commercial airline deaths I think in the last 20 years so you know we were having some trouble that was that was that was that

That was probably true the first week of Trump's presidency. Like, they probably snatched the record, then everybody that died after that was just like, just, you know, added to it. Yeah, they are at a transitional phase. They're trying to, they're trying to figure out if they can charge us like $9,000 to go to New York City and conditions that compare favorably to steerage class on the Titanic. Exactly. Did you see that when they were going to like? stack like they were going to get rid of the overhead bins and like stack yes like what the fuck with that dude what the fuck well so my my prop my proposal to like give a shot in the arm to

the industry to like revamp it a little bit make an airline that the whole theme is naturopath stuff like instead of serving you you know ginger ale and beverages you get some methylene blue instead of the little crack the biscoff cookies you get raw fermented meat you know what I'm saying like you get yeah

because that's hot right now that's in the vibe shift is a real thing and not just a fake media construction to get clicks it's real and so

they should capitalize on that I think now could you imagine the enormity of the cluster fuck you would have if you gave people like raw milk on a

flight to like Singapore from New York Dude I think you would have people Trying to open the fucking exit door Like mid-flight And just You know

Just suck half the plane out of there There's nothing worse Than being sick on a fucking plane Or any like sort of Like situation you can't readily escape from Well look Americans want to play with fire like this

Let let's I say let them big i mean like you know you'll never you'll never defeat the um main character syndrome and arrogance and godlike hubris of the average american voter who like flirts with the most insane version of fascism every four years and then the most milk toast version of fascism every four every other four years and so i say like just let him like put them on the flights give them all raw milk like i can see who comes out alive yeah if you want a spade run your own death yeah like by all means so yeah it's just i don't get it i don't get it i don't get the

the urge to just you know i don't know i mean i'm on the other side of the spectrum though where i like used too much hand sanitizer and wash my hands like to the point they're like look at these fucking things oh dude those are skeletons you you you rut that you dang rubbed all the skin off again i did dude again so yeah I don't get it. He's got floppy bone fingers. There's just like, it is, you know, like in any other time, like, you know, we were talking about this like a fungus that's like spreading all over the country or whatever.

Fungus? Like, yeah, have you not seen this? There's this candida that's like spread to 27 states and killed a bunch of people. What the fuck? Kills one and three people it infects. Yeah, there's a, I'm sorry. All right, do me to update you. There's a fungus quickly taken over America.

Yeah, that's just, you know. I'm having literal deja vu right now, so. Yeah. So there's that happening. It's just, I don't know, man. It's like. Oh, this is the super bug you're talking about. Because in my mind, I got it confused with the super flu that's also happening.

Because there's like a- There's a super flu that's out there doing crimes. with a super candida god damn fucking hey man okay listen we need to sit okay a fungus can do

its thing a virus can do its thing or a bacteria can do its thing but we can't have all three of these motherfuckers running wild in the street that's true you're getting attacked from every fucking angle then well here's what I propose why not phage therapy

is that what maybe maybe that's what this is that a that I'm about to propose. Divide and conquer. Get two of them to gang up on the other one. And meanwhile, you sow dissent and distrust between the two

in their allyship against the third so that they all come down together. That's true. It seems virus and bacteria make natural allies against the fungus. Yeah. But the fungus have elaborate networks and the communication advantage.

It's hard to say if they could thwart the threat. Whereas virus, Viruses aren't much in the way of communication. They just kind of are just like little fat sacks floating around, and then they get in there and start mashing a bunch of buttons. They drill. They have their little drill things, too, that they drill into.

You know, they drill into yourselves. Are they got spirochet? Spearkeets? Yeah. Is that what there are? I don't, I'm not sure. I know spear keats are like, I think syphilis is a spirokeet. Drill on virus.

Drill baby drill What is a virus Is it a cell? What is the individual unit of a virus? I literally think it's just a floating sack of fat It's like if you took a quarter Like a little dime bag of olive oil But shrank it a lot

And then just And then just put like some sort of zany guy That likes to tap a bunch of buttons up the helm That's exactly what You're right I guess like lipids right Makes no sense They don't call them fats

That's a little They don't like that It's an antiquated word In the viral community They prefer lipids Okay Okay Yeah it's like their version of like

Retrograde Mm-hmm I won't say it Anyway I won't say it here Do we need the viruses and bacteria We need some bacteria right like some bacteria is good for us I don't know if any virus is good for us

and fungus is that alien really so it does all kinds of other stuff but if we wiped them all out would we be fucked would that be like shooting our dicks off well what is the purpose of it is it population control that they do do they call the herd so to speak

John Dutton talks about that in Yellowstone that's true remember when he's sitting there he's like and then you could get in this river and get a bacteria that kill you. Brain-eating amoeba.

And he ends up jumping in the river? Yeah, he was... Saving his... John... Native American grandchild. John was hypercontract about brain-eating amoebas. It's like, I don't want you in there,

especially when the temps go up in the summertime. They're breeding grounds for all kinds of... They start getting their flagella out, and then before you know it, you're dead. it's like he's this rugged individualist but he's like definitely afraid of germs so much so he gets into like

Howard Hughes like he starts locking himself and Beth ain't coming out there don't even come back to my house unless you're masked him uh huh on the on the liberal Jordan Peterson

front and on just the general state of America at the moment there are two things I wanted to read and bring up I think you had a few things you wanted to bring up as well I think we mostly covered I just kind of want to talk about John Dutton's hypochondria and just this mention of this candida

Well, no, we didn't get through one of the articles you sent. One of them was in the Washington Post. Isovigil's plan to spend $100 million to recruit gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers in a geo-targeted ad campaign, part of what the agency called a wartime recruitment strategy to hire thousands of officers. so they're hiring the John Dutton's They're hiring the John Dutton's of the world What could go wrong? Yeah, how does that make you feel? Honestly, you sent me that story this morning

is the first thing I read when I woke up this morning I was like, God damn it And then I remember like, oh, I have a job where I have to go talk about how bad things are I was like, oh, yeah, this is I forgot this is how I make my living. to it's not it's certainly not a good development no but like also also to like I don't know like the older I get the more I'm just like like everybody has their own individual set of beliefs

and stuff like that like I don't know like two weeks ago it felt like maga was out and like you just didn't hear much about ice anymore like do you still think it's like a robust like recruitment effort or is it like people just like no i don't really want to be associated with this with this ship that's going out i don't know i can't tell i mean it seems like it seems like ice doesn't have the sway i guess or the the attractiveness it had you know three months ago but i don't know so i don't know department of homeland security is still posting um white nationalist memes white nationalist Nazi memes like the one where they

stole that Japanese artists photo of like a Cadillac next to a beach in a palm tree and it's like America after 100 million deportations we can finally get back to you know what makes this country great or whatever it's like they

they're still posting like those Fashwave edits where they like show AI generated photos of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans talking about defending the homeland and whatnot. So in their minds,

they're still winning, I guess. I don't know. I am increasingly sour on the American public in their ability to... You don't say. Me, I'm selling on American myself. I don't think most people

give a fuck, dude. really don't i think it well there's just you me tell you what it is dog there's no new ideas under the sun and we've kind of hit like a wall with it all it's like this stuff you sent me like the the beth macy dope sick thing and like she's running for office now it feels like we are doomed to just replay 2016 over and over and over and over and over again so much so that jd vance has emerged as the early favorite to be the president in 2028. Yeah, and I'm sure he will be. One of the funniest things I've seen in the last month

is people who are dead certain convinced that AOC, if she ran in 20208, would win. Dude. That is the most, look, I mean, on the left, everybody's got their role, okay? Everybody brings their own set of resources, experiences, skills, whatever, into a movement. And I say that, like, one of mine is grew up in a rural extractive area, live in Kentucky now, Red State, no longer living in a rural area, but have spent the vast majority of my life in rural areas,

but have also spent at this point a pretty good amount of time in cities as well I cannot I cannot adequately express like how much she is disliked outside of a maybe 150 mile radius around New York City whether fair or unfair it's just that's just the reality when I was at the coal miners blockade there were two politicians they kept bringing up constantly as exemplars of who they thought were feckless and or corrupt and or full of shit grifting or whatever

by the way, the same miners blockade that Bernie Sanders personally sent like 20 pizzas to and they loved it. Those miners loved that. They were all on board with that. But there were two politicians they kept bringing up that they said they hated the most. Mitch McConnell and AOC. So do with that what you will.

It is the inverted horseshoe, man, where, like, if you're, like, Kamala Harris, AOC, or Barack Obama or Joe Biden, you're, like, looked at as, like, Stalin. And if you're, like, a real social Democrat, like, you're just, you're, like, a notch above that. You know what I mean? Like, you don't really, like, Bernie doesn't really suffer from that same thing, even though his politics are to the left of those people. It's a weird, it's a weird thing. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's a personality thing if there's like, you know. It's a personality thing.

I think that people see AOC is like, I don't think it has much to do with their policies or whatever. I think they see her as someone who spends most for her time on Instagram doing like eight hour a day reels about how bad everything is. And like, I don't know. You can say that's good from a political education standpoint. Certainly I'm not going to knock it because that's also my job. But at the same time, if you're a politician, that kind of comes a. cross is a little um just comes out across as a little fake or contrived and I think that like people see her as I don't know I think they kind of see her as inauthentic is the thing so I don't

but I don't know maybe I'm wrong I mean I've been wrong I literally in 2019 said Kamala would be the next president so I said Ron DeSantis would I said Ron DeSantis would win in 2024 so I'm I don't I'm wrong oh no who was there I said something uh what's the guy Rick Santorum uh huh I think on this program I projected a showdown between Rick Santorum and Dennis Cucinich or something for so I've been yeah I've been lost in the field myself but we're wrong more than we're right that's hard so it's hard to well and that's fine that's fine we can at least cop to that what do you think about let me ask you this what is the the the Gavin

Newsom viability thing as far as you're concerned like everybody seems to be like the early forecast and granted this could be like a uh uh ron desantis uh you know comla harris style showdown that like that doesn't come to pass but do you think it's like do you think uh Gavin newsom's like strategy of give them a taste of their own medicine is like working so much so that it's putting him i mean i think he's a slight underdog today and with the betting public, right, to J.D. Vance, but, like, people are essentially saying it's going to be those two for 2028.

Dude, I saw one the other day that was predicting that Kamala was in the lead, that she was polling better than Newsom. In one poll that I saw, I don't know if that's true across the board, but it depends on who, it depends on who the candidate is up against. I think Kamala would lose against Shady Vance.

I think Newsom would win against Jaydy Vance. I think Newsom would win against JD fans probably but I just I don't know who his bike knows I'm like done trying to understand

the American Burger Reich the the American like Burger Reich Vermacht media and American mind it's just it's just like

there's just so many Hitler particles diffused throughout the population it's like there's super bugs and candida and Hitler particles everywhere so it's hard to really know

it's clouding people's judgment yeah it's like the way it comes out on the other side is just like everybody's got a million different political beliefs and none of them make any sort of linear sense or anything like that there's no grand narrative of an american future you know in fact i would argue that like the grand narrative is that it all ends in calamity and maybe we're sort of willing that into being like there's just no when we started out doing the show in 2017 and taking the piss on J.D. Vance. I had no idea that he would like rise to this kind of prominence. And I think that's kind of what you see with like, I don't know, like, you know, I don't want to get into the whole, you know, bagging on Beth Macy and the

dope sick and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I don't care about that shit. But like I feel like everybody's just like has seen jad yvance's rise like that's you know and it's like oh what we have to do is figure out how to whisper to the white working class still in 2026 they've been trying to do that for 10 goddamn years i find like a sort of left alternative to that uh-huh and it's just like there is no left alternative to that and the other thing i want to say to people that think that's viable like like listen you see you were talking about like you know you're you're sort of experience you bring to the table on the left is coming from an extractive area and all that kind of thing what i bring to the table is i'm probably the only man that's ever witnessed a deal

of real like monopoly money style food stamps being traded for drugs okay and that experience has taught me this is that some people are too far down the looking glass man uh-huh like a lot of these people that you're trying to woo back to like a social democratic consensus like of the, I don't know, whatever, Appalachia in the 70s or whatever, it's not happening, but largely because the thing that's got in the way of all that is irredeemable brain disease. Yeah. We've got CTE. I mean, and I'm not talking even, I'm not even talking like, oh, they're just like kind

of under Trump's spell. No, what I mean is that, like, I actually believe. that our physical architecture of our brains has been permanently altered by the constant barrage of slop and memes and 24-hour news cycle and, you know, everything's so emotive constantly. You hit the emote button times 20 on every fucking thing. Yeah. You know what I mean? We're not equipped.

I mean, like, I was jesting last episode when I said, we're running like new software on our hardware, but I really kind of believe that. Like, I think that, like, the obstacle to winning people back to. a consensus is that like and I think rich people know this I think the elites know this I think that like in a way they've basically stopped or like put a serious impediment in the way of working class politics by destroying the minds of like a whole generation and even like an older generation the um well I will say there's something about about like Twitter that I've realized over the last sort of

couple months because I've not been on it as much is that like the the anti oh okay as of from as of today we're recording this on January 2nd in the last two days Grock has started just making child porn so basically like the website is a is a kitty porn website at this point I don't know that I'm yeah I uh validates my choice to stay up there as much as possible. Yeah, I don't think I can be on the child porn website anymore.

But, like, it's crazy that, like, no one in power is going to do anything about it. I mean, there's no one in power going to do anything about anything. I listened to, like, a 30-minute segment on the media this morning on NPR where they were talking about, like, LED headlights. And, like, the argument from the industry, the auto industry was just like, well, it's a new technology. like new technology there's trial and error and it's like okay well you guys just bake in like a certain amount of deaths with this stuff like you could just use i don't understand why you even need LED headlights like why i mean i understand that like maybe they're trying to innovate around a problem which is that like you hit a deer at like one in the morning or whatever

and you need a way to see that coming. But, like, I just don't understand, like, how we've got to a point where we can't even regulate our way out of something that's obviously making life more dangerous for people. Whatever. Who the fuck? We're not going to do anything about it. We're not going to do anything about, like, Elon's child porn AI bots. Social media.

But, like, but I will say, though, we're kind of, it kind of goes to show you how, like, how we're stuck in this loop. because I kind of, like, I was reading that Beth Macy thing, you know, for the listener, Beth Masey, the author of that book, Dobsick, and they based a Kevin, or I'm sorry, not Kevin Koster, Michael Keaton. Michael Keaton vehicle. Vehicle. Hula.

Netflix. It's one of the two. I think Hulu. Yeah, think Hulu. She's running for Congress, and I read an article about it, and she was like, you know, we gotta stand up to the power of people we're corrupt and we gotta stand up to them

I will say that if you're if you run as a Democrat in 2028 or 26 you'll probably win I mean I don't know if

now is the time to get in the get in the hunt if any leftists out there want to do entryism I guess you'll you'll probably win so I don't know maybe there's not a better time

than now yeah that is true you could probably flood the zone and get some in there because I just I just don't see there being like there is a solid block of support for Trump stuff

there's always going to be a solid block of support for people who want to just genocide everybody on the planet but I don't think it's the majority at this point I think that people are so fed up with it like they're just kind of tired of the noise

like I said they vacillate back and forth They want a quiet fascist and a loud fascist. It's the hubris of the American voter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now what they want is they would long for Joe Biden right now. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. They do it and they do it every four years at this point. You get buyers remorse within the first three months and then...

Like, oh, we lost more people to aviation disasters in the first week of the Trump president. Well, as we're recording this, The enhanced premium tax credits for the ACA have expired as a result of the big beautiful bill, which means like 20 million Americans' health care premiums are going to go up by hundreds of dollars. If the Republicans don't do anything about that by November, they're going to get blown out of the fucking water. I mean, because polling on this shows that, like, Americans don't give a fuck, like, who does it? They just won it. Like, it's, like, we've said it before, but, like, health care is one of the things that there is just broad consensus in, on in America.

And most people support anything that lowers their health bills, even as far as going, as even going so far as to support, like, when a guy wastes a fucking CEO health care at 7 in the morning on a New York sidewalk. So it's like, there's, but my point is, is that, like, if you are a Democrat. Dude, if Luigi walks, that guy's going to be drowning in pussy for like 20. it's going to be crazy you're going to see a generational run right there I still don't even think that the guy that they've got in custody did that like I don't know or maybe I'm just saying that as propaganda I don't know

but I feel like Luigi didn't the case that they have made is so full of holes like they have fucked themselves the prosecution so yeah I don't anyways point being is that Democrats could run on that just on the ACA alone and I think that they would fucking clean up so I'm saying like it could be

it's probably going to be a banner year for Dems and if you want on board if I can go for it I guess if you're on board hey good on you I mean I wanted to read this real quick from Fortune magazine GDP data confirms the Gen Z nightmare

the era of jobless growth is here The U.S. economy grew at a 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter, blowing past economists' expectations and delivering the kind of headline that signals strength. Consumers went on an unusually strong spending tear while corporations clinched $166 billion in capital gains. Trump and his team wasted no time celebrating. But so there is something missing here, though, in this boom. And it's jobs. Hiring this year at best has stalled. has collapsed. Unemployment has climbed

to 4.6%. Basically what you're looking at, dog, is you're looking at like, consumer spending is up, but joblessness and wage stagnation is also up. So what the fuck is going on?

When you say that out loud, you just have this image of Wiley Coyote running on air. And doesn't realize, it hasn't looked down yet to realize he's getting ready to I mean, I posted this on Twitter and someone in the comments made a funny joke about it. It's like, yeah, I guess I missed the chapter of my economics class on growthless growth.

Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, the era of jobless growth is here? I don't know. So what is the plan then? Is the plan just to see how far they can. like subsidize the AI bubble before like that when that finally collapses dog like what will it be will it be like no food on the shelves like Soviet style collapse like what's like what what like how many times can you just like pull the levers to like keep it propped up when

you literally have people growthless growth I think a big it so it tells us about this later on in the article, but one of the biggest areas of growth here, but also where like there's a massive amount of pressure being applied, is just social services, healthcare. And people are spending their savings on health care and health care debt. So it is basically like running on air. Like this is not, it's not a, this is not growth in any sense. And like, as you pointed it out like if you were to just bracket out AI yeah you've got an economy that's like barely treading water barely keeping its head above water and then on top of that like it seems like either an AI bailout is sort of like clandestinely already happening or there's

going to be like a government guaranteeing of we saw this under Biden though do like my first exposure to somebody like Sam Altman was him pissing and moaning that he lost a lot of money on like bored apes or crypto or something and saying the U.S. government should guarantee that. And they did. Do you remember that?

Oh yeah, dude. Dude, it's like if you're just like a madcap fucking insane person that's trying like, you know, like, you know, dressing up like you know, I don't know, just like your little whims and emergent

technology or whatever and you make all these risky bets like you and you just like want daddy to bail you out like when it all fucking blows up in your mediocre face uh-huh like they've already been doing this shit i just don't i don't know man i just don't dad the the the on that note david sacks had a tweet that was like as a response to socialism Miami will replace NYC as the finance capital and austin will replace san francisco as the tech capital and this guy responded to him, Aaron Slodov, at Aphysicist. Miami could be a serious place in roughly

100 years if they play their cards right. Yeah. A serious place on the ocean floor. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that place is the Lost Island of Atlanta. Dude, have you heard of, have you heard of Y'all Street? Uh-uh.

Okay. Y'all Street? Yeah, I'm a psycho that's been paying attention to this guy's. there's this guy named Tony Busby in Houston and he's like a trial lawyer he's the one that was like suing

trying to sue Jay-Z and trying to make the case that he had something to do with like the Diddy victims and stuff like that? Yeah so he was taking all these like cases and whatever and he does that kind of stuff he'll like go and like and part of it is like in the case of Diddy he's like brought

a lot of successful cases against him with his victims and stuff like that but he had Rick Perry on his podcast the other day. Damn, that's a name. Perry made a bowl. Yeah. I didn't know that guy's still around.

Also, why is there like a Texas guy look? Like, did you notice like Rick Perry kind of looks like Josh Brolin, who I know is not from Texas, but like plays Texans a lot? Mm-hmm. There's like a good looking early 50s man that comes from Texas or whatever, and his politics are terrible. Yeah, it's the sunshine, I guess. Could be.

So Rick Perry's on there, and he was like. like here's what I would say because they were asked because Buzzby goes what do you think of mom they called him mom dummy mom dummy and they were like you know yeah they were just doing all that kind of like cool guy stuff and um Rick Perry was talking about how like if he were a betting man he's going to be betting big on y'all street and basically saying the same thing as you say as you point out here that like if you're tired of getting taxed out the ass move from New York City to Dallas and that that Dallas should be the the global hub of finance you've spent some time in Dallas what's your thought on that actually that makes a lot of sense yeah it's like a completely

soulless wasteland that I could see becoming the hub for the end stage like the terminal cancer stage of American capitalism I could see that that yeah it's like yeah instead of like all these guys hanging out at like these uh boozy restaurants and all this stuff it's like they just pack up to dallas and like they're doing coke in the bathroom at like tg i fridays and shit yeah like instead of like dining at spotted pig that boozy restaurant that had like a rape room or something they're gonna be like at popados at the airport or something yeah yeah what did i mean on that note This is really astonishing because it talks about this.

Everyone's been talking about like the K-shaped economy. Businesses are not broadly expanding capacity or hiring aggressively or even hiring at all. They are extracting margins, managing costs, and in many cases, waiting. They have learned to grow, they have learned how to grow without hiring. Okay. I know everybody here, I know nobody wants to talk about like value theory or Marxist economics anymore. I know we've been thoroughly discredited. Yeah, because

we have to have capitalism until it kills us. We have to have capitalist dystopia until it kills us all. But like, where does value come from? Who makes the profits? Is it just comes out of the air? Apparently you could just say something is valuable and it's valuable. How do you grow without hiring? How do you? How do you?

I don't get it, dude. I don't get it. I don't get like, I don't get the concept of grown men like talking about like the blockchain or like the board apes or like the AI. I don't understand how these things like where do they derive their value from because Sam Altman said it it's valuable and it's the next big thing. Like I don't know. Like is it is it Jeff Bezos being over leveraged it? Is it like like can these guys also? not be incredibly stupid as well

as wealthy. Why do we have to overvalue their... Why are we over leveraged in their opinions on stuff? I think that's the thing because they're out of... I don't know. I mean, I think the logical process of neoliberalism

has finally come to a head. I mean, it's in several things. It's in several areas. Whether you look at AI, whether you look at the climate crisis, whether you look at the Nazi state in a 90-mile strip of land in the Levant known as Israel

genociding people. It's like it's all come to a head now. Like this is what they're floating the economy on. It says here, when you're carrying an economy by wealth effects and affluent households as opposed to employment gains and generating new paychecks, you're vulnerable if there's any correction

in equity markets. So basically, like, that's what's keeping this all afloat, essentially. Like luxury, good spin, which even that I think is like I saw yesterday that sacks declared bankruptcy so it's like luxury good like sex fifth avenue yes actually so like even these like classic like uh signals of wealth and like affluence like you shop here like are like tanking sack yeah luxury good spending and then yeah basically like home ownership among the affluent um and then capital gains uh they're they're not they're not even remotely concerned in growth in any

anything below a certain percentage or margin in the American economy. And that's the behavior you would see from essentially like gambling addicts, right? People that are like just like Howard, what's his name? Like in uncut gyms or like Tony Soprano at the end of the season six. You know what I mean? Someone who is like heading towards a. Oblivion. Yeah, exactly.

So it's like that's, I mean, and so basically if there's a market correction, which I saw a headline today that said like, investors are expecting a stronger market than ever in 2006, which is like they are high on their own supply like you have never fucking seen. If they're predicting a stronger market than you've ever seen in 2026, there's going to be a market correction, which means that the whole fucking house of cards will come tumbling down.

And then we'll see what happens in the midterms. I mean, you don't even have to run as a fucking, you know, dyed in a wool socialist at that point. You could probably just run is you could just tell people you're going to pave the roads and just a sweeping victory exactly yeah

because the other people high on their own supply believe in this Nazi state stuff and they just don't really care what the voting public has to say and they think that's going to just like hold forever yeah exactly well okay on that note I wanted to read something

before we take off this is from Nick Christoph remember Nick Christoph Oh. Oh, yeah. The title of this article is in which I valiantly tried to cheer you up. The reason I'm reading this is because he published this on New Year's Eve, or right before New Year's Eve at the end of 2025.

And, you know, we had a Patreon episode on Monday, but we got really into the weeds of an article in the Atlantic about subjective experience. uh one thousand years ago blah blah blah you can go listen to it but we didn't get to really debrief much on 2025 and i don't really want to um at least not politically personally what could i say about 2025 that hadn't already been said like personally i had a great year like for me personally and you know yeah but like you know uh politically uh macro economically whatnot it's uh not it's not it's so great um but um but i wanted to read this because it's also pertinent going into

2026 and i wanted to read it because there's been a lot of discourse on this show in the comments and whatnot about like oh uh is this show dumer anymore am i even listening to a dumer program anymore are these people like drinking opium and i hope that by reading this i can disabuse you of the notion that we're drinking but i also want to I'm also not a doomer in any meaningful sense. I don't even know what that word means. Anyways, Nick Christoph, in which I try valiantly to cheer you up. This is the season when I customarily argue that the year just ending has been the best in human history.

So I dutifully sat down at my laptop and tried to write something along the lines of, sure, democracy is eroding, politics are toxic, wages, wars are raging, America is losing allies, the planet is burning, and young people will never have. afford homes. But other than that, I've done these best year ever columns annually, irritating Eeyors, but now I just can't. The year 20 and 25 was a setback for humanity, and unfortunately, the U.S. is a reason for the retreat. Maybe the worst calamity to strike an adult is to lose a child. That has become increasingly rare, but in 2025 for the first time in this century, the number of children worldwide dying before the age of five is believed

to have risen by about 200,000, according to the Gates Foundation. speaking of that did you know that like bill gates um has officially come out and basically said that like climate change isn't that big of a deal like the gates foundation has backed off of climate change as a priority as have as have like most elites and has like have like most of the left in my opinion too and i don't i don't know i mean yeah it's it's kind of the issue of guys i mean in order for anything else to make sense you have to have the raw material to work with, and that raw material is the earth. Yes, exactly.

I don't know if you know this, but yeah, you got to have a house to live in before you can address anything else. Children are dying and increasing numbers in part because the Trump administration slash humanitarian aid. Yet perhaps because I've seen so many children suffering unnecessarily, I feel a need to read something reassuring, and it seems the only way I'll read such a piece is if I write it. So here it goes.

I'm really confused because three paragraphs the second ago, he said, I can't do those columns anymore. And now he's like, well, I'm going, I want to read one, so I'm going to write one. That's a really funny concept, by the way. Like, I want to read something until I'm going to write it. It's like a starting point is to gain perspective and acknowledge that in the arc of human history,

we're still in good shape. while 2025 wasn't the best year in human history measured by child mortality it was one of the five best years ever okay one of the five best years ever how do you even hold on a second

more children under the age of five are dying than ever before but let's keep some perspective here I mean what wasn't the year like 1999 pretty good I bet like the year 3 AD was pretty good right

Pax Romana like what that was a pretty peaceful year yeah I don't oh my God what's the what's the evidence I guess he says fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000

so I guess he's measuring the metric is children dying maybe it's a hard metric to argue against Nick so. I guess I'll give it to you there. That's true. It also seems likely that the positive trajectories will resume after slippage in 2025 and 26. The Gates Foundation forecast that while the trend of declining child deaths will be slowed,

deaths will at least drop in the coming years. Similarly, the share of children stunted by malnutrition will most likely be lower in 2030 than it is now, but perhaps not as low as if aid funding had been sustained. until around 1970 a majority of adults had always been illiterate now we're at 88% adult literacy in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school

and those educated women transform families, economies and societies I don't I mean I don't know if you can look I think like literacy is more than just being able to read

okay like yeah there's sort of an emotional maturity component and you know okay so like the median American person can read at like uh you know or the overwhelming majority can read at like an acceptable level but like they also like with a straight face think that you know we should give nine guys all the money and like that's just the way things are but yeah I mean like I don't know how many tweets or Facebook posts or whatever I've seen this year, well, people fall for AI all the time and stuff.

But even more fundamentally, people being like, has anyone noticed that it's cloudier now than it used to be 30 years ago? There's more clouds now. Yeah, it's like, it's like, people, people, people can read an acceptable level, but everybody's also like probably clinically diagnosable as schizophrenic. People will be able to read as long as text messaging and social media exists. I mean, people can, like, shrink words and sentences together, sure.

Like, there's more to literacy than just being able to decipher the scribblings on the page. Like... And then the other thing is we're at 88%, which is kind of funny. Like, we're reading at a B plus average.

Despite the mess in the political world, some important trends are encouraging. Drug abuse has been one of the great scourges of modern times with more than half a million Americans dying of overdoses since 2020 but the worst may be over while drug deaths are still far too high and not nearly enough is being done about them incomplete statistics suggest that roughly 30% fewer Americans will have died of overdoses in 2025 than in 2023 um scientific because everybody's too broke to cop yeah it's more like yeah now they're just now they're just dying from

withdrawals yeah I don't mean that. I'm not laughing because I think that's funny, by the way. I'm laughing because it's so dumb. It's dark. Scientific breakthroughs also offer hope. A drug called Linnecapavir is emerging as a more potent weapon to prevent HIV AIDS. It can be taken by injection once every six months and virtually eliminates the risk of getting HIV.

Then there's the gene editing tool CRISPR, which is revolutionizing care for sickle cell amemia and other diseases. Okay. I mean, sure, I'll take that all. I think we also cured hunting since diseases cured. But here's the thing, though. Here's the thing, though. If somebody has to be subjected to wage slavery until they're 102, you know, or, you know, or rather risk the repossession of the gene-edited kidney of what use of those technologies, you know, if you can't access them, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like if you're above a certain income bracket in America, like the health care system probably fucking rocks. If you're below it, which most of us are, then it's a fucking nightmare. I saw this like back when I was on the health board in Lutcher County when like there were new hepatitis C drugs that came out and a lot of people in eastern Kentucky in places

that have been ravaged by the opioid crisis have hepatitis C because of behaviors associated with the opioid crisis or whatever. and I remember talking to this guy who was like on his second liver transplant and I was like kind of coming to him talking about like well man you see like the new drugs coming out and stuff like that like you know it's probably likely but you'll never have to you know go through that again and he looked at me and said who can afford to get cured yeah that was the bleakest thing is the saddest thing everybody's ever said to me it's like that treatment is minimum like 200 grand and at that time it may have like come down since then but like it's the same thing with all these like we can get excited about the prospect of like health in the future but like who can who can actually take advantage of it yeah well and it lends itself to what i've not fully read this article but i would like to see him dig into a metric that i find increasingly important which is like you talk about literacy you talk about technological advances but like what about the ever widened

chasm between our sort of lived experiences and the false reality presented to us every day that is just around the corner or that's just available to us if we try hard or work hard enough or is available to us through clicks and online engagement like i guess what i'm saying here is that like and we pointed this out on the patreon episode on monday but i feel like now more than ever we live in a false reality we live in a simulated sort of wilderness of mirrors and like what does that do to the human psyche like meaning has never been more important and also never been further away from us you know what i'm saying it's just like and and well and actively like getting divorced from us every day you know yeah and so like what does

that say i mean i don't feel like there's ever been a moment like this in human history granted i've never lived before i don't want to make a sweeping generalization i don't want to make a sweeping sweeping generalization like Christoph here does and say it's like the worst or best in human history. But like just, you know, my scant knowledge of human history, I just don't think that there's been a moment like this before where the search for meaning and fulfillment is so is driven into us and driven home to us at every, you know, at every stage of our lives that it's something we need to attain and do, but it's never been farther away from us. Yeah, while simultaneously, like, foisting, you know, stuff that separates us from that on us, like, at insanely every fucking minute of every day. Yeah. It is cruel. It's kind of like, it's dangling a carrot, you know?

Yeah. So it's like a technological crisis, a spiritual crisis. Like, these are important metrics. Like, I guess materially, yeah, we should take into consideration that child mortality is lower. And I think that that's a, that would be a good sign. But I, I mean, I guess do you think that's still going to be the case in five years with, I just saw a headline earlier this week that like five states or six states are ending all vaccination requirements for, for children? I mean, it was like Idaho, Florida, you know, Tennessee, like I'm, I hope I'm getting, I hope I'm not libeling a state.

to get sued by a fucking governor or something. State of Tennessee bringing sued against you for smirching Tennessee. Yeah. Like, I don't think that that's going to be the case for much longer. So, I mean, I don't know. I don't know how you... I can't imagine that having a good effect on childhood mortality. No, I...

No. Just don't see that happening. It's hard, dude, it's hard. I mean, it's hard not to view it all as a liquidation project. It is. like it's just hard not to look at the arc of the last 10 or 15 years like we're actively a Nazi state that is trying to make germ warfare on its population and then just direct warfare on you know non-white members of that population and also it coinciding at a time with

you know a once-in-a-lifetime public health event well i mean once-in-a-lifetime doing a lot work there but you know who knows when that's going to happen again and it just seems like it's just hard not to view that as like trying to cull the herd or like you know trying to you know diminish the numbers of the hoary masses who like in the back of their head won't all these people responsible to die in pretty pretty gruesome fashion yeah i think that like a big reason why you're seeing the like you're seeing the like you're seeing the rise of an alternative health care infrastructure and alternative health care society or state or whatever in parallel to the traditional one, right? The one that we've known for most of our

lives and our parents and grandparents have known that only really came into being in like the 1920s or 30s or at least the beginnings of it and then like fully came into like an industrialized form of it in the only as recently as the 70s and 80s. But like the failure to extend that to the population at large, both through the Clinton's failure to do any kind of like universal health care reform in the 90s and Obama's failure to do anything like that and just these piecemeal handouts

to like the insurance industry is the reason why you have created a political space, a political opening for the rise of an alternative health care society, right? And like that's why, I mean, yes, I think some of these people do want to do mass culling, mass eliminationist genocide like Stephen Miller. But I think that there's another aspect of it that is also because liberals have failed comprehensively to confront the profit motive. I mean, how many years are we going to have we said this on this program?

It's been the whole fucking point of this program, trying to tell people about the perils of capitalism and how it's slowly killing us all. but it's just you can you can make all the reforms you want to and those are good like i'm not against like reformism or anything like that stuff that's good but they can't hold it's just like like losing 40 pounds and putting it all back on like i've done nine times yeah it's like it's just it's just like it can't hold forever like that and and and yeah until you address the profit motive and like yeah and and and and and you there's just like like like you're just like like none of this stuff is going to stick, you know. Do you remember the moment in the early pandemic?

I want to say April or May, really it had become apparent by the end of 2020 by December. And by the time you had like Omicron 21, 22, like it had real, I mean, it was just blatantly obvious. But do you remember the sensation of watching the healthcare system kind of bend under the weight of like there was a public? health crisis you had a public health infrastructure that had been so deracinated and stripped down for parts and like watching it try to it was like I don't know it was like watching uh fucking like uh hurt you know I don't know you had you had doctors going to the broom closet and killing themselves yeah exactly right but that kind of shit like nurses doing shit like that you know what I mean like it just like the yeah and even just like mass

death just constantly for several months. Well, and even just like, I remember in Whitesburg, like the public health department, like trying its best to like talk about like masking and social distancing and like doing public health awareness campaigns and just watching in real time these, you know, forms of what we would consider to be fundamental pillars of a healthy society just buckle, right? under the stress they didn't all collapse they're all still there but like they are under they're kind of collapsing under the weight of their own contradiction of using the profit motive as a engine for keeping it alive and again it's also under attack though from what i'm saying

is an alternative health care society or or infrastructure best represented by rfk junior A man who I learned over the past week, and I won't say who told me this, who as a child harpooned his best friend in the ass and he had to have emergency surgery and then burned down a dock in Hyannisport because nobody was paying attention to him enough. What the fuck? I'll tell you more about that offline. Well, on that note, Christoph writes here, another area that inspires me with its progress is clean energy. climate change is still an enormous challenge but energy economics have turned upside down and now offer a path forward if we are willing to take it

my old college buddy Bill McKibbin who perhaps has done more than anyone else to raise alarms about climate change and who often as a result sounded rather bleak is now surprisingly upbeat dude this is all cope Bill McKibbon is upbeat I think it's all cope I really do I think that the I think that the elites have given up on trying like I think

there was a moment where solar energy and alternative energies were cheaper especially under Biden they were trying the IRA stuff the inflation reduction act you know what I mean like they were trying to make it cheaper ever since Trump has come back in

it's like not even remotely profitable to be doing again this is all run on the profit motive what the fuck you think is going to happen well did you saw I mean we talked about this maybe a couple weeks ago or something but in the late Biden era Ford opened up EV plants in Michigan

and Kentucky, like that was one of Bashir's signature things because they were going to manufacture like the Lightning F-150 and it's like electric or whatever here. Yeah. I think the same thing in Michigan. And Ford announced a couple weeks ago they're shuddering both of those plants and they basically just got them both built. Holy shit.

Well, there you go. I mean, and even then, like, EVs is a marker of, like, movement on climate change is extremely bleak. We know how much, like, carbon goes into a fucking, And not only the construction of a plant, but even just an EV car, you know what I'm saying? Like a lot of oils and, you know, polymers and carbon goes into an EV car. Not to mention, like, it's powered off of energy that comes from some extractive resource, probably. I mean, maybe you could say wind and solar if you're in, like, California or New Mexico or Texas or something, but not here in Kentucky.

We don't have sun. We have wind, but I don't think you can really do much with the wind-powered car. The wind-powered car. It should be a big fan. It looked like one of those, like, little boats that take you on the Bayou Tours in Louisiana. That would be tight if we had those, but we had, like, Bayou taxi drivers. We need to build canals. We need to replace our interstates with just canals and give everybody, like, boats.

Oh, dude. You know I'm all about that. I've been saying that for years. I'm all about that. In his terrific new book, Here Comes the Sun about the Revolution of Solar Energy. Bill acknowledges all the challenges, but adds,

we're also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history. Something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity.

Bill McKibbin is not anti-capitalist, correct? I don't think so So for that reason I think this is cope I think that like I just I don't I don't agree I don't I do not think

that you can get green energy through market incentives I think we've tried it I think we're still trying it I think if it was going to work it would have worked by this point Would it work 20 years ago It would work 15 years ago

It would work yeah There's nothing that I can see now That suggests like oh yeah there's a boom a booming green energy coming yeah also like bill macibbin is kind of old right like he's probably like getting towards the end of his life and is like oh he's 65 he's not that old sorry dude sorry sorry sorry i'm just like a part of that also probably is him taking into account his own legacy i just i think it's cope i could be wrong i don't know um it took 68 years from the invention of the solar cell in

1954 to install the first terawatt of solar power on the planet in 2002. It took two years to get the second. This is because solar is increasingly cheap and simple. Balcony solar systems are common in parts of Europe. Because batteries are making immense strides. Okay, like, sure. But you're not taking into

account the U.S. death drive. The American death drive? Like, you could... Look, we... In Kentucky, we used to have it to where you could build solar panels on your house and then sell the surplus back to the utility. Then they passed a law saying you can't do that because we're committed to death here.

We, everybody must die. It's an affront to the, the remnants of the coal industry. Yeah. And also that goes to like, think about like AI and the Trump administration banning states from regulating it. We're committed to death here, brother. Like this is the death drive. What are you talking about it?

There's one thing. It's the profit motive and the death drive. living in concert Will the U.S. have the savvy to embrace these technologies and help avert a climate disaster? I don't know, but a decade ago it was hard to see how we couldn't cook our planet

while now there's a ray of hope. Dog, I got to say, as someone who's been on the environmental left for 15 years now, I think there was more hope 10 years ago, personally. I genuinely do. I feel like I was so, I was on hopium so bad.

You know, I was talking about like Elon Musk's like grid scale batteries and shit. Like I was on some fucking opium 10 years ago. Most of us were. And you didn't know that the bulk of his outfit was going to be a flamethrower and a child porn generating AI.

And to illustrate how it further degenerated that is, you know, people listen to this show. No, I was employed with the Sierra Club for 10 years and on the NGO left, environmental left, the infighting was about things like,

the CEO of Sierra Club given a guy a make work job who was previously best known as directing as being a director of softcore

like Girls Gone Wild style porn for the Playboy channel yeah just to give you an anecdote or an example of how

kind of cynical and and just defeated the environmental left has become in the last five years. In my opinion, that's just from what I've witnessed.

I mean, and this is, yeah, not even just to use Sierra Club as an example and not just to use, like, our own personal lives from 10 years as an example. I've just seen even local groups who are once more focused on environmental issues completely give up and switch to more, like, immigration, civil rights issues or whatever, which are, you know, those are all good things to focus on. but I guess I have seen a widespread kind of sense of defeat and resignation on the climate question from the left. So just like I said, like the last five years, really, I think that that's really kind of, I think since COVID. Because in my opinion, I was way more optimistic about the climate change question 10 years ago.

I thought like, oh, yeah. I remember you texting me about the Tesla batteries. And I thought, man, that's good. Yeah, exactly. that gave me something to hold on for two for a little while so i think this is cope from them i don't think there's any sign that there's a ray of hope now i think it's way more bleak now than it was 10 years ago um then again it could mean we're nearing the end of a period where um you know that resignation ends right like we could be nearing the end of a period where like

we puncture back through to caring about these things. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it is one thing. Maybe the, but if the source of your hope is the idea that people are going to get burnout on Trumpism and swing back to caring about these things, like, that's, I wouldn't say that in and of itself is cause for hope. Yeah, yeah. Well, and certainly, like, again, I think a lot of the left has kind of backed away from

any talk about climate change. And on a certain level, you can't really blame them because I think the voting public gets a little scared by that because it's like, well, what am I going to do about it? There's nothing I can do individually about it. It's like, you know, corporations burning fossil fuels and all this stuff. And so I kind of get that because it makes the problem seem so large. There's nothing we can do to stop it. But also at the same time, it's like kind of the ecological contradiction of our times. So you can't really ignore it.

I think it has a lot to do with what's going on in the Middle East and our relationship with Israel and the Saudi states, right? Like, I don't, I think that, like, the Middle East is being remade primarily because the Saudi states have kind of hit a peak oil of their own and are trying to, you know, re-triangulate their relations with various people in the region. It's crazy, like the strides that they're making, too, because it's like, When I was the last couple of days over the weird period between Christmas and New Year's, I finally watched the F-1 movie. And, like, there's just like- Oh, yeah, interesting. I've got to watch it yet. Like, banners for Aramcoe, like, on the tracks.

And, like, they're, like, shaking hands with Emirates and stuff like that. Like, all those Gulf states that, you know, still have slavery and stuff. Like, have really sort of made strides in the public eye by just their, like, mass takeover. of like sports and sports media worldwide, not just here, you know, where they've taken the golf tour and all this stuff, but, you know, sports that are like more popular in Europe and stuff, like F1 and tennis increasingly.

There's a new master series tennis tournament being held, and yeah, you guessed it, Saudi Arabia. You can you imagine, this is a funny thing. Like, you look at the cities where, like, the biggest tennis tournaments are played, and it's like, you know, New York. City, Paris, Melbourne, Australia, London, England, Shanghai, Madrid, all these, like, urban places. Then right at the bottom, it's like Cincinnati and Riyadh. That's God intended, perhaps.

I'm sorry for blanketing all the Gulf states is Saudi states. I don't know why I said that. I meant Gulf states. I said Saudi states. There's only one Saudi state. There's only one Saudi state, yeah. Jesus Christ. I'm stupid.

All right, so, Christoph, so there you have it. This wasn't the best year in human history. So much went wrong. So many lives lost needlessly from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine. I mean, it's bearing the lead a little bit. There was a genocide in at least two of those. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So much betrayal of our own values here in America. but still measured by child mortality, education, nutrition, or women's rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300 years. 300,000 years. Okay, the best decade in the past 300,000 years. That's a funny statement to make because 300,000 years ago, they didn't have decades. There was no concept of a calendar.

Can you imagine just having the audacity to say that in an age where, like, Palestinian people and Sudanese people are, like, literally in danger of, you know, extinction and not, you know, and then just be like, well, but guess what, though? We trimmed childhood mortality down a little bit. Well, speaking of, yeah, Sudan and Gaza, like both results of the U.S. relationship with the colonial interest there, whether it's UAE funding the genocide in Sudan or Israel doing the genocide in Gaza. I mean, I can't.

Dude, the guy, the, this, does he literally think that there was like, because you know how we have like the 80s? Like, the 80s was a crazy decade. Gordon Gecko, a hair metal, the new wave, you know what I mean? Like, and then the 70s like, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy,

you know, Bob Dylan's Christian era. What? Bob, that's a stite secret. I mean, like, does he think that, like, the concept of decades held, like, 100,000 years? Like, during the Bronze Age? Like, where they had been, like, we probably didn't know that 10 years ago. Clingrical. He's so fucking stupid, dude.

Plus, we can glimpse a path forward that would leave Earth worth bequeathing to babies born today. So, we all need a bit of reassurance. So take a nanosecond to commit. commemorate our good fortune in living together in one of the best times ever to be a human being. Now onward to now onward so we can try to do better in 2026. That's how he wrapped that up. With onward. He probably got paid $10,000.

He got paid $10,000 for that probably. Oh, my God. I want that single goddamn dumbass. I won't be a guy that has a job like Ryan Seacrest or Mel Copper Jr. where I work one day a year, or one of these columnists that just write fluff and get like fucking 1970s Esquire style rates for it or something, in an expense account. Dude, a columnist in the New York Times who makes six figures a year said that we're living in the best decade in the last 300,000 years.

Oh, my God, baby. Like, the concept of a decade probably didn't even emerge to, like, the mom. fucking, like, I don't know, like 10th century or something. I don't fucking, you know what I'm saying? It seems like, it seems like that's a 20th century adventure. I don't know. I feel like even in the 19th century, they didn't say, back in the 60s, the 1860s.

I could be wrong. I don't know. Hard to see. I don't know. I was watching Shogun and one of the Portuguese guys said it's back in the 90s. He was talking about the 1590s. So maybe it has been around a while. Then again, it's a TV show.

It's a TV. show on Hulu. I bet it's been around for about a thousand years, but... Back in the 1590s, man, where life was free and the loving was easy, man. Back before the music died. Yeah, back before the music died.

Yeah. These aren't your... This isn't your parents' 1610s. Well, to fully put a bow on it... Okay. Yes. Comparatively speaking, um, maybe unlike mortality rates, uh, women's

rights um that's probably the only two things yes we're living in a better world in 2025 than we did we're in like 19 women can vote i'll be um that doesn't seem to matter anymore but like like we have made we have made some yeah right yeah some progress but man that's a hell of a thing to say in light of i feel like like every day i see like biblical prophecy being fulfilled and you still have guys taking money to say everything's great actually even bill mckevin they got to macabin they got to him bro i mean i'm not like saying that like we're all doomed we should all fucking kill ourselves but um the editorial line of this podcast is still the same as it was uh eight years ago which is that um unless you end capitalism which yes

is not just as simple as like saying let's end it tomorrow let's put the bit let's push the big red socialism button but like regardless however it is ended unless you end it you will be facing extinction of probably upwards of 75% of the global population um and so i just uh that's not doomer uh that's just that's just facts i have a pretty good like i have a pretty i i i still i'll hold out hope that it's possible. Dude, the pendulum swings to the left. It happens. It's not happened in almost 100 years, but it does

happen. Yeah, that's true. It is true. It's like, we can hold out hope, but that hope remains abstract for the moment. Like, there's no evidence that we can see it happen, but that's like, you know, that's part of it. You know. Yeah. So I am hopeful, but

I just don't see any reason for hope right now. That could pop up any day. You know, when the, one of those Nepalese guys were chasing the finance minister down the river and whipping him with a cat of nautails, that was a reason. That was a glimpse of hope. That was tight. The Yemenis. Yeah.

The Houthis, like the Houthis, like that's tight. Obviously, the Palestinian resistance, Hamas, red triangles. All tight. all dude here's one here's one uh there were like 26 suicides of idf soldiers in 2025 it's like the highest number ever recorded i mean that's progress that's good that's progress i was read this stuff about like how the masad had hired former s s officers you know about like all this stuff wouldn't surprise me like including including the guy that engineered like the gas chambers like was a key figure in engineering the gas chambers they hired him

to do what I'm not sure he they just he was in the employee of the Mossad at one point well the I mean it makes sense because Netanyahu as well as probably upwards of 97% of the Israeli public thinks that

Hitler was only talked into doing the Holocaust by a Muslim imam so in their minds there's only in their minds like the Nazis weren't that bad compared to mussels yeah when Hitler was in jail and converted to political Islam that's when it really started going downhill exactly that's what happened yeah after the beer hall putch when he was in jail they joined in oh yeah yeah yeah Let's get on out of here.

I have things to do and a day to commence with. But please go and subscribe to our Patreon and subscribe to the YouTube channel. That is all things that you can subscribe to. And we would support you subscribing to that. So please just go do that. The link is in the show notes. And go check out our premium episode for Monday. pretty good in my opinion

people people aren't as people aren't commenting as much as they were when Tom was pissing everyone off which I am a little disappointed in but I wish people would I wish I would log in and see 300 comments

yeah but maybe that's a good thing maybe that means that people are digesting and absorbing rather than reacting that's true That's true.

So who knows? Gender reaction in people, so. Well, reaction is good for the bottom line, though, brother. That's true. That's how engagement goes up, man, and we get more money. Yeah, next week, join us as we bring on our guest, police commissioner Tish from the NYPD to talk about the Mamdani era. Yeah, that'll be on the Patreon, though.

You guys subscribe to Patreon. You got to be a Patreon. Yeah, you got a plane. All right. Well, thanks so much for listening to everybody. Please go to the Patreon and subscribe. Please go to the YouTube channel and subscribe. And we will see you next time. Anyways. We're going to be able to be.