Tommy Vietor: The Marionette in the White House

0:00car salesmen are annoying. Ssss. Sign here please. Never talk to one again with FlexScar, the first and only month to month car sales. Oh no. Get a great car, switch anytime. FlexScar, you drive everything. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background Play, so you can lock your phone and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. The lead to welcome back to the show Co-founder of Crooked Media. Co-host of a little show called Ponte America. He was Obama's, the Obama administration's national security spokesman after being a driver for Barack Obama.

1:00I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. I'm a pro-demon. For Barack Obama. He's also the co-host of Ponte Save the World. One of my favorites. The last time you were on time. Which is a 2025. If you haven't come on at all this year. Really? Yeah, I went back to the archive. I mentioned that I dozed off after listening to the 26 minutes of Ponte Save the World. Well, good news. I made it 39 minutes. Wow. This week's episode because I'm locked in on the Horn of Africa. Good. So we're going to be doing a little, yeah. We're going to be doing a little Horn of Africa on the show today too. That's great to hear. There's a lot going on. I was going to say, did you make it through the 25-minute Ethiopia segment? I'm surprised you did. Yeah, no, that's what I started to do as towards the end. But I was really working. I was kind of fighting off, you know, kind of like the nods on the airplane. As airtree, I came up. So we'll get back much more airtree content to come. I want to start here. You know, we're both independent media folks.

2:02I think it's important to support independent media. You're shameless pitchman on your shows. And so there's been some discussion of, I don't know, publisher of the bull work lately, Sarah Longwell. And so I don't know. I thought that like for the clippers out there, I was wondering if you wanted just to kind of start off with like any thoughts about Sarah Longwell. And whether you think people should support her efforts or not. The thing about Sarah is she did steal my car briefly in college. She has told the story. I've not got the tell it on my side. On my side, you know when you fill up your car when you're in college and it's sort of like all the money you have. And then she and my friend Lasla return it completely empty. So she owes me a bunch of cash. So if you subscribe, it would go towards her paying down her debts. And I would subscribe to what now? The bull work. The bull work is great. We need to support independent media because they are not going to cow-tow to the Trump administration. They're not going to build a ballroom or you know jump when he says how high. Yeah, that's why he says subscribe. Not going to like nitpick, Kamala, or anything like that, you know. I'm going to focus on the big picture.

3:04I think we're all going to nitpick whatever we want. I don't want to turn this into a reach round. No, we're not going to. I did really appreciate what you guys did for the Haitian community in Springfield. How much money do you guys just raised? Because we also covered on the episode before you after you fell asleep. Yeah. I did an interview with a guy from the Council on Foreign Relations who had just gotten back from Haiti and wrote up a big report on it. And we are sending 350,000 people back to a literal like war zone levels of violence. 90% of Port-Aprints is controlled by gangs. The sexual violence is just like through the roof. And like what Trump is doing is so unbelievable evil and to support people here is a pretty big deal. For no reason. Also, I just I guess to kind of follow up on the smear and the lie about it's like pet eating. Yeah. It's just total and it's just dehumanizing disgusting. So I appreciate it. It was really good to be there. I'm frustrating in a lot of ways. And J.Vale wrote about this. Like the tough part about it is, you know, and you guys are not there, there are things like that too. But when you go to Minnesota, like there really was this kind of community rallying around, you know, each other in Minnesota in the face of like these jackwooded dogs.

4:05And not exactly what's that. And we were very grateful for the people that came out. We were donated in our community. That's like not exactly what is happening really in Ohio. A lot of the politicians are too scared to stand up for them. I mean, Mike DeWine's not no-tim walls on this front. And you know, there's just a lot of fear. So it's brutal. It's terrible. All right. We have very serious topics like that to get to. I want to start with foreign policy stuff. We'll get into politics, but just as a little appetizer. I just have a question for you. I've had some I've been obsessing about lately. Have you seen Trump's legs? Have you been looking? You have the picture. Yeah, you put it up. You've been looking on his love out his legs. It's incredible. Yeah, we can pull it up here. Like the way standing, I mean, there's been some discussion for a while that you might have some sort of brace. Or I don't know, just like the weight from his top portion is such that it's like creating downward pressure onto the joints. Yeah, it's one of the photos I saw. The direction his feet are facing compared to his torso. Looks like they're about to spin around his body like the exorcist.

5:05It conjures up like Lord Farquad. Do you remember him from the Shrek movies? Of course. Or we were a little, if you like ripped the legs out of an action figure and stuck a tiny ones in, he kind of looks like that. What I'm trying to figure is, how does he stay upright? Because he's leaning forward so much. It feels like he should just be constantly falling. And there's a lot of different angles. I've been studying it. You know, I was pretty sold on the fact that he had leg braces until I had bent tariffs on the pod. And he'd just spend some time with Trump. And I was like, did you get a good look at the, and he said he got a good look at the hands and the legs. And looked, the leg looked real to him, natural. But something's happening, I think. That's a good reporter. Yeah, I always assumed it was just like lifts in the shoes to make them from like six to six three or whatever they claim he is. I have been very reticent to do the like Trump dementia stuff or whatever because he's like always been crazy. But it's been more and more stark for, if you accidentally come across like a 2016 campaign rally video, it's really jarring.

6:06Yeah, it is. It's like watching a Biden debate from 2007, frankly, compared to where he was the end of 2024. Or just like, you know, pushing Paul Ryan around a little bit. Yes, that was brilliant. Paul Ryan. I did enjoy that. I mean, nothing they say about his health is honest, right? I mean, I think they release a height and weight for Donald Trump that makes him like the equivalent of DK Metcalf or like John L. Way in his prime, right? So of course we don't believe the cognitive stuff either. I have some John L. Way stories. You kind of made a pass up my mother one time. But that's neither here nor there. Yeah. What's Paul Ryan up to now? Is he still on the board of Fox? To the A.O. Yeah. I'm Googling. He's still on the board. That's kind of a, that's not really a courageous path traveled by Paul Ryan. Just kind of, you know, just quit that kind of crowd. There's this is a funny little inside gag about you. You don't come. This isn't your world. You don't know, but these people, but like the, the people that are like the, the balance budget conservatives that never got on board for Trump. But also the, you know, they kind of rode in,

7:06you know, Edmund Burke or something for president or Jack Kim, for whatever like that kind of crowd. Yeah. They're kind of starting to, their mouth's watering a little bit. They're looking at 2029. And I think that Paul Ryan might think that things are coming back for him. Huh. I'm, I have a hard time thinking that debt and deficits is going to be the winner this time. Hope springs eternal guys. I mean, guess what are we at like 40 trillion? You don't think in the Democratic primary, we're going to get, we're not going to get a debt and deficit Democrat in the 2028 primary. Yes. And now I think we're going to fight about modern monetary theory again. Remember that was like hot in the streets for a while. I don't know. I mean, we're, you know, if you're paying six, seven percent, seven percent now on a home mortgage, higher, eight, it's getting up there, buddy. Yeah. I mean, you would think that there might be a deficit hawk Democrat. Do you think who would, who would be the person to do that? Do you think? Bashir, you know, someone coming from that kind of Andy balance a budget kind of lane. This is what I'm looking for in 28, which goes against kind of what I think the discourse wants. Like I want somebody that is,

8:07you know, that goes full V-tor roads on foreign policy. Like, bordering like not quite all the way to like ban Hamas roads, but like, you know, the US. Yeah, really should just like totally back away from the Middle East altogether. Okay. And then maybe go like try to outflank the leftist candidate on health care. You're like, you're a Medicare for all. Like I, I'm fully, you know, taking over the entire health care system. I'm going full left on health care. And also too, by the way, I really care about the debt and deficits. And I want to fund cops. That's what I want. Okay. No, can somebody like, can somebody shake things up a little bit? I mean, it's not a bad strategy to win. That's a bit of a unicorn just in terms of how we're going to fund all these things. But I guess the nice thing about 2028 is I think everyone's going to give up on pretending that they really have a plan, so to speak, or a way to pay for all the things we're proposing. I think Trump has given us all permission to just get to that later. We're going to fund, you know, I don't know.

9:08We're going to tax AI companies and we'll save some money on the Department of War. Taxable. And we're going to get rid of ICE. And, you know, we're going to stop giving rich people, oh no, boomers are going to get mad about this. We're going to stop giving rich people social security. Okay. I don't know. Great. And then, you know, we're going to balance the budget and give everybody health care. This sounds great. I think it's a good plan. I just think we just need to make sure. If you're listening, one of the people who's at 2% right now, the 2028 polls, something to think about. We also need someone just that's really good looking saying all of it. So really can't get a behind. A Xuelander. Yeah. Like kind of, yeah. Like a Xuelander style guy. Okay. Maybe Rob Sand. I mean, he kills me. He was a male model. He was a male model. If Rob's been raised, people are going to start talking about him as a 2028 VP nominee or whatever. It's going to make him insane. He doesn't want to do it. But it will be part of the conversation. Let's do some form policy. Then we'll get back to politics. Let's do it. Aaron Warren is today. The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier strike group.

10:12And additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East. Adding 9,000 to 10,000 more troops. Obviously, much sailors to the region. As President Trump considers renewing strikes that are on after the midterm elections. This feels like this is happening. Right? I think so. There's going to be an escalation period after the midterms. I mean, how many times do we have to read it? Trump is floating constantly to his staff that he's thinking about or planning on re-escalating after the midterms. They're certainly reloading their capacity in the region. Like, I think there's a good chance that one of those carrier strike groups comes home and gets rotated out. So we have two there and one comes back. And maybe the same for the ARG is one of the amphibious ready groups. But still, a lot of service members permanently in the region. It's wildly expensive. And I think people don't realize that we have 11 aircraft carriers by statute. But usually it's like a third of them are deployed. A third of them are doing training stuff. And a third of them are in the dry dock getting fixed or maintained in some way.

11:12So there's not like, there's not 11 just like ready at all times. If you have three of them in the middle east, that means one in China that we're not covered in a lot of places. I don't know. I mean, I'm not a military strategy expert. And I know that we do have the best and the brightest working on this right now. I mean, Pete Hanks has making sure that we don't have any fem boys. No, no bearded ladies. No people who are into y'all we, you know, no, no piss play. So I'm saying in sure it's just just you know, it's great. Hey guys with muscles and I don't know. And that's and they're doing a lot of tea and a lot of push ups. But like we were kind of it seems like we're kind of signaling to the Iranians. Like they've now had a period of time also to regroup. And while we're like just you know, discussing our testosterone replacement therapy. And and I don't know, you know, the different types of asymmetric options they have in the

12:12straight. I'm not optimistic, I guess I would say. No, I'm not yet. They live there. They have nowhere else to go. The IRGC lives in Iran. They have nowhere else to go. And so we can conduct another six month bombing campaign and re-hit all the same sites over and over again that were apparently weren't taken out the first time. But they've have a capacity to rebuild. They obviously have ballistic missiles left. They have lots of drones left. They can hit all our bases in the Middle East. They're clearly getting intelligence or targeting information from the Chinese, maybe the Russians that are aiding them and being pretty effective. They've killed what is it in 19 or 22 if you believe the Washington Post, US service members, they've injured 800 more. The cost is going to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Like there's no strategy to win this war. We can send as many aircraft carriers as we want. There's still not a strategy to end this war. And also we're running low on all the interceptor missiles that keep people in Israel or on US bases or anywhere else in the Gulf safe. So they're playing for time and I think they have a better hand here. Yeah, they do. They do have a better hand. For example, we got a fatty who's into fisting.

13:16We're using them. The Iranians are using them. They're not leaving anybody on the sidebimes. Yeah. This guy's going to throw a punch. Okay. I had a serious question. Am I? I am nitpicking. So I've already fallen down on my promise from beginning of the podcast. I am going to nitpick the Democrats a little bit. Are they capturing as much of the political benefit from this shit show as they could be right now? Because I just don't feel like they are. No, every time I read like a story about Trump secretly telling his team that they're going to go back to war after the midterms, I would like to hear every single Democrat out saying something like release the secret plan or like calling on their opponent to tell Trump not to resume the war with Iran or framing the entire debate as, or sorry, framing the entire election as your last best opportunity

14:18to actually check Trump and end the war and prevent him from escalating. From the very beginning of this war, there were a bunch of Democrats who were unsure what to say about it because they hate the Iranians. They've been lobbied forever to take out the regime like they kind of like wanted to wait around and make sure the war didn't go well before they criticized it. I think they need to be full-throated in opposition. They need to point out what a disaster it's been that it could only get worse. That Trump is not reliable or good at this. Like, no, they're not even coming close to capturing the political benefit. They're pretty good at, if you listen to Democrats talk about the war, the war comes up. You know, like if I ever were paying a part of their game and we've DVR we've paused, you know, the Sunday show that whatever Democrats out on, they get the Iran war question. They're going to pivot to the economy, right? And they're doing that well and that's fine and that's good. It is important for voters to understand the connection between the higher gas prices they're playing, the higher food prices they're playing, and the war. But like, the war is also bad on the merits, right?

15:19And I do feel like they're jumping straight ahead to that. And instead of focusing on, they have no exit strategy. It's fucking outrageous that they're sending our, it's not fair to our troops to our sailors to send them to the region to sit on this boat. When there's no plan, there's no exit strategy. It's not patriotic, you know, it's not powerful. It's not strong. It's fucking idiocy. Like, they're right. They are cowboys. They're acting like dumbass fucking cowboys. What do you attribute that to kind of like, and so again, there are obviously exceptions about this. Rokonic, Rismarfi, others. But like, what do you attribute to kind of the caution to go at the war for the war's sake, rather than always pivoting to the economy? Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I'm sure they all got the same talking voice from the same pollster saying, oh, the polling obviously says the economy. The focus of the price is better. Obviously. And there's also, I've also heard big donors that hate, you know, the Iranian regime and want it changed for a variety of security reasons. I agree with you. I think like, I also think there's some DNA within the Democratic Party like that's left over from kind of 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004.

16:20That feels like you have to be tough when it comes to conflict. You have to seem like you're willing to take Hawker's positions in wage war in order to seem credible. I think we're so far past that it's crazy and that the American people now know that more often than not when the U.S. launches a military campaign, it ends poorly for us. It makes us weaker, it makes us poorer. And then also, you have the stories of these service members whose deployments are getting extended by months and months, like literally trying to kill themselves by jumping off the ships. Yeah, what about those people? You know, so yeah, I just, like, the war is bad. It's a disaster. Doesn't matter with gas prices were low. Like it's not going well. Yeah, I'm a little bit obsessed over this because I feel like I want, I have Bill Kristalln and Bob Kagan. And I'm like, I want a model, I want to model some behavior here. You know, it's like the chief neocon. You know, if Dick Cheney's buddy can be like, this war is fucking stupid. It's making America weaker. It is, you know, an insult to our troops. Like they don't have a plan. Then why can't a Democrat say that? It's like Bob Kagan say.

17:20Now let's talk about Jared. He's messing around over there in the region. We have a good CNN story out today. Well, a well reported CNN story, I guess it's not, you know, good news. That says this. At the same time, the Jared Kushner is active as key negotiator and the Warren Gaza, his private equity company, Affinity Partners has held the largest stake and then Israeli firm backing businesses involved in Israel's military campaigns. The firm has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Israel's largest arms manufacturer. It also holds stakes at least eight other companies providing equipment for the Israeli military, ranging from drones to warships to demolition machinery. All nine companies saw their stock value climb last year with many stating the war in Gaza had driven demand for their businesses. You don't say. Yeah. Like this is like a lefty conspiracy podcast dream. It's like whatever, everything that I guess a horseshoe, everything that Glenn Greenwald ever said about the Bush and Obama administrations is happening, right?

18:22Now, it's like the sign-in law of the president is the biggest investor in Israeli weapons manufacturers. And he's also not really negotiating the quasi-peace that we have going on in the region. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about companies that are making high explosive tank rounds and 500-pound bombs and the optical camera that goes on a drone. Like there's not like 10-general stuff. It's like the shit they're dropping on human beings and killing them. Yeah, my takeaway from the story was like, Jared is literally a war profiteer and that's what we should refer to him as going forward. I think no one thought he was an honest broker. Like even, like well before Trump took office again, he did this event at Harvard where he talked about how well, he thinks that basically that you should ethically cleanse the Gaza Strip and like set up a tent city for them and the desert and they can all live there because it's great real estate. There was all the things about like BB-Den-Yahoo crashing at their house when he was a kid. But now we know that like not only does he prefer the Israeli side and the negotiation, but that he, if it drags out, he gets paid more

19:25because they're dropping more bombs. Peace will be bad for business and they're the largest shareholder. Largest stakeholder. It just one of the things to like the investors and Jared's fund are all from the Gulf. So like think about this. The Saudis, the Abaradis, the Kuwaitis. Seems politically fraught for those leaders. If their populations know that like their sovereign wealth funds are going into Israeli companies, they're dropping bombs on Palestinians or making the bombs to be dropped on Palestinians. That seems like an insane thing for like politically untedible for those countries. Does seem fraught for MBS like in particular, you know, who I think is one of those things. And some ways that the MBS Trump parallels is pretty similar from like first-term Trump. Like you know, things are going well in the country. People are willing to overlook a lot of stuff. But you know, now that Saudi is embroiled in a multi-front war, obviously they're suffering economic consequences from the what's happening with the Houthis. There've already been some reporting about this that there's some unrest. Obviously they don't have the kind of money to throw around

20:25that they did a couple of years ago. And now it's like, well, also by the way, we're investing in Israeli weapons manufacturers. Yeah, I don't have a lot of pity for MBS, but imagine you're him for a minute and you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, I bribed Donald Trump. I bribed the dumb sons with like the Riyadh, Trump Tower, and the Gulf courses. I bribed Kushner with his little affinity partner, which he used to invest in all these drone companies. And what do I get in return? I get him starting the stupid war over my objections. They're not defending me when you know, the Houthi rebels are firing missiles at my pipeline. And Trump is just completely hung him out to dry. And you're right, like they were already kind of running out of, not running out of money, but like things were going well with his big dumb vision 2030 plan, which was just this crazy boondoggle for like McKinsey consultants. They already were raining that back, but now they could see some real economic challenges going forward, if like the oil and gas industry, if their supply is taken offline for a long time. Yeah, we could have warned them. You know, maybe it'd be at MBS been kind of listening to

21:27independent resistance media. You've been listening to the more practice. Probably wouldn't have liked the kind of her maford I comments that I was making, but like other than that, like he could have gotten a little tipped. I could have seen that this wasn't, I really, a trust for as the counter party. You know, that might have been something to look into. Just the connection between the Christian and the Iran thing like, like it is, it's almost out of a spoof, like the idea of the point man for the negotiations, like before the war started, when they were allegedly trying to come to a new agreement, a new nuclear deal. Like the point man in that negotiation was an investor in Israeli weapons manufacturers and an advisor to the Saudis who's getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars from the Saudis. But like, no wonder he couldn't come to a deal with Iran. Like, like, no wonder we're in a fucking war with Iran. Like the person that was in charge of making sure we had a peace deal was on the take and is incentivized by the interests of Israel and Saudi.

22:27Yeah, it's so brazen, it almost seems like hard to believe, but there's been like, there's been so much overlap between Jared's volunteer job and his actual job that, like we've seen in versions of this. Remember that Jared is technically a volunteer for the government, so it doesn't have to release any of his financial disclosure forms or anything. But the New York Times reported that when he was in Davos last year, on behalf of the US government, laying out his Gaza Reconstruction plan. Remember that? It was like the AI renderings of like these fucking jets and like, you know, futuristic towers and things. At the same time he was there, he was trying to fundraise for Affinity Partners, his company. We also know that the guy he's been negotiating with, with Russia is a dude named Kieril Dmitryev, who is the oligarch who runs Russia's sovereign wealth funds. You think that guy's not dangling deals in front of Jared and Steve Wukoff like all day every day? So like, this is kind of a part and parcel to just how he operates and how they all do business. Kieril was the guy that was in Florida. Jetsky? Yeah. Yeah. Like when Trump said that we got to agreement,

23:28people were like, what agreement are they talking about? It was like Kieril had written it. Yeah, he wrote the plan. Yeah. Okay. Good stuff. I wonder what's happening on the China side of things. I'm sure that there's some cash flow in around there. One thing that I had missed, but I said you guys had talked about about the China Summit that I want to bring up and then open up to any other thoughts you have about it, was that the US ambassador to China, David Perdue, lost a China off. That's tough. Tough, tough booking. He says in the recent meeting, Trump asked she if China wanted to buy weapon systems from us. Yeah. I saw that headline and I thought what he had to have been kidding, right? But then you watch the Perdue clip. I think he said it like Fox News Sunday. Yeah. And no part about him is kidding. And then Trump gets asked about this comment from Perdue in the Oval Office and Trump kind of plays dumb. He's like, oh, I don't know. He must have met Taiwan. But like the context here is that Xi Jinping's mission every time he comes to Washington or visit Trump wherever

24:29is to slowly kind of chip away at US support for Taiwan. We know that the Trump administration is holding up a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan. And now we're hearing that Trump is offering the cell, the Chinese weapons that presumably they would use to invade. The island is not like, it's just like, it's another example of like, it's just so crazy. It just doesn't, it's hard to like wrap your head around them. It doesn't make sense. It's one of the knows. I mean, it might make sense if, you know, one of the kids was on the board for one of the weapons companies. Right. Yeah, Eric, maybe. Despite the fact that the world is falling apart around him, it doesn't seem like Trump's confidence in kind of the mercantilistic real estate guy view of the world has been shaken at all. Which makes sense. Because if you know Trump's backstory, like you went bankrupt a million times, like there are a lot of periods where things look like they're out of control. And like he always can wield, deals scammed his way out of it. Right. And I think that like that's basically his world view. Right. It's like, well,

25:29I don't, he doesn't have anything against the Chinese. He like says the Communist are bad. Because he knows that that's what he's supposed to say. Yeah. He doesn't have any like critiques of the Communist system. He likes it. He prefers it actually. I love it. And so he's like, well, why couldn't I sell them weapons? Like maybe then we like each other more if we were doing weapons deals together. Right. I just think that's his world view. I think that's right too. I mean, I think also he's always looking for like some announcement of a deliverable that he can pretend is helping the United States. But the last deliverable they announced was a sale of a bunch of Boeing planes. And my understanding is that those purchases have not been made yet. They've also, they've left like being announced, soybean purchases and things. I mean, I think the takeaway from the summit to me was, what was remarkable is how little they accomplished and even tried to accomplish. There weren't like months of preparatory meetings between Besson and his counterpart. Like they just punted the trade war pause a couple months until after the midterms. They fucking loaned us to pandas, Tim. We didn't even get to keep the. That was alone. They're alone. The panda diplomacy is always a loner.

26:30I thought that was a gift. Those keys are coming back. I hate pandas. Do you know that? I think pandas are so overrated. They're weird. They're lazy. They can't procreate. You know, I don't, you know, I'm not going to into in-sell culture. At all. I think the original answer. That's true. Okay. To it. And I'm always like, I've always hated pandas diplomacy. I was fucking pissed. Was it only you guys on both of the prize? Was it Obama or one of those times? I remember being in DC being like, I'm not going to the fucking zoo to see this. They're trying to butter us up with this panda. Keep the panda. They think they took our pandas back. They do the bomb administration. Now they might be back in DC. Someone yelled at me about this in the comments. I think they're back. But like they did take the pandas back for a little while. We got a loaner of two pandas. They're in quarantine right now. To Atlanta. Right? Awesome. First. We're going to be live in Atlanta. The board.com slash events come, come, come see us. Take it so available. That was seamless. Trump picked Xi Jinping up at the airport,

27:32which I think he thought was like a courteous move. I think that Chinese like they care about protocol and I think they think that makes Trump look like their bitch. And then they don't respect that. Yeah. The whole thing was weird. He is. They're bitch. He didn't want to get anything out of it. Like that's the point. They didn't do all the stuff because what he wanted to do was show off his toys. You want them to see the ballroom? Granite. You know, you want them to see the helipad, the granite. Like that was those were the deliverables for him. For sure. Like she's going to see how cool the van the granite is. No doubt. Okay, we're going to do a little serious breather now, everybody. And then we're going to get back into politics. But we're doing the Horn of Africa. I feel like if we saved the Horn of Africa for the end. Everyone's tired. I think that yeah, I think I think there'd be a risk that people would leave the podcast and be like, I'll see you on Monday for Bill Crystal. And so we're going to do Horn of Africa right here in the middle. I became interested in this couple of years ago because I had a friend who's to grind. And when I did not my party on Snapchat, we did a whole episode on the atrocities, integrate. And it was my lowest viewed ever episode.

28:34But I still felt very passionate about it. And then recently my former FY pod, co-host, Cam Kasky, it's kind of a genocide, a fishy and auto. And we were wanting, he came to visit me. And we spent like a Friday night like watching two hours of Ethiopia, Eritrea YouTube videos. Oh God. Where it was just kind of explainers about everything that's been happening. And he's like war footage from the police. No, not war footage explainers. Because it's very complicated. So we're not going to do all of that right here. We're going to just do the basics. But I came away from it thinking that we really should consider a regime change war in Eritrea. And then I think that I might be for that. So we'll get to that at the end. But why don't you explain to people what's happening at Ethiopia first? The very quick version of why I think people should care about this is from 2020 to 2022, there was a civil war in Ethiopia. And the estimates for the death toll is like between 300,000 and 600,000 people. What is it? This was the Ethiopian government against the de-Granes, the TPLF and the North.

29:37Biden was able to put a lid on this through a diplomatic deal. But it wasn't fully implemented. It basically trumped doge to a lot of the funding that would have helped to make that process go forward. So now, since we've recorded that episode on Potsay of the World, it comes out every Wednesday. Subscribe, whatever you get in your feeds. There are now reports of drone strikes in Addison, the capital of Ethiopia. And so what's scary about this is there could be fighting between these ethnic communities in Ethiopia. But also, this time, the Eritreans are allied against the Ethiopians. So you could see two, like major nation states going to war with one another. And Ethiopia has a population of like 130 million people. This conflict could spill over into Sudan, their neighbor. It could spill over into Somalia, their neighbor. And so they're just like the possibility for multiple conflicts to merge in the most disastrous way possible. At a time when there's no USAID or assistance budget out there for any of these countries to help them or all the international institutions that might try to stop the violence are useless, it's very, very bad.

30:39And a lot of people kind of astounding the alarm to me. Yeah. Ethiopia is the 10th most popular country in the world. So I need to just think about the Syrian refugee crisis and what exactly what the result of that was. You know, I did a much bigger population potentially, not so even including Eritrea. And the other thing for people who, you know, just it's been a while since they're in geography class. I, while you're listening to us and you just pull up on your phone, Eritrea and kind of look at the geography there. Like the other part of this is like this is right at kind of the other straight where oil's coming out of the Persian Gulf where there's fighting with the Houthi. They see, yeah. Yeah, right. Right across the way is the, is Yemen where the Houthi rebels are. And to get in and out of the Red Sea, you have to go through the Bobbleman Depth straight. And that's what the Houthis have managed to close. But if all of a sudden you kind of lose access to all this additional coastline or like we lose access to our bases and Djibouti for some reason, like there's lots of strategic reasons too that they be worried. Now on Eritrea, tell people about what's happening there because the leader of Eritrea is like 110 years old

31:41and he's been there since 1967 or something. And he, and it's basically North Korea. Yeah, it means called the North Korea of Africa. Like then there's very little information flow in and out. If he's 80 something, what's his name? Isias of Wurke, I think his name. Wurke, good pull. Wurke, he's been around forever. It is like as authoritarian a police state, you can find. You can be conscripted into the military indefinitely, essentially. I think they have a constitution. It has not been sort of operational for decades. They have a parliament, but it has not met a sense like George Bush was president. So it is an authoritarian police state. But again, like if they went to war with the Ethiopians, like that would be two real deal militaries clashing. And God knows who else might get involved. The Egyptian, the Sudanese, like, and then the other sort of the element here just to complicate this is that the UAE, the Emirates are just constantly feeding arms into the Horn of Africa. They give them to the RSF, which is a rebel group in Sudan. They give them to the other parties in Ethiopia.

32:41So it's like, there's just a real arsonist here. And Ethiopia is completely landlocked. Right, so they don't have any access. And so this is another problem where there's all this economic strife there because they're getting screwed by the are tray ends and so on. So like, you know, it's in order to get goods into the country. Like, you're not able to. They kind of deal with Djibouti. And I think I've a lot of their port accesses through Djibouti. Oh, really? They flirted with recognizing Somali land as its own state. If you look at Somalia, it's sort of like, comma, you know, and the top part is would be Somali land. So he offered to do that that he walked it back because it pissed off all the other countries in Africa essentially. So, but yeah, water acts as a big deal. I miss the huge, that's what she said, opportunity with getting access through Djibouti. And I couldn't let it pass. I just I was like two seconds late on it and I couldn't let it pass. So the human rights situation, this is where like my 2000s Tim Muslims are flowing. And I talked about my 2028 candidate and it's like, you know,

33:42we've really struggled with Middle East wars, regime chain wars. They've done nothing for us. You know, it's time to maybe step back a little bit, work more from a diplomacy perspective, you know, think more about trade and working with allies rather than trying to interfere everywhere militarily. I'm like, what if my view is that we should have that policy for the Middle East, but maybe I give Africa a try. Like, let's say we found, I don't know, a leader we liked, an EVO PR Djibouti, and really just kind of went in there and took out Isaiah and Eritrea and brought freedom to the Eritrea and people like who are being constricted into the military, you know, we then have a nice base of access there on the red sea. Thoughts? I feel like Marco Rubio just took over your soul. And basically you're doing the Venezuela plan for East Africa. No, no, no, no, no, I want freedom for the people. I'm not stealing their gold. Okay, I'm not stealing their gold. I love the story about how American companies are like, whoa, we're not touching that goal. It's like gang, like looted gold for Venezuela.

34:45No, this is like we go for that. We try to find the Maria Machado of Eritrea. What if that Maria Machado of Eritrea really wants to go to war with ETH? I don't know. It feels like a bad idea to me. No bad idea isn't a brainstorm. All right. It's really horrible. I mean, I'm like half joking, but the half that I'm not joking about is like, at once you really dig in on the like potential risk here, but also like the ongoing humanitarian disaster. It's hard to not just be like, we got to be able to do something. So I'm like tens of millions of people who could be starving to death. And again, even if Donald Trump doesn't care about a single human being in these countries, and ascribe no value to their lives, what you talked about earlier, like the migration crisis that could come from a country of 130 million people like descending into war is, hopefully you don't have to explain why that would be bad. Well, at the very least, maybe we could cut off, you know, kind of our economic ties with the UAE

35:49who's like in there trying to make things worse everywhere around the world. It would be great if that was like ever a part of the conversation. Or like when people went to Cafe Milano and saw the ambassador there, they said, hey, maybe stop doing this. Maybe stop funding all these warlords all over the place. Yeah, maybe knock it off. I mean, knock it off. Maybe that's the first stop. Instead of a regime change, where the first step is to go into Cafe Milano and talk to some of the UAE diplomats and be like, knock it the fuck off. All right. Yeah, there as you know, you've been in DC. Like, that that that embassy is very good at like kind of influence pedaling and sprinkling on any different places like all of a sudden, Mika Brzynski is doing a like summit on women's empowerment and Dubai and you're kind of like, how does this make sense? It's like, well, it doesn't. Fuck. It's a shitty situation. It's tough. I don't have anything else good. The regime change war and air trade out and it was my best idea. I understand the risks. Okay, I understand the risks. But we'll keep monitoring Horn of Africa news and if there are other Hugh Hewitt is the weirdo conservative radio host to is a total Trump shell and embarrassment.

36:54But there's one thing I do like about a show is when presidential candidates come on. He has like a series of like four random questions at the end and they're like things that he is really interested in. Yeah, his algorithm has to spy, you know, things like that. And maybe when the 2028ers come through, like what are you going to do about the Horn of Africa? That's good. Maybe one of my or how are you going to take down air trade? Yeah, I just kind of lean in. We're not going to take down air trade. We're building it up. Sorry, yeah, right. We're taking down Isaiah's a forky. Okay. That's what we're taking down. That's my. The fucking dictator. You're right with the ugly mustache. All right, let's do some politics. People you made it through. Midterms, you said you were in Michigan. Do we in Texas too? Or you just been doing a Texas deep Josh? It was in Michigan, in Texas. Where were we in Texas? We're in Travis County, so Austin. The liberal bastion. But it was great. It was really fun. Went down there for the Texas Tribune Fest for a couple days. Got to eat some incredible barbecue. Talked to a bunch of people. It was fun. Where you out on state of play down there.

37:55And there's a pull out today as Bobby Polito. We've had on the USF. A great candidate. The town of music singer. I was running down on the, you know, kind of one of the border districts. It was a district Trump one. I'm going to buy memory now. I think 18 and the poll today. It was internal, but had him up 13. So that's a 31 point swing. Or it was 29 points swing. Something that effect. And if you look at the same poll as interesting in that district, Tallerika was up high single digits. You know, host, the governor candidate was only up one. And this is maybe a little different. You can't really extrapolate that out to the whole state because it's very unique district. You know, a lot of Spanish speakers, etc. But I don't know. I'm wondering what your thoughts were on that. On the state of play probably. Yeah. I think Bobby Polito, shout out Liz Smith, who introduced me to him. He's like a unicorn candidate. He's a very, very famous like Latin Grammy award-winning singer and artist. And they recruited him to run for this race. And he had massive name ID throughout his community already. And like in a change election,

38:56when everyone hates incumbents, to say you're like the furthest thing from a politician, you're actually a famous musician. Like it's great. It's amazing. And he's a great communicator. We had him on our show. We got to keep finding more of those. You know? Yes. I don't know. We need Master P down here in Louisiana. There we go. I don't know. We need some fucking bluegrass person in Kentucky. Right? Kentucky. I like that. I think that's good. I genuinely, I really think that's a good idea. People with like a brand name ID, like some sort of community. It's good. I thought to juvenile. Talk to juvenile. In Texas generally, I think the vibes are very good. But when you talk to the campaigns, they are definitely way less bullish than the public polls. Like Tallahuretko's campaign. If you ask them off the record, they'll be like, yeah, we think there's like 30 to 40% chance of winning. Now, I'm probably there, expectations managing, of course. But like the polling averages you'll see will have Tallahuretko up a couple points. And I think that's just, that's not the case. I think one thing that could help them,

39:57do you know the Tallahuretko, there's a libertarian in that race. So maybe you can get your win number down to like 48, 49. But you know, like the Democrats have a ceiling in Texas. This year, the ceiling might be 50%. I think Gina's folks are fairing, Gina Hose's folks are, have a little heart of a challenge because Abbott's just a better candidate. Like Ken Paxson is the worst candidate that the Texas Republicans could have selected. I heard that Abbott's internals have him up four or five points. But we'll see. It's all like kind of how you're modeling the electorate. I think Gina needs to win 60% of Latino vote. She needs to get double digits with independence. She needs to blow it out in like the five big urban counties. But then she's also trying to peel away some Republicans by talking about education and voucher programs and also data centers. I think they're being really smart about that. I think Tallahuretko has been very smart and how he's run his campaign too. It's not gotten like nationalized as much as say Beto's has. But it's Texas. You know, it's a slog.

40:58Even though people kind of misremember Beto's first campaign. It gets a little personalized. And even though it's by three. And yeah, like Ted Cruz is more of an avid cop than a Paxson cop. I just I don't think you will appreciate how much less popular and worse that a candidate Paxson has than Cruz. Because to the average Paxson of America listener, it's kind of like tough to tell the difference between the two of them. For sure. But if you are a Republican swing voter in Texas, you can kind of see the different types of bruising. It's different. Yeah, different. He's worse. And I think that they've wanted to lessons from that. He knows race is harder. It's just the state race is harder to than national. It's a different animal. And Tallariko did have this going for him. In 2022, he signed a pledge not to accept a dime of fossil fuel money. On Saturday, his campaign was informed by the pledge writers that he had one week to return $36,000 in donations from oil execs to avoid their wall of shame. Tallariko said, yeah, I'm going to keep it.

42:00Campaign today is going to keep it. So I think that I think being on the, it's pretty funny that the lefty group, I'm sure all people who are earnest and good intent. But the idea that they thought that being on the no fossil fuels wall of shame would be something that Tallariko would be worried about. I think Petrae is maybe a little bit of a lack of understanding of the incentives of the Texas campaign. Or that we can't just kind of make a greater good calculus in our own head. So we got from an election that Tallariko was going to help your cause more than Ken Paxen. Yeah, Ken Paxen is like universally bloat down in Texas, even among a lot of Republicans, John Kornin, for example. I think it really helps Tallariko that Kornin ran tens of millions of dollars of attack ads against Paxen before he was a the nominee. That said, Tim, like, I don't know. I talked to someone today who said, they're seeing a bunch of internals slipping for Democrats in recent days. And I wonder, yeah, and I don't know if it's like a reversion to the mean. Or if it's tens of millions of dollars in Republican attack ads,

43:04kind of biting and doing what they're intended to do, we'll find out. Where were those? Where were the states? All over the place. Several swing states. I don't want to blow up my source here, but yeah. Sure. Where are you at on kind of the conversation around the fact that the Democrats have really been overstated in the plain states in the upper Midwest for a couple of cycles now. And there's just something about kind of the rural Midwestern whites that they're harder to pull. And that is kind of like a concerning factor for folks is they're kind of assessing Ohio, Iowa, Michigan. I worry a lot about the response bias. I mean, I think it's just right now Democrats are enthusiastic. They are the kind of cohorts that you tend to find to be Democrats are more likely to respond to a survey and like get through it all the way. I think that I'm very worried about response bias in these polls. So that said, like it doesn't change the fact that the underlying fundamentals are way

44:07better for us. Like I believe the Trump's approvals in the tank. I believe that people don't like the Iran war and kind of like the fundamentals. I think the polling is way too rosy and like, you know, there's a merist poll of Iowa the other day. Remember that they had like Josh Turic up like six or something like that. I talked a bunch of people in Iowa and they're like, absolutely not. Like maybe we're tied, but it's just it's not that. Yeah, there's what I today has sand up by eight or nine and Turic by two. That could be real. I think that Rob is probably several points ahead of Josh in part because he's a great candidate, but in part because his opponent doesn't live in the state. Yeah, but it's going to be a slog, man. It's tough states. And he is the, yeah, have you gotten one of his medical devices? No, it's a opponent. Yeah, I got it right here. This is a, this is one of the exact exactly and invested in a medical. That's the covering. Oh, what are you looking at? You can see it here. I haven't tried it on yet. So I'll report back.

45:09He has a weaker candidate out of state and Rob's running. Rob should have really good race. What do you make of what's going on in Michigan? A lot of Michigan discourse. So open, open ended for you to take that where you want. I was in Michigan two weeks ago. I saw what's a dual town hall and then interviewed him. I saw him in LA a couple of nights ago. I think he's one of the most talented communicators we have in the party full stop. A dual speeches are excellent. He weaves his bio together with kind of what's happening in the world and makes a pitch that is both emotional and factual and it's exciting and sobering all the ones. Like he's just, he's really, really, really good. I do still worry about that bruising primary. I worry about potential tax on him being perceived as more progressive than kind of the average voter in Michigan. And I worry about Islamophobia and people. The legacy of 9-11 has got a long tail. And it's clear that Republicans think that essentially accusing. I don't want to Sarah's focus groups that might hurt Vivek.

46:09And if in Ohio. I mean, yeah, unclear what he had to do with 9-11. I have not read Sarah's full breakdown on the Abdul Focus group. I feel like it was a little more bullish, but like I think it's a rate. Like I think it's Michigan is a, unfortunately, I think a swing state this year. And I think, you know, Abdul's primary result kind of rattled me. I remember everyone thought he was going to be up like, he's going to win by seven. He's going to win by 12 over Hailey Stevens. And then it was essentially one point. So I think we got to assume it's going to be that. And there's a spending advantage issue again. I think Abdul's going to win. I think people misunderstand the microtidious factor. I do also think this. We're veering a little into discourse territory with this question. But, um, you know, I, I think the speech is really good. And his ads have been really good. And that team knows what they're doing. Some of his interview stuff. I'm like, he's all cute. Trying to, trying to do it. And I'm like, kind of like, why are you doing these? Why are you picking some of these fights sometimes? Like he, he knows he's a good arguer. And like he wants to win the argument. And like, that's not always the best thing to do in interviews.

47:11But, um, I don't know, man, it's like we're looking at Georgia and North Carolina. And you got Roy Cooper running. And he's running away with it so much that the Republicans are not even investing anymore in the state. Like North Carolina and Michigan, that were pretty similar on the presidential state level. Wattley is not great. I don't know that is he meaningfully worse than microtidious. I don't know. They're pretty similar. And, you know, Roy Cooper's running away with it. So, I mean, sure, some of this might be Islamophobia or whatever and the bruising primary. But I think it's kind of weird that, like that's just kind of blank observation about, you know, where Democrats are running stronger is kind of controversial sometimes. When you're talking about how the party should look to maximize their advantage. What do you make of that? I mean, I just on Europe dual point, I hear you on the interview stuff. Like sometimes there have been times where he's said things in interviews where I've like texted him and said, you know, happy warrior of dual is kind of better than this,

48:13kind of more brash version or said something to his staff. But that said, like when I was out there at a town on meeting, I watched him mention Fox News and some people are cat calling from the audience. Like, you whoop, Jesse Waters is ass or stuff like that. So, like, it broke through. I got attention and made him look like a fighter. The fighter thing has been an element we know the Democrats are looking for. But also whenever you talk to campaign staff, even like, even campaigns that are high profile like a dual or games, how to rico, they say the hardest thing is breaking through. And the thing they wake up and have their, they think about every day is like, how we're going to get attention today. And so when you fight with Jesse Waters, you get a lot of attention. Even if I think like some of that attention might land badly with the swing voters that we all think he needs. Does he need that though? In the set, I guess that's one question. And like the Senate race, like is that necessary? Is that not a presidential cycle thing? I mean, I don't know. Again, Roy Cooper seems to be doing just fine. So people just like knock counteracts. They're just like, Roy was a popular governor and so it's not fair.

49:14But I don't know. Roy was a recruiting coup, right? I mean, he was just a popular governor, like, probably 100% name idea across the state, was able to raise money and just kind of like scare out Republicans. While he's a terrible candidate, he sucks. I mean, I don't think my garage was a great candidate. Like, if I were, if I was my Republican, I could chew my like dream candidate. Five years ago, my garageers might sound like the right guy. But in the midst of this Iran war, she's like the former czar of the deep state. Like that doesn't feel like the best guy. It's already lost on the sock in the ticket. Yeah, I hear you, man. I don't know. I just like, I think as an outsider, somebody who's an immigrant, I just, I think it's strange that there isn't more people feeling like, you know, Roy Cooper must be doing something right. Yeah. I don't know. Like, nobody says that. I just, it doesn't benefit. I don't think anybody is like kind of factional interest. I think Roy Cooper is a great, but Roy Cooper is a very charming person. Like, he has a ton of political skill. He's a recruiting coup. I think like what, what, what I think about this is I think we don't give Chuck Schumer

50:16his flowers enough for that recruiting for shared brown, recruiting shared brown in Ohio. Like, he had some wins there. Yeah. Michigan, obviously, like, I wasn't a dual person. I think that he was the strong candidate. Then Haley Stevens, it frustrated me that the DSCC was like, so have you handed there? I think we got to agree that Maine was a wash. Maine was a mixed bag by the end for the pro and anti-Schumer. Yes. So why don't they gin and milk? Why don't we have the right to gin and milk? What's the right now? I'm really fine with her right now. I think you have to show that you can, you want a campaign and can win a primary. You can't quit before the vote, you know? Yeah. She didn't really have the fire in her belly. I wouldn't say for that campaign. No, you're giving him a wash on Maine. Okay. We'll see what the clipers think about that. You know, I'm more saying like, people were pretty hard on Chuck for a while on that one. And then I think Chuck Schumer had a point when it came to the vetting challenges issues that he had been raising, you know?

51:16Try to give him his flowers, Tim. Did you have any hope for any of the indies? Any of the random, like, there was a poll that had South Dakota candidate, winning by nine, the defendant against my grounds, anything there and you hope you can I can I just you in a bill crystal was monitoring eye to hope. Like I feel like the best thing we could do for a lot of those candidates is just not talk about them, right? I mean, don't you want to just sneak through if you're Dan Osborne or Bangs or like any of these candidates? The thing that makes me worried is that they're gonna use you against them. They'd have to be like liberal Tommy Vee tour once. No, the van for Barack Obama. And now he's pushing Brad Baines. I don't know what that was saying. Brian Baines. I think. I think that I mean we the collective like national democratic party. Here's the thing I think about like the biggest shift we're seeing is like Latino voters kind of last in first out for Trump, right? It's not the white voters, which is why sometimes I think you see polls that are tighter and main or new Hampshire. If I apply that kind of logic or kind of that data to some of the other state you mentioned,

52:21it just feels like it's going to be a challenge. That's all. I'm hopeful a big a huge overpormontial for Democrats. We can certainly take those seats. The question gets hard when you're talking about should you allocate resources to South Dakota that you might send to Iowa, right? Like that's where this gets complicated. Yeah, I don't know. If you're kind of a 100 millionaire listening to the show. Yeah, come on. You want to just take a swing for two million and South Dakota. I don't know. Who the hell knows? I mean, my grounds and Jim Rish aren't exactly like in the world on fire up there. You know, did you even know? No, but you're getting at the top. Do you even know that they're in the Senate? I barely know those names. Yes, I do know who's the other. Who are the other Idaho and South Dakota senators? Is it still Crepo? It is still Crepo. Good job. Jim Gump and Idaho. Who's the other center of South Dakota? Larry Craig. Yeah, Larry Craig. Who's the Idaho? Larry Craig was Idaho. I'm going to blow past your trivia because I don't think I know. Is it not Heinrich Wilson? The Senate majority leaders from South Dakota, which is the funniest punchline of the judge.

53:25Who is that? The David Dashel. Jesus, I know his name. Fuck, it's just blanking on it. The good-looking one. The talk guy. The tan. The tan to me. Just get whatever. My brain's on my mind. I'm going to let you. I think it's funnier to not know. I think it's funnier to. Here is, it's just a brain fart. Here is what I want to get at, though. What do you talk to people who are like in the kind of consulting DC world? And they get at this resource allocation question. The challenge that they're having is that a lot of the Democratic Party's traditional really big donors are not giving as much this time because they're furious about 2024 and feeling like money was wasted and because they're worried that Trump will come after them. And so that's where this resource allocation scarcity question becomes a thing. Don't be scared of people. Final topic speaking of money. Our guys over at the All In podcast. David Ballsaxx is the AI's R. That's for the white house.

54:25Johnson's Jesus Christ. It took me like 10 minutes to get it. And also on the floor of like dozens of AI companies while being the AI's R. Friend of the show Jason Calcanis, Chimath, Paul Apatia. They were upset with your old boss, Barack Obama because he's become a little safety pilt on AI and was just discussing in a very Obama way about how we need to find balance and make sure that we're getting the benefits from this technology while also considering the risks. It was not a fire branch type remarks, but he was just kind of... Wasn't Bernie. No, he was just raising concerns. The guys at the All In pod did not like that very much. Let's listen to Chimath. We as in the world are about to endow three, four, five, six companies with about $10 trillion of wealth. And what Obama knows very well is that most of those companies

55:28are overwhelmingly left leaning. And what he also knows is that there is a huge portion of that money that will then get put into philanthropic and charitable causes that then he will and the people around him will be beneficiaries of. Remember what Chimath tweeted the exact length of his dick down to the quarter inch? Like, I'll never forget that. I did not know that. I did not know that. Oh, you did not? No, I did not remember that. I remember seeing this chicken legs once in a picture and people asking if why he keeps skipping leg day. I'm confused by the theory that he's putting forth there. So Obama wants us to slow down on AI because if we slow down on AI, then the companies that are going to profit the most are the existing companies that are liberal, not Elon, not Altman, not Zuckerberg. I don't know which companies he's talking about, but like the liberal companies will benefit from the slowdown and they will give money to nonprofits

56:30and the nonprofits will give money to Obama. And that is his financial interests in this. That's the case that he's making. That is the case. And I want you guys to know that, Tim thought that these comments weren't dunkable enough and I promised him that they are. You got to write. The master plan, you call for basic safety regulations. You freeze the market where it is, three to six companies that are kind of winning and the others are the kind of can't get in. Step two, companies like the other. We might not actually be the case, by the way, but like even taking that at phase value. Who knows? Step three, after post IPO, all those staffers set up donor advisor funds and give to charities or give to packs. Step four, Obama rakes in that cash. He thinks that is the real AI conspiracy. That's the plan. It is not the cabal of guys at the Olin podcast who bought themselves access to the Trump administration by throwing fundraisers to the point where David Sachs became the AI czar. And now the VC class, they're very mad because they can't get,

57:31they can't make money off of open AI or anthropic anymore because those companies are too frothy. The valuations are too high. There's just like no way to get in and make money now. So what they're doing, what the Olin guys are doing is they're sprinkling bets on all these open source model companies or like software or applications that are associated or getting built around it. And they want to ensure that those bets pay out. So they are literally lobbying the president of the United States, having him call into their Olin pod events and pushing for these like total acceleration as policies. They're promoting Trump on their shows, they're promoting these ideas on their shows and having over vested financial interest in that policy. That is not the conspiracy. It's the thing with the charities over here. Like that's a paranoid there. The charities might be the conspiracy. I like these guys are making ungodly amounts of money and are just like, let's just press the gas, all gas, no breaks. And maybe who knows? Who knows? Maybe AI could lead us to a great prosperous future

58:33and David Ballsack sends up being right. I will say if you look at their record, I'd Chimoff was like during COVID. When I first got exposed to Chimoff, I was during COVID because he was pushing these SPACs. Yep. And that's why they're calling him scam off. Yep. And they're like these meme stocks like clove. I remember buddy being like, gotta get it on clove because Chimoff is pushing that. And that's not going, and it's just like, these guys don't actually know anything. They're just chart go up investors that want to see as much money as possible. They're happy that they have their little Mary in that in the White House so that they have their own podcast co-host as his top advisor. They're going to get a lot of getting's good. And so why would we take our pedal off the gas now? Because who knows? It's crazy. And they're so unbelievably kind of sending and they like kind of scoff at anyone who's calling for basic safety. But the reality is, it's what you said. Like these are investors and podcasters, but the people who actually understand the science behind artificial intelligence

59:35to the best of their own ability because no one really totally understands how it works are calling for basic like comments and safety measures. But like these guys just don't think they can sum it up. Tim, did you see that Trump did a 75 minute time magazine interview in it? He talked about being like a big grok user. Yeah, I did. We talked about that yesterday as how he thought grok was amazing because grok predicted correctly that the people of Venezuela would agree to him as a liberator. So grok's running our foreign policy. Maybe he could grok Eritrea. Yeah, get your answer. Swan was telling us that he also was really impressed with the meme-making potential. Like literally Greg Brockman and Altman. This is in regime change. So if I don't have this exact graph, people can check me a bit. But I believe it was both Brockman and Altman went to pitch Trump on Chatchee, B.T. and Vegas. And like he was really impressed because it was like show me a picture of Doug Burgham and his wife on a horse in North Dakota. And then I was like the picture went up.

1:00:36And he's like, it looks like Doug. That's amazing. Put Doug in a see through bikini. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, grok. Just. All right, Tommy, anything else you got for me? Now this is very fun. Thank you all for your insight, particularly in the horn of Africa. You've my love to your wife. Well, what a... Oh wait, I did have one more thing for you. Final topic. Love it. Said it's OK to call him the F-Slar now as long as you're for the Democrats. And so do you want to take an opportunity to do that right now or not? He was defending Mary Peltola and he said it's OK to call him the F-Slar as long as you're for the Democrats. And so this is your one free pass. I'm resisting making a joke about feeding your lizard. But no, I'm not telling the same pass on that one. Thank you, though. That's Tommy Vittor. We'll be back here on Monday for another edition of the podcast. We'll see y'all then. Peace. Have a good weekend.

1:01:56The end of the world. Done with this year, a mistrink will be Missing the songs for you. Too slow to hate. Summer came late. Fire's on the west side. I'm rolling the waves. Let's miss P.H. Catch it before it's almost gone. Try to pretend it's the end of the world. Some kiss me to death. There's nothing left to decide. Nothing to prove. And nothing to lose, only told. Don't tell me in name. Well, burn our mistakes and destroy. To the end of the world.

1:03:00The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco, and audio engineering in editing by Jason Brown.