2025.07.11: Let's Go Brandon

You and me, we're done professionals, okay?

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gun up!

Good!

Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

for July 11th, 2025, My Ainas,

Bernie Burns, sitting right over there, our old friend, Mr.

Brandon Farmahini.

Say hi to Brandon, everybody.

Hi, guys.

Brandon, how are you doing?

You could be like an FM DJ, morning DJ, with that switchboard.

It's addictive.

I got it.

I look at my soundboard.

I actually try to use it less because sometimes I get out of control.

I know.

It's one of those things that's like only funny for you.

Like I would do it all the time.

When we had a 90-day fiancé podcast, I would just take excerpts of people screaming.

And it's like, you could, you'd never get tired.

You could do it a million times and you could tell everyone listening is like, please stop.

But to catch people up, those of you who wouldn't be be familiar, who are hearing you maybe for the first time on this podcast, Brandon was one of the first ever hires.

You were like employee number six, seven.

Seven.

Yeah, I was basically the one after Nathan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then, you know, when I came in, Jack came in soon after.

Monty came in not long after that.

And then, you know, Chris

Carrie, and then things kind of like exploded from there.

But you were also like, interesting for you, you're very unique in the history of Roosheath because you were a gateway to like a whole other generation of employees because you were the person who reached out.

You were station manager for Texas State Television.

And there was a big gap between when Matt and Joel and I were there and you were there, but you were the one who has reached out and made contact with us.

Yeah.

And I, so I was like, I guess indirectly able to bring in people like Miles, Lindsay.

Marshall Chris.

Marshall Chris, yeah.

You know, and a huge,

you know, a bunch of other people.

I can't remember.

Basically, like a whole generation.

Yeah.

It was like, you were the gateway for that.

Yeah, that made it great because, I mean, we all just wanted to make things that we ourselves liked.

And that is a really good atmosphere in a lot of ways.

It also is a struggle because everyone is emotionally invested in their vision, which will conflict with other people.

Like,

I do, I've edited some corporate stuff this year and like I'll get a note I don't really like and I'm like, well, I don't give a shit.

Like, I don't fucking care.

Fine.

Let's make the video worse.

Like, it makes no difference.

That's what the client wants.

Yeah, this is soulless.

Like, I don't fucking care.

But, you know, if it is something that you do care and you've put a little bit of yourself into, then you have a lot of like conflicting personalities.

And that makes the work in some ways like more difficult from like a in the short term.

In the short term.

Longer term, better prod.

I'm already sensing a theme for us is short term versus long-term stuff.

Yeah, you have to be willing to put up with the bad short term.

And if you can, it'll pay off in the long run.

And I think it did.

Like, I think like a lot of the stuff for us that was the hardest and like maybe the most conflicted, like came up with the best product.

And I also want to say something.

I really appreciate you.

You're the person I see on social media who is.

boots on the ground at protests and things like that.

And it's a very easy thing for me to say because I'm all the way across an ocean in Scotland.

But I love that someone I know is there.

Like there was a whole video of you washing tear gas out of your eyes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I shot that whole protest and it was like relatively like tame and mundane until it wasn't.

Right.

The state, the state troopers were like, all right, we're tired of this.

So

I had stopped recording because I was like, I've been shooting like seven minutes.

It's too much footage.

It's all repetitive.

And then all of a sudden, shit started breaking out.

So I had to like very desperate or like very quickly start recording again.

And there was just tear gas everywhere because like, you know, these are not expert crowd controlling people.

They're just people who are a little scared.

Like, so I tell people at a protest, don't run towards a cop.

It's like a, an, like a, a scared animal.

They're going to overreact.

And that's what happened.

It's a very common thing said in like whenever a cop has to testify because of a shooting or violence is they use the word scared a lot.

And it's not, it's not a word that you normally associate with someone in full ride gear.

But yeah, they're scared.

That's why I'm like, replace the cops and the politicians with robots and AI.

Get the fuck out of here.

What's wrong with you?

Yes.

When you see this, like, when you see articles about Russia and their new AI-driven drone, that doesn't scare the shit out of you.

Yeah, we need a better AI to fight it.

Jesus.

You must be invested in NVIDIA or something.

I wish.

Oh, my God.

Could you imagine?

I wish.

I got to ask people this now.

Have you seen a bipedal robot in person

like on the street?

No, I'm trying.

There's one running around Austin.

I'm trying to find him.

It's coming.

That day is coming for you when you're going to see it.

I'm excited.

I'm going to be like, that's my first robot that I've ever seen.

And it's one of those things you can easily take for granted.

But my whole life, I've thought in the future, we're going to have robots walking.

Yeah.

And here we go.

It's almost about to come.

Yeah.

Like, and I, I, so I think the conversation we're, we're not all having is what do we do in a post-economy?

Because

pretty soon, relatively soon, AI is going to replace almost every job.

Almost every job.

Every thinking job, basically.

Well, and with robotics.

Yes.

Every physical job.

I mean, our roads are going to get built, you know, 24 hours a day with robots that are working like data speed, like physically fast.

And it's going to be great.

But then no one is going to make money.

No one is going to have money to spend.

How do you charge for services?

It's not an issue of universal basic income because there's no one creating anything.

and there's no way to charge.

There's no way to like say this should cost us.

Like we have to figure out what we do when there is no more need for an economy at all.

And no one knows the answer to that.

No one.

Is it what we're talking about?

Short term, long-term again?

Yeah.

Short-term is every individual job.

Oh, you're talking about robots resurfacing the road?

That sounds fantastic.

But then you apply that to every single job of existence.

And then what do you do about it?

Yeah.

I think you're right.

I think UBI is, it's a conversation you start to have

for the situation we have now applied to the future, but then it's going to so rapidly evolve.

Yeah.

What does it mean?

What do you mean income?

Like, what if you just take the I out of that?

If you don't need income,

then

what do you do to replace it?

And it's one of those things.

It can be such a huge change.

We just don't have the capability or the language to even challenge it.

No, how do you buy a house?

How do you decide who gets to buy what house?

And how big of a house and what location, you know, and those kinds of things.

Yeah.

There's no easy answer.

And we're not even working on the question because we're worried about 10,000 more ICE agents running through every major city.

I should point out to you, the protest that you went to was not the No Kings protest.

It was prior to that.

It was prior.

Two weeks.

It was the ICE protests in Austin about two weeks prior to No Kings.

Yeah, I was out of the country visiting my son, my new little son.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

I love all that's the other photos.

I don't want to say it because I know if you want to talk about it, but yeah, baby boy, just i warms my heart to see you yeah it's crazy how much cuter he is than all other babies

isn't that funny isn't that funny yes your child is definitely cuter than every other baby on the planet and smarter and just more endearing and he's a genius yeah right um i love it yeah yeah so it was a and so um there was a lot less attention and i think they just weren't prepared and like the the to their credit the austin police you know didn't use any tear gas the austin police already kind of learned a lot of lessons from 2020.

Well, they were in the process of paying for those lessons.

They're still, we're still paying for those lessons, yes.

I'm glad you said we, because I'm paying for those lessons as well.

Yes, it is.

Was it $25 million to the one kid that they hit with a rubber bullet or something like that?

Or was it

$25 million in the aggregate?

I think it might have been $25 million in the aggregate.

But like, yeah, there was that.

And that's the worst one.

The kid was just standing there and a cop, he just pulled up his shotgun and it's like, what are we doing?

I think I hit with a rubber bullet and had a TBI, I think, right?

Or he had long-term damage.

It was lodged into his forehead.

Wow.

You know, it was crazy.

So they did learn.

But the issue is now you have this other agency, the DPS troops who had less experience and they're taking their marching orders from the governor of Texas, who's much more like Trump, like,

you know,

no chaos order.

And the thing that I want to point out is like, you know, what the protesters were doing was technically illegal.

They were blocking a public street.

So legally, sure.

Practically though, it was a Monday night on 8th Street, not a major corridor, when school is not in session in an area that has, that sees regular street closures.

Like 6th Street has been closed three days a week for 20 years.

So like practically speaking, there was no problem.

It was just an issue of the principle of the matter.

And I think what hopefully those DPS troops are thinking now is we should use our judgment.

Is this worth

deploying chemical weapons?

Right now.

What was it like, by the way, to get hit by that?

Because I don't think you, that's your first time, I assume.

It was my first time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

So I was, I didn't really register.

Like I knew gas was out there, but like you kind of relate, right?

Like you're trying to get the shot.

But then the gas kind of starts to overtake you and you start a few things happening.

One, you kind of go blind a little bit and your eyes start to burn.

And then it feels like you can't breathe, even though you are breathing, but you're not really breathing in.

It doesn't feel like you're breathing in oxygen.

You're breathing in gas.

So your lungs are also burning and lacking oxygen.

Yeah.

So you just want to get away.

And then luckily there was a photographer there who gave me some water.

Because I had sparkling water and I was like, I don't know if I should put this on my eyes.

So she gave me regular water and I was fine for after, you know, 30 minutes.

And then it took me a while to get to sleep that night.

But, you know, it was, it was fine.

Now I own a gas mask and I, you know, get it.

Get yourself too, like, one of those little eyewash cups.

I was talking about this recently.

You always see people out there with the bottle of water like they're a raccoon in a wildfire somewhere.

And then somebody's pouring water on their eyes.

It's like, you know, this is going to happen.

Just get out, go on Amazon, get an eye wash.

Just pour a mask like you're doing.

But I had buddies back in college, very different time.

They got in an argument in Taco Cabana right by campus and they decided to bring it out to the parking lot.

They're fighting.

They bust out of the Taco Cabana fighting and fall into the parking lot.

They might have been drinking.

And the security guard ended up macing both of them.

Jesus.

So mace is probably definitely worse.

Oh, you think so?

I would assume so.

I was fine.

After, you know, 20 minutes, and it was painful, but like it nothing like how people react when they get maced.

And their thing was, too, was they recovered.

They were a little bit puffy in the face.

But what happened to them was they got in the shower the next morning, took a shower, and then it washed everything like off their skin and hair into their eyes again.

Like they had not gotten rid of all of it.

And it was like a second round of it when they weren't drunk.

And then they were screaming in the house.

Yeah, no, you got to get home and you got to shower immediately.

Like, and like I had to put my clothes out on the balcony so they, because you're not supposed to wash your clothes immediately because you're going to get like the residue in your washing machine.

So now, yeah, I had to learn.

And this is, these are the things that you learn when you live in a crumbling democracy.

I was going to say, we're talking so casually about chemical weapons being used by us, by the authorities.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is kind of cool because I love history and I've always been interested in what it was like in the Weimar Republic as they backpedaled towards autocracy.

And now I get to live it.

You know, it's great.

And that's why I like being online and saying the things that are happening in front of our faces because I feel like it's very easy for people to just be like, ah, it's probably fine.

And so be like, reminding them, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're right.

This is not fine.

I also want to say something too, because you said that the protests were doing something illegal.

It always ruffles feathers when I say this, but protests should be wildly inconvenient for everyone else.

I don't like this idea.

Whenever you see something like the just stop oil people, and they're like, I lose all, they say the same thing.

I lose all sympathy for their cause when they block the road.

It's like, what do you think a protest is?

Do you think they should be in the corner going, hey, this thing you're doing that is destroying the world,

can you cut it out, please?

Like, that's not what a protest is.

It should be disruptive.

It should be civilly disobedient.

That's what a protest is.

The other ones you don't know about because it didn't affect anybody.

Yeah.

And I love the don't

was it don't stop oil or don't stop oil.

Yeah.

Not don't stop oil.

Um, because like their message is like, look,

you need to stop the habit of your life because this is not normal.

This is going to, we are trending towards a real problem.

And it's like trying to remind people, like, it's, it's insane that you're getting up every day, going to your job and treating things like, like, this is, this is normal because it's very much not.

And even like when they, they threw soup at the Van Gogh painting, like, and I love, I love that artist so much, but I think.

The painting's fine, by the way.

It's protected.

It's protected, yeah.

But like, their point is, is it makes a lot of sense because like, what is the beauty of that painting if there's nobody with intelligence left to be able to appreciate it?

Right.

I think the best message is to tell people that we've lost and it's over, then they'll start taking it serious and then they'll be like, Okay, let's start doing something.

Because as long as you say we still have time to like make things right, like there's five years left, yeah, you can't give people five years.

No, you got to tell them it's already too late, and they'll be like, Oh, well, we'll see.

We'll see about that.

Yeah, well, you grew up as a millennial, yeah.

So, climate change, ours was nuclear war, the Gen X guys.

Like it was like any moment, someone's going to push a button, you're all going to die in 15 minutes.

And then yours, it's like your whole life, climate change has been around, right?

It has.

But I guess for me, 9-11 was really the

really

thing that shaped like my experience in this country.

And I mean, I guess I was relatively old.

I was 15 or so, a sophomore in high school, but still, it was very transformative culturally.

And it's really funny because when I talk to like young Gen Zers,

like we were talking about the war in Iran and whatnot, and you know, how the U.S.

gets involved, they're like, well, no one could do anything here.

And I was like, well, let me tell you this story about 9-11 and these, these, these pilots.

And they were like, oh, well, that's not a state actor.

And it's like, who fucking cares if it's not a state?

Well, as an Iranian American, too, did it affect you?

You're 15 when this happened.

That must have been tough on a different level as well.

Yeah, I was like, you know, I was like, hey, you know, I talked to my class.

I was like, hey, everybody, as an Italian, I'm really concerned about these Iranians because I had to be in English class where my like very conservative Texas Katie

ISD teacher was like talking about how great this Bush speech was when he was talking about Iran as the axis of evil.

And evil is a really, evil's a very powerful world.

You just don't throw the word evil around.

No, yep.

You know,

so yeah, that to me, at least in when I grew up, that was my transformative thing.

Less so climate change.

I think people global warming, I guess, what it's called then.

Younger people can relate because of experience and just the proximity and time to us.

COVID was a crazy time.

It's like, it's crazy how fast we changed and then how quickly we just moved away from it as well.

And we just blocked, like, people don't talk about COVID.

It was such a huge thing.

And we just, it's like PTSD.

It's like, yeah, it's almost like it didn't happen.

And quickly, I thought, well, the world has changed forever.

And no, not at all.

We just went right back to the way we were before.

Like, I was on a tram in an airport just recently, packed shoulder to shoulder with people, and somebody started hacking.

And I thought, man, four years ago, everyone would have like gotten the fuck off this tram, right?

I think the closest thing to that, though, in my memory is people don't realize how weird stuff was.

Maybe weird's not the right word, how distinctly unique the period right after 9-11 was.

Like a lot of things that we associate with normal American civility were just out the window for about nine or 12 months.

Yeah, go listen to the Howard Stern show on 9-11 or 9-12.

And that is very rep, it's a good representation of how everybody was like, we got to kill these fuckers.

And it's, and the president was really kind of fanning that.

There's actually a really great documentary that came out on Netflix.

It's called like The Hunt for Bin Laden.

And it's from the CIA's perspective of 9-11 and the post-9-11 search for bin Laden.

And then you get a really good insight to how the administration was handling it.

And it wasn't a learning opportunity.

It wasn't figuring out what did we do to get ourselves here.

It was, we got to find these and we got to kill their.

And like, the CIA is bragging about like making a deal to like negotiate and then kidnapping the people that they were meeting with.

And you're like, guys, this is also like their cells and they're in your neighborhood and they could be activated at any point in time.

It was what I always associated when people talked about like the red scare back before my time, you know, but it was like, it was real and everybody was.

And I would love to say that I wasn't falling into some of those pits myself, but it was like, it was a very weird looking back.

It's, I'd say, on the level of about COVID, of like, but just for America, how weird it was.

And everything was about 9-11.

Yeah.

And it was scary, you know, to be to, even I'm only half brown, you know, there were definitely people who are browner.

Um, because like, I imagine there's a lot of people who can kind of relate to when you hear the news of a mass shooting or any kind of mass casualty event, your first thought is like, please don't be brown.

Please don't be brown.

You're starting to see that politically too.

Like anytime there's something like that, now it's like, please don't be one of our guys.

Yeah.

It's that, that, I hope they're not on my team.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the things I also really appreciated about you is the fact that you are heavily involved with local politics.

And we were talking about like, we're saying short-term, long-term, but it really is like small scale, large scale.

Right.

And that's the thing.

So many people are just.

completely uninterested in local politics, but it's so much more effective.

And it's, it seems to affect you every single day.

Like what's the turnout for a midterm local election?

Well, what we've done at least in Austin is these elections used to take place in May and fucking no one votes in May.

I think like 2%, right?

Yeah.

Of eligible voters.

Really low.

So like we've shifted them to

November.

And then this last time is the first time that the citywide mayor is actually in a presidential year where turnout is going to be higher.

So there's a lot of like, and those reforms aren't hard to do.

You just have to have enough people people that care.

And if anybody is like, how do I get involved to make my like help with mass transit or urban planning in my community, find like the urbanist group in your city?

Find the Discord.

Your subreddit is a good, nice starting place, but the information in your subreddits are very, it's hit or miss.

But it has so much more impact on your day-to-day life than anything Congress does.

And you can also feel like you're being effective.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, you do feel like the drop in the ocean when you're trying to do anything like vote on a federal level, but it's the only thing that people really pay attention to, I feel like.

Yeah.

And it's a shame because there's so many important things that really shape everything that you do.

And

not just on the city level, but on the county level.

And then to a little, a similar extent on the state level, but that is a lot harder to influence.

But I mean, you can have so much more power to shape your surroundings if you just learn how these systems work because they are relatively complex.

It's not an issue of incompetence or

like scandals or people stealing.

The problem

in America, especially with infrastructure, is overlapping jurisdictions.

Like right now, we're in the city of Austin.

We're also in the Austin Independent School District.

We're also in Travis County.

We're also in the state of Texas.

We're also in the Campo metropolitan area.

We're also in the Cap Metro, whatever area.

All of these are independent.

And if you have an HOA, that's also a government.

It taxes, it has representation, right?

And you might have to work with them to get stuff done.

So like all of these are different agencies that all have to navigate and work together.

And they're not all on the same Slack workspace.

You don't.

It's an issue of like the practical

difficulties in making all of these like coordinations because like Austin doesn't control all the roads here.

Like South Lamar, that's a state highway.

North Lamar and South Congress on significant sections, also state highways.

So you have to learn all of the rules to the game.

And it's annoying, but once you do that, you really can have a pretty profound influence on

those dynamics.

And you can help educate other people.

And that's really the ultimate power is the more people that understand how things work, the easier it is to get people in office who also understand how things work and to get stuff done.

Can I make a request, though?

Sure.

As someone who follows you closely on social media, I do appreciate all that.

Can you please stop posting about plans for Austin airport construction and the master plan?

I get PTSD.

You get triggered stuff.

Oh my God.

It was like, I was just, I landed into that airport and I came through two other airports to get there.

No construction anywhere.

I didn't see it.

And I landed there and it's just like, boom, it's everywhere.

I almost got hit by a wrench.

A guy dropped a wrench from a scissor lift And I almost like people scattered.

And it was just like, oh my God, always.

And they got plans for further expansion.

And it's, I got to point this out.

That is now 40 gates, 38 gates or something in the airport.

It is the biggest airport I've ever seen where there was no transportation of any kind internally.

No trams, no like moving sidewalks even.

No carts.

Like, excuse the cart.

But the person can take it.

There's none of that stuff either.

It's just insane to me.

And they're going to make it bigger.

They're going to make it bigger.

And they're not going to put, they're going to put a moving sidewalk in the tunnel connecting the the new concourse and the main terminal so at least there's that well look at that look at us look at look at the progress future did you hear about the guy that died at the austin airport because he fell in the um like the boiling hot fry batter what there's apparently like a cage underground that collects all of the fry batter from the restaurants in the airport and he fell inside of it and either burned alive or drowned oh my god yeah fucking crazy right that we have built we have that like a central location to collect fry batter.

Yeah.

But I can't catch a tram across.

And nothing guy died because of it.

Oh, that's ridiculous.

Yeah.

And then like we might not be able to connect the train to the airport for a few years.

That's a bummer, dude.

You mean our light rail?

Yeah.

Light rail is the ongoing albatross of local politics in central Texas.

Yeah.

It's, we got like one line put in 15 years ago.

A freight rail line, yeah.

A commuter train on a freight rail line.

That's how I get to work, actually.

Is it really?

Yeah, yeah.

I don't, I don't drive.

I haven't, this is the first time driving to your house I've driven my car in a month.

There's no shit.

I use my e-bike and I use the train.

So did you like though structure where you live based on that?

Yeah, I live next to downtown.

I don't know if you ever go to that like free health clinic when you were in college.

Which one?

No.

Right next to downtown, next to that old folks high-rise.

Oh, okay.

Next to Town Lake, where the serial killer hunts.

Well, that's about.

We should talk about that at some point.

All the dead bodies that keep showing up in Town Lake.

I used to be scared that I would be murdered.

Now I'm scared that the people in my apartment are going to think I'm the murderer.

So I actively try to be non-murderer-y.

So

you're saying you live your whole life like when you walk into a convenience store, but don't buy anything and you have that, I'm walking out without, this is my, I didn't steal anything.

I have my hands up.

I am not the man you're looking for.

I don't think there's a serial killer, but maybe.

I don't know.

There's speculation that there's a serial killer in Austin because every time a body ends up in the lake, they have an explanation for why that is.

It's the same now just ran, oh, they were drunk and fell in the water.

It didn't happen.

There was a lot of drinking in Austin, and a lot of people who lived here, we didn't have this much corpses in the river.

Yeah, I guess, like, when I was Rainy Street didn't really come alive until like the last 15 years.

And Rainy Street is basically bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, water.

Right, it's true.

And there was no like barrier.

So I could see, and I've, I am someone who has peed a lot in downtown Austin

over my life.

You know, that can catch you a sex offender.

Come on.

I was talking about there was two, I won't name them by name, but two famous directors who got busted with public urination and they had to register as sex offenders on the registry because they exposed themselves in public.

I'd say that's a good thing.

That's fuck you.

That sucks.

Then put a public restroom somewhere.

Amen, brother.

You have those in Amsterdam.

They're like, they're weird, but I've got them.

Amsterdam has it figured out.

The dutch they have got it i asked i was like the dutch i'm like aren't y'all worried about climate change and the dutch guy was like uh no well we're dutch we'll figure it out i was like underwater we live i saw one place that was like something like uh 14 feet below sea level yeah and that's the lowest point in that region i thought holy cow think about what that takes yeah houston has been trying to build a dike next to galveston for like 15 years.

Is that right?

And like Amsterdam has like 10 of them.

Right.

Well, also, I should point out, so does New Orleans, right?

And that was a huge thing.

Do they?

I think they have the levees.

I don't know if they have.

I've never seen levee in a dike.

It's like this like they're like fake islands with like these movable bridges that close whenever the water starts to rise.

They're really cool, but they're really.

It's like there's water here and they want to keep the water from where the people are living their daily lives.

Yeah, but like the levees are like a really cheap, shitty version.

Okay.

The dikes are like, I mean, the one to build on in Galveston would be like 15 billion or 20 billion.

That's like the Lefufu version of it.

Yeah, boo-boo.

Right.

Okay, I gotcha.

I gotcha.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Brandon, man, it's so great to catch up with you.

We'll have to have you on.

Hopefully, you'll be up for it.

Yeah.

All right, Brandon, thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much.

That does it for us this week, ending July 11th, 2025.

I'll be back to talk to you on Monday.

Hope you all will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.