The Most Popular (and Insane) Third Party in American History, with Jon Bois

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

The dollar's gone through the floor.

Now, whose fault is that?

Not the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Somewhere out there, there's an extraterrestrial that's doing this to us, I guess.

Right after this ad.

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We have a surprise for you, John.

What's that?

So I should say that John Boys is a guest I wanted to have on for a long time because I'm a fan of your work, super fan of your work, actually.

But I also brought you in here because we started getting voicemails from this guy.

Hey, Pablo, this is Peter.

One thing that I've been really fascinated with recently in the sports landscape is

really it's a lot of what you are doing on the show, right, and exploring the narrative of sports in a different way.

And I feel like one of the pioneers, at least in this YouTube age, that has been

you know, telling sports stories differently

over these last couple years is John Boy, you know, introducing the idea of visual storytelling.

So, if you ever want to do one on John Boyce, maybe have the dude on.

I'd love to see it.

Did you get the right John Boyce?

Yeah.

So, his cadence was really interesting because he said John Boyce, but he said it like John Boyce.

Yeah, like almost he was referring to a John Boy.

Exactly.

Who's a different sports YouTuber?

But who sounds exactly the same?

And it's like, it's very hard to differentiate the two.

Like, oh, we both have pretty good followings.

That's both of us.

We're both white guys with beards.

It's both of us.

We're both on YouTube.

That's both of us.

Here's the thing: the clarity set in because our guy, Peter, this caller who called into 51385 Pablo, our voicemail line, didn't stop calling.

Pablo, it's Peter again.

I will not watch another episode or listen to another podcast until I find out why John Boyce uses Kube Alert and how he figured figured out how to use that for his dish balls.

The threat was a little fed up.

It was.

I mean, his demands have been met.

If only he knew that he didn't need to keep calling and keep escalating this.

It's your boy Weekly Pete.

You know what I'm gonna say?

Pablo Torre,

John Boys,

collision course.

Make it happen.

Why does he use Google Maps to create stunning

visual stories about sports and humanity?

This age of video essays and data visualization.

He somehow makes the mundane significant and the seemingly significant mundane.

I don't know how he does it.

Find out how he does it.

I'm going to call every week until John Boys gets on.

Please, for the love of God,

not too proud to beg.

Please get John Boys on.

Sean Bois.

Till next week.

Goodbye.

So you know who he reminds me of?

Did you ever play SimCity 2000?

Absolutely.

So you know the guy who, if you raise taxes too high or plummet them too low, he's like, you cannot eliminate funding.

You will regret this.

He's that guy.

So John, thank you for being here, I guess.

I clearly have to be.

So yeah, I mean, I'll accept the thanks regardless.

But yeah, this was my destiny.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Feen Champain, afforded to alcohol by volume reported by Remy Control, USA Incorporated in Europe, New York, 1738.

Centaur design.

Please drink responsibly.

Okay, so the reason, the real reason I brought John Boyd into the studio today, onto the show, finally, is because I wanted to discuss his excellent new documentary series about the most successful third party in American political history.

I learned a lot, and it seems relevant at the moment.

I want to get to that in a bit.

But you should also know that Weekly Pete kind of had a point.

Because John and I, as evidenced by the project he just released, we really do consider each other kind of spiritual cousins inside this largely homogeneous sports media ecosystem.

John, however, is the sort of cousin at this point that you only see like once a year when he drops, for instance, a seven-part, nine-hour documentary about the history of the Minnesota Vikings.

Well, what do you say?

I think it's about time for another football Viking Norse Viking analogy.

Bud Grant's Minnesota Vikings, the teams of the 60s and 70s, used the sail.

There were two ways to make an old Viking longship actually go somewhere, the or and the sail.

The sailors.

Or a two-parter about why there are fewer and fewer athletes named Bob.

After scouring dozens of databases, I was able to find 11,612 athletes who went primarily by the name Bob.

And when you combine this sort of intensively manic research with John's 3D charts, these polygons tumbling across the topography of what does feel like Google Earth, what he makes for Secret Base, the product that he publishes over at Espination, it feels like what I would call this nostalgic, almost analog kind of futurism.

Whether the subject happens to be Ross Perot or Barry Bonds, it's this overall aesthetic, which directly connects to something that John's executive producer, Will Bukima, recently told me, which is that, yeah, John Boyce is technically from Kentucky, but his career, his technological arc, begins even more specifically at Radio Shack.

Oh man, I remember using the

registers that had like those IBM App Tiva PCs and stuff.

And I used to write my first internet posts on those cash registers back in like 2000.

Is it blogging on a cash register?

Yeah, before anyone said the word blogging, this would have been like 2002.

It really felt like manning like an Alaskan outpost because even then, like Radio Shack stores were more often than not completely underperforming.

I was one time briefly a manager of a store that they intended on closing.

And I was there for like a solid month before they closed.

And like an entire day would go by and I, not a single person would come in.

And so, I just like pulled up a chair, sat it in the front, turned on a MacGyver marathon on all the TVs, and just sat there and watched MacGyver.

And that was like my job.

It ruled.

This does feel like the origin story.

Yeah, it really does.

It's just like, what do I do?

Man, I'm sitting here, standing here in front of a computer.

Is there anything else I can do?

And because I wanted to, you know, I'd long been interested in like actually writing slash doing something on the internet.

but um

i am very short on like takes like if i have a strong opinion i am going to guard that with my life because i only come up with like four per year like everything else is like waffling opinion that like could be blown over with a stiff breeze but like every few months i'm like oh i believe this strongly oh i got to do some of this If you were to watch one of your videos for the first time, you're seeing what exactly?

How do you describe, how do you characterize it?

I think hopefully the end result, the experience from the viewer's perspective is like a video game that you're not allowed to play, a video game you're watching somebody else play.

I'm kind of the one playing it.

I'm also the one building it.

And I found it to be a really, really good vehicle for telling stories and also just being a visual hook.

Like people are not used to seeing animations that look like that.

It's been like the perfect storm.

I kind of stumbled upon how to do it about 10 years ago and I kind of kept pushing the envelope.

Like, what will Google, Google Earth let me do?

Man, another thing is that

the end product you see, like the Google Earth sort of tapestry and timeline and stuff that we make, it serves as our outline.

Like, there will be times where I'm like, wait a second, like, didn't this happen before?

What's the quickest way to look this up?

Oh, wait, no, the quickest way to look this up is to pull up Google Earth and see what I did a month ago and like actually literally zoom back to that

rather than going back to my notes.

So

what you're seeing is basically like my big sort of gaming table.

How you make it.

Okay, I've used Google Earth before.

I've used the application.

I don't know if people have out there listening, but yes,

you got a three-dimensional version of the world that you can fly around in.

So I think it was back in like 2013 or something like that.

I was planning on just making a simple GIF of like something in Google Earth, like a map of a city or something like that.

And I was kind of pecking around in the menus.

And it lets you do all kinds of things.

It lets you draw polygons.

It lets you help like shape those polygons, the color, the outline, how tall they are.

I didn't even know this part.

I also pecked around a little bit more and I was like, oh, whoa, it lets you like actually embed image files in Google Earth.

So that could be like any image file.

It could be a newspaper clipping, photo, chart, whatever.

So I basically can turn off terrain, turn off 3D buildings, and it becomes the Earth becomes this totally round billiard ball.

So then I get this like JPEG file that's 100 pixels by 100 pixels, like pure black.

And then I stretch it over the entire planet.

So it's not the Earth anymore.

It's my world.

And I'm going to do whatever the hell I want on it.

Have you ever heard from the people at Google Earth who are like,

oh, you're using this for this?

Are they even aware of the fact that you're using their software like this?

There have been a couple of people at Google who have like tweeted at me and be like, oh, whoa, that's crazy.

All right, well, have fun.

It is kind of like walking into an abandoned radio shack only to find someone who has built something beautiful.

A cathedral.

You're making donuts in here?

What the f?

I want to get to what you've been making most recently

because the Reform Party project, which I got to get a sneak preview of, and I, as I told you as soon as you walked in, I inhaled

with an enthusiasm that I didn't even know I had for Ross Perot.

This is not a sports story.

There are sports characters that you may recall in here, but by and large, this is very much about

what?

It is about the

last third-party movement in American history that was by any means anywhere close to successful.

Do you want a government that comes at you from Washington or do you want a government that comes from you?

Okay.

Who do the people in Washington work for?

It was founded by Ross Perot in 1995 following his independent run for president in 1992, in which he accrued 18.9% of the popular vote against Clinton and H.W.

Bush, despite, among many other things, just like up and quitting halfway through the race because like it wasn't that fun anymore.

And then decided to come back and throughout, like before, during, after the race, he was saying like, I don't really want to be president.

And yet 19% of Americans still voted for him.

Right.

So I want to stick with 92 for a second here because i remember ross perot from my childhood but i only remembered him before watching your work as basically the closest thing to a mad magazine caricature that existed in real life i remembered him as dana carvey playing him I got funny ears.

Fine.

Okay, so let's have a debate on my ears.

Okay, is that what you want?

Okay, here's the deal on my ears.

Large, oversized lobes filled with wax and covered with thousands of spiky hairs.

Why were you you specifically interested in Ross Perot?

What did you want to convey to people that maybe didn't remember anything beyond just those basic facts?

So it's so funny.

People who are like barely younger than me, maybe like five years younger than me, are just like, oh, Ross Perot, oh, he's the all-that guy.

You remember Nickelodeon's all-that?

Yeah, of course.

I think Amanda Bynes, like Ross Perot.

I got four billion dollars.

I can do that my own.

They don't remember as the guy who was like running money for Oliver North.

They don't remember him as the guy who was like inciting riots in Iran or running and damn near like toppling Bill Clinton and H.W.

Bush.

They think of him as like the funny all that guy.

Right.

And what, again, the basic thing that I was like, oh, right.

I should have remembered this is

he was a billionaire who

loved

being on television.

Yes.

So he was the third richest person in America for at least a time, totally self-made and everything.

And yeah, he just, he could have just been that guy.

He, I mean, because like Larry King loved him back in the day.

He could have gone on Larry King anytime he wanted to.

Is there any scenario in which you would run for president?

Can you give me a scenario in which you'd say, okay, I'm in?

Number one, I don't want Taylor.

I know, but

which is kind of why I think his interest in being the president kind of wavered, because it turns out there are a lot of things about just like campaigning for president, let alone being it, that are decidedly like unfun.

Not as fun as you know, him walking into a debate without much prep, it seemed like, and just dominating.

Was legendary.

Good evening, and welcome to the second of three presidential debates between the major candidates for president of the United States.

The candidates are the Republican nominee, President George Bush, the Independent, Ross Perot,

and Governor Bill Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

Bill Clinton and H.W.

Bush both had all kinds of support personnel around them, going through debate prep, doing rehearsals.

I think mock debates.

Yeah, mock debates.

And actually, it was either Clinton or Bush who actually hired a sitting senator to play the role of the opponent.

And doing all this stuff, fretting over everything, Perot just going to wing it.

And what's happened in the meantime?

The dollar's gone through the floor.

Now, whose fault is that?

Not the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Somewhere out there, there's an extraterrestrial that's doing this to us, I guess.

And everybody says they take responsibility.

Somebody somewhere has to take responsibility for this.

After the debate, everyone is like, Ross Perot destroyed those people.

Like, he destroyed Bush and Clinton.

They don't have any juice at all.

They're not entertaining.

Meanwhile, Perot is not only making some good

points, he's getting laughs.

Now, just for record,

I don't have any spend doctors.

I don't have any speech writers.

Publish shows.

I make those charts you see on television even.

That's true.

Now, but you don't have to wonder if it's me talking.

See, what you see is what you get.

If you don't like it, you've got two other choices, right?

Wait a minute.

Oh, he's charming.

You know, usually if somebody gets laughs, it's like a Mike Gravelle kind of dude at the, and he's just like, I don't know why I'm here, whatever.

And like, everybody's like, oh, let's laugh at that guy.

But Perot was getting the crowd to laugh at Bush and Clinton, which I've never seen anything like that in modern times.

You have a moment that you spotlighted with archival video in which Ross Perot, and I've never seen this.

Ross Perot stops for an applause break.

Yeah.

To get a sense of how much he was killing it.

We've got to collect the taxes to do it.

If there's a fair way, I'm all ears.

But he was on the heater.

Like he was, that was such an insane heat check that I couldn't help but respect it.

I mean, Ross Perot is somebody who, thank God, he wasn't president.

Yes, you should say that too.

He would have made a really bad president.

Not that any of them who have become president are necessarily good.

Also, he was, it would have been really bad.

But as a human being, I don't think he was a particularly like bad guy.

I think he was deeply flawed.

And I think he had some like really embarrassing and bad moments.

And he had a a lot of blind spots and failings.

Totally.

But like at the end of the day, I think he was like a really fascinating guy, not just from a storyteller's perspective, but just like as a as a fellow human being.

There's a lot to admire about him.

Well, one thing that felt like, oh, this is why, this is why John is doing this is when I remembered that he had bought a half hour block of television.

So the debate stage, he's there, he's dominating, but he's also doing something very funny, which is he's saying,

I can't possibly talk about all the things I want to talk about in this limited time span.

And so what he does is he buys a half-hour block of television in the middle of like the TGIF lineup.

Yep.

Like in the heart of our childhood.

Yeah.

And he does what specifically?

He just has a half-hour video where he just has charts that he makes himself.

He sits at his desk and he holds up these little cardboard charts that he made himself and he explains like, oh, these are the taxes I'm going to have to raise on you.

This is what the federal deficit looks like.

This is the gas tax.

Since we're dealing with voodoo economics, a great young lady from Louisiana sent me this voodoo stick and I will use it as my pointer tonight.

These guys want to make this kind of money.

They ought to be TV anchormen, basketball players,

or rock stars.

But running a company, look, these fellows.

There's no soundtrack.

There's no

interstitial segments.

There's no internet.

There's no Google EarthCam.

Not even that.

I remember as as a kid, I watched one of the debates.

And at the time, being 10 years old, I had no politics.

It just happened to be on.

My parents were watching it.

So I was like, I watched it.

I was like, oh, this guy's like hilarious.

I don't have any political opinions at all, but he's great.

Then I found out he had like the show and it was called the Ross Perot Show or something.

I was like, oh, I'll watch that.

And like five minutes into it, I was like, this sucks.

I'm done.

And then look at me

all these years later.

I've, I've become him.

I'm a guy.

I'm a dork who makes half hour charts that he, you know, videos about charts that he made himself.

Millions of people watched these charts.

Like, this was not a flop.

No.

It was some insane percentage of America that actually tuned in to this guy, talk about something that I think is genuinely, and irrespective of all the bad, crazy positions, which you also detail in the hours of this three-part series, beyond those specific positions,

there is this notion of the two-party system is not telling you things and we do need some other countervailing force that will.

It's kind of, I mean, the phrase that I think of is like from the mouths of babes, like wisdom, right?

Because you've got.

If you cede the territory of like very common sense territory of like, oh, it's bad to drop bombs on people.

It's bad to kill people, things like that.

If neither of the two major parties are willing to say that, or if they're too like scared to say it or if they're just they don't care enough to say it, then you have ceded that moral territory to whoever is off in the wildlands.

And that can be anywhere, anyone from like libertarian like, you know, shut-ins to super far left, like, you know, hippie-dippy folks to whoever.

Right.

And so there is this underpinning of like actual value and a sorely missed check on the two-party system that comes through all of the absurdity.

But I don't want to underweight the absurdity

because I did not remember truly how insane the coalition that the Reform Party became really was.

They had nothing in common.

Like by the end, you know, because through most of like the first few years of the Reform Party, they did have some commonalities.

By the time 2000 hits, I mean, you've got a Marxist black nationalist,

not not only in the same reform party as like a blood and soil dude like Pat Buchanan,

but they are like allied with each other.

They're like co-signing each other.

Yes.

One is chairing the other's campaign.

And we choose not to play our assigned walk-on role in their sham election.

And this is while one of them is saying like, I hate everything he stands for, but it's just important to basically build any kind of third-party movement, no matter what that means.

There just has to be one.

And that actually manifests, like in the most literal possible terms, in the late days of the Reform Party.

Like, stuff kept falling down at events.

Like, signs would come unglued from the wall, mics would fall over, mic stands would break.

Like, objects, like, inanimate objects of our world, were themselves

so unable to bear the absurdity of this party that they were just like, this, I'm out of here.

The trajectory that this party goes from, just to give a very quick overview, right?

So, 92, Ross Perot takes millions of, millions of millions of American votes.

No electoral votes, but the point being that, like, as America's sort of attention was concerned, he had it in a way that was stunning.

By 96, and correct me if I'm wrong here, he's basically reduced to the caricature that I remembered him as.

And then 98,

our old friend Jesse Ventura shows up.

New from the Reform Party, it's the new Jesse Ventura action figure.

You can make Jesse battle special interest groups.

I don't like your stupid money.

And party politics.

We politicians have powers the average man can't comprehend.

You can also make Jesse lower taxes, improve public education, and fight for the things Minnesotans really care about.

This bill waste taxpayer money.

Me, trip it.

Don't waste your vote on politics as usual.

Vote Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura for governor.

I should disclose that when I was co-hosting Dan Lebetard's radio show

years and years ago, I was wearing an orca suit because I had lost the grid of death punishment.

So I was wearing an orca suit.

We've all been there.

Whom's the Mong Us?

And Jesse Ventura was a call-in guest.

And so the first encounter I ever had with Jesse Ventura was interviewing him in scare quotes while dressed as an orca and him just feeding to ESPN radio 9-11 conspiracies.

You know, I got in all sorts of trouble when I questioned 9-11.

Well, I've been vindicated because in the chapter, the new chapter in the book,

the 9-11 report has 28 redacted pages that we're not allowed to see, that George Bush redacted them.

And so I was like, oh, that guy, that moment was born in this moment that you chronicled for me in ways that I had not realized.

Yeah, Jesse,

man, first of all, one of the things I like about him is like, every time he talks, he talks like he moves his entire body.

You know, a lot of these candidates tell you that your vote is wasted if you vote for Jesse Ventura.

That is pompous and arrogant.

It's your vote.

And I want you to remember that the only wasted vote is not voting your conscience or your heart.

He is somebody who

either I find his political stances and opinions completely bullseye, or he like turned around and threw the dart out the window.

It's either exactly right or like a new kind of wrong I haven't heard before.

But regardless, I do find him to be somebody who is far more honest than just about any other national American politician I could name.

Like, and by honest, I don't mean right.

I mean that like he is telling you what he really believes.

He believes it.

Yeah.

He actually believes it.

He is an idealist.

And like whether that is enough to be laudable, I honestly couldn't say.

I walked away like respecting the guy, which I kind of always did.

As much as I disagree with a lot of stuff he says, like I respect the guy.

And truly, like his platform, the through line.

And of course, he comes in in the state of Minnesota and he shockingly wins the gubernatorial race in 98.

Jesse Ventura sends his kids to public schools.

So Jesse Ventura believes in the public school system.

And also

succumbs in a way that Ross Pro also did, in ways that you chronicle, to having his brain eaten by conspiracies.

By the end of like where my story leaves him, he's just like a really lonely governor.

He is the sitting governor of Minnesota, but like he

can't make any friends at school.

You know, like nobody will ever work with him to do anything.

There are a lot of people who are like, yeah, I voted for him, but he completely screwed up the budget entirely.

And there are like things that, you know, he has even by his own admission, he's like, oh, yeah, there's like stuff my views evolved on certain things.

And like, I, I feel like I messed some things up and I had to change some positions I had or whatever.

But yeah, the parallels between Ventura and Perot just kept presenting themselves in

kind of a hilarious way.

Yeah.

And then by the time we get to like the metastasized version of the party led by Pat Buchanan, who is just like, and you do have some clarity on this.

Like you do sort of pop in on your soapbox about Pat Buchanan, which is, I think, a pretty,

a pretty natural take to have.

I think so.

It's not exactly a brave take on my part.

I'm not like, you know, creating any like new ground here.

Pat Buchanan's definitional quality, the one that sets him far apart from the rest of these remarkable people, is that he is a big bag of shit.

He is a man of comprehensively awful beliefs who has been one for a long, long time.

That's something that I've never said about like anyone in any video i've made but it was jarring for me to hear you say as much as it was also appropriate yeah i mean what do you say to a guy who sucks that comprehensively and actively and intentionally um you know i've in previous videos there have been you know figures that have stood in as kind of the villain or the bad guy but uh yeah uh buchanan was a first for me and that like i had no choice but to just call him a piece of i did run that by our our legal and you know our review team i'm like can i say that and they're like yeah go ahead.

So, all of which naturally brings us to, of course, the entrance of Donald Trump into the story.

Let's get into some things.

The Reform Party, by its name, means reform.

You will be leaving, if you run this, you believe in what, the Republican Party of the Republic?

I'm a registered Republican.

I'm a pretty conservative guy.

I'm somewhat liberal on social issues, especially health care, et cetera.

But I'd be leaving another party, and I've been close to that party.

You have a vice presidential candidate in mind?

Well, I really haven't gotten quite there yet.

Oprah, I love Oprah.

Oprah would always be my first choice.

Oprah.

Oprah, your competitor, right?

Oprah's competitor.

You know what?

I'll tell you, she's really a great woman, though.

She is a terrific woman.

She's somebody that's very special.

I have not even thought about it.

I guess we'll see.

We'll see.

Maybe that's part of the whole process.

Would she be someone?

I mean, and I want to make this clear.

Like, Trump is not really even

one of the main characters of this, but he does fit into it.

And it's telling that he fits into it because he also wants the f out of it.

If I remember right, it was like mid to late 99 when Jesse Ventura recruits Donald Trump to become an alternate candidate for president and present his nomination to kind of combat Buchanan's ascendancy.

And yeah, by the end of it, by the end of the six months, like the party just went so upside down that Donald Trump was like, you guys are too weird.

Like, you guys are too racist.

I can't do this.

In episode three, the third and final part of your series, you struggle to convey

the way that the political beliefs do not map onto a conventional matrix of opinion.

For all of the new characters in what you call the clown car of the Reform Party, you kind of build like in the sky above the Google Earth that you are manipulating, this other zone.

That's almost like a quantum zone of political opinion.

because what was hard to characterize here?

One of the first things I really looked up, I was like, okay, I'm doing a reform party story.

I've got to find the cranks.

I've got to find the quacks, the wingnuts.

Let me get to them first and work my way backwards.

So I found all of them.

And then I just thought about how funny it would be to try to originally anchor the political positions of the characters in the story to those like typical like two-dimensional like sort of political four quadrant sort of a deal.

Yeah, like the facebook things where like you answer 30 questions and you find out where you sit on the political spectrum like i tried to do it like that because i knew that the cranks and the wing nuts would like completely break it to pieces in every direction because you ended up with guys like i mean my favorite possibly my favorite guy was uh ken dixon he held three defining beliefs, right?

The first was that he's pro-affirmative action, great.

The second is that he really cared about eliminating the deficit, which like those two things don't really go together.

Historically, dope.

Now, these are triangulated with a third position, which is that we are now living in the end times and Jesus is about to come and take us all to heaven or cast us to hell.

Now, if you believe that, if I believed that, I wouldn't really care about affirmative action or the national deficit because like we're not going to have any jobs or money.

Like, it's all going away tomorrow.

But yet, he believed all these things and he held them all in his head at the same time.

And I'm like, that's awesome.

Yeah, there is this through line, too, of like people with very specific crusades that are wonky, that are policy-driven, and yet also beliefs in like, for instance, who's the guy who believed in transcendental meditation?

John Haglin.

Oh, God.

There is far more evidence that group meditation can turn off war like a light switch than there is evidence that aspirin reduces headache pain, for example.

It is a scientific fact.

The back of the baseball card on John Haglund is...

Yeah, man.

He was an acolyte of the guy who taught transcendental meditation to the Beatles.

And basically, it was a set of beliefs that

if you believe them to the letter of the law, we'll tell you that if you get like an exact number of people meditating at the same time, like 7,000 people in the same place, they meditate exactly right, you can reverberate so many good vibes around the planet that you will bring about an age of world peace.

The rest of his positions were like pretty, like, either pretty safe, like, oh, we should, you know, make guns safer and like, you know, like have more gun control measures, things like that.

And he was also, again, if you cede this territory to these people, these are the people who are going to say the absolutely true fact of like,

yeah,

America has to stop what it's doing abroad, not because it'll make us safer, not because it's like a

cost spending or saving initiative, but because it is just morally wrong.

Right.

And so at this point, I think it's obvious the ways in which what you're describing, that dynamic has manifested in the present day.

Yeah.

The idea that there are real, even more than colonels, like real planks of truth in what a lot of people say who would otherwise be categorized rightfully as bats conspiracy theorists and or abhorrent influencers at this point.

But because the institutions they invay against do not have the ability to say those planks of truth for all of these political and financial, frankly, incentives that they are abiding by,

the cranks get to feel so much more legitimate than they would be otherwise.

Yeah, yeah.

They are allowed to find this credibility and legitimacy like on the ground,

like it's a power power up in Wolfenstein.

And they just walk over and like, oh, wow, I have credibility now because I'm saying the thing that like these people like completely fail to say.

So your sort of diagnosis at the end of this in terms of what all of your archival research says about the prospects of a true third party.

What do you find yourself thinking about having done this exhaustive research?

I kind of felt like a clown by even like seriously contemplating and daydreaming about what a third party would be like, just because ever since the 90s and the Reform Party and how spectacularly like they blew up,

it has been a sort of running joke to even talk about the third party.

Like anyone who talks about it in a serious way, it's just like, it's loser shit.

And so like to even like make this documentary is kind of like loser on my part to some degree.

So like,

it's really tough.

That's why I

really

refused to prescribe any like way forward, because not only am I not confident enough to do so, I know I am unqualified.

You know, maybe a third party really is a stupid idea.

Maybe it is a right idea in the long or short term.

But the only thing I want to say like definitively and objectively with full confidence is like, you're not a wrong, selfish, stupid baby for even asking the question.

You know, we are allowed to at least talk about it.

Look, look where we are now.

I want people to talk about this until the point at which the talking about it or the voting for it undermines the stability of the

weakened and morally compromised system, which feels like

better

than the alternative.

Yeah.

And that's where it's just like, again, I am left just sort of resigned to a future that I don't blame people for wanting to imagine

can be better.

Exactly.

And like, it's overwhelmingly likely to fail.

Like, it's just like I, you know, it's probably,

probably

not a good use of time.

Maybe it is.

I don't know.

But I could see it falling into the same pitfalls that, you know, all third parties do.

Like, I mean, you look at like Andrew Yang, you look at RFK, which, by the way, that is my greatest fear that like terrifies me that someone will walk away with this with the idea that like, oh, I should vote for RFK.

No, no, no, no, no.

Write in Oscar the Grouch before you do that.

Like, I swear to God.

I do love the idea that Aaron Rodgers is going to watch this and be like,

dude, it's going to happen.

I know.

There's going to be some third-party candidate who picks it up.

And I'm like, John's absolutely right.

I'm like,

no, no, I'm not endorsing any third-party candidate who's out there right now.

I just want to make that clear.

So, when I was talking to your executive producer again, Will Yukaba,

he let me know something that I'm not even sure you're comfortable me knowing, which is that you're working on a bit of a palate cleanser of a project coming up next: a two-part series, yes, about um

Kadarius Tony, Kadarius Tony,

low-sinking kick.

Tony on the run.

Still up on his feet.

Tony has a wall.

It's another block.

Tony inside the 20.

Tony still going and he's down to the five.

Which is like, I just did

three hours on Ross Perot.

How can I get this out of my system?

What do I need to do next?

Kadarius Toney, aka Young Joka, is one of my favorite football players.

nothing he does on a football field will ever change that um i am a kadarius tony fan i it feels like the the family crest of kadarius tony fandom which is like nothing he does on a football field will make me like him less it's like required yeah he's already done so much amazing stuff that like i know the whole thing is is sort of an exploration of because it's a two-part series right and part one focuses on everything you did at blunt high school in alabama everything you did as a florida gator has has some like spectacular highlights, some very like Tyreek Hill, Deion Sanders looking stuff.

And, you know, with the Giants, he had that 189-yard receiving game, bitten by the injury bug big time, has a lot of crazy misadventures in between.

And then the second part is going to be like,

okay,

are you a fake fan or are you a real fan?

You know, as we visit his 2023, which is arguably

by some standards, one of the worst seasons that Wide Out has has ever had or Wall Carriers ever had before.

There's no getting around that.

Even a Kadarius Tony fan like myself has to admit that.

The project is really not about him so much as you, the viewer.

And like you'll, I hope you ask yourself, like, how real or fake of a fan am I?

Because I saw a lot of Chiefs fans on Twitter during last season who were having the time of their lives when he ran back the longest punt return in Super Bowl history, Um, a play that the Chiefs might well have not won their second Super Bowl of the Mahomes era without.

And they loved him then, but he drops a couple of balls and they decide that he is just like a pox upon the earth or whatever.

And that is the fakest, most embarrassing I can imagine.

So, wait a minute, I'm getting this.

I see the

sharpened blade of a take.

Yeah, I know.

That's why I made it because I had take it was like my first take in months.

My take is that Kadarius Toney is an awesome dude.

He is an admirable person, interesting human being, funny guy, and an incredibly talented athlete.

He is not perfect, but who among us, right?

Yeah, God.

What is the most satisfying part of the fact that you get to do stories like this?

Yeah,

what sort of energizes you as I look ahead to a future in which I'm like, okay, trying to constantly keep the balloon in the air of like stories and churning content and all this stuff.

And and it seems like you get to pursue passion projects once again you can tell how understudied i am and and and everything and how like frankly kind of dumb i am because when i keep when i cite inspirations i go back to kid

i go back to shell silverstein and uh his favorite poem of mine was called put something in and basically the entire uh it ends with like put something crazy in the world that hasn't been there before um and when i make something like i don't need it to be the best thing i don't need it to like knock anybody flat or win awards or anything.

I just need it to A, make it something good, make it something people really enjoy and make it something that otherwise would never have existed, something that would not have been in the world if I didn't put it there.

And I mean, it's not like I have this unique talent for doing it.

Any of us can do it.

I happen to be in a position lucky and privileged enough where I get to do that on a large scale.

And my only wish is that more people got to do the same because I am not a genius.

I'm not a visionary.

I'm just a guy who gets to do this and works my ass off.

That is well said.

Better than I could say it, frankly.

And I hope somewhere that mother weekly Pete is finally satisfied.

He's strongly Pete today.

Oh my God.

Stronger than I ever realized.

John boys, thank you for

doing this, man.

Thanks so much, Bobo, man.

It's a good time.

The full three-part series John made on the Reform Party is available now over at patreon.com slash secret base.

It is worth subscribing.

They just launched that thing.

And also their YouTube channel is where you can find everything else that John does, which is invariably pretty good.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.