S2 Ep1014: Adam Kinzinger: Mortal Damage to the American Empire

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Could not have a better day to bring back our our friend. He's a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

Speaker 1 He served in the Air Force during Iraq and Afghanistan. He's the founder of Country First, and he writes a Substack newsletter.
And he's got to turn off his notifications. It's Adam Kinzinger.

Speaker 1 What's happening?

Speaker 24 Buddy, what's going on? How are you? Thanks for having me on the day when the stock market collapses. That's a good day to have me.

Speaker 1 Thanks for saying that.

Speaker 1 Nothing happening.

Speaker 1 You know, we just have like MAGA conspiracy blogger, white nationalists running the National Security Council and the stock market collapsing, global economic crisis, the Canadians dunking on us.

Speaker 1 Nothing much to talk about. So we'll get into all that, but I wanted to start.
You texted me yesterday this clip, and we're 90s kids, you know. So

Speaker 1 Ferris Bueller's Day Off was obviously pretty formative. I don't know how old you were, but you know,

Speaker 1 when I was 11 or 12, getting into my troublemaking phase,

Speaker 1 catching Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Speaker 1 on home video. I I don't think I'm quite old enough to, I didn't see it in the theater.

Speaker 24 I was born in 78, so however old that is.

Speaker 1 You probably saw it in the theater then. You might have seen it in the movie.
I did, brother. I saw it.
We were rebels. That's legit.
Well, it's funny. In that movie, Ben Stein,

Speaker 1 who has now become a big Trumper, gave the class a lecture on a topic. And the elder millennials and young Gen Xers among us will remember what it was.

Speaker 1 But for everybody else, let's take a listen to Ben Stein speaking to Ferris Bueller's class.

Speaker 25 In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the anyone, anyone, the Great Depression, passed the anyone, anyone, a tariff bill, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which

Speaker 25 anyone raised or lowered, raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government.

Speaker 26 Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects?

Speaker 26 It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.

Speaker 1 It did not work. Smoot Hawley, actually.

Speaker 24 I would think that Trump has seen that, right? Like,

Speaker 24 that's why it's important to talk about, because if he all of a sudden sees Ben Stein saying that Smoot Holly didn't work, and that's been the interesting thing, by the way, Tim, is I've seen a few Republicans try to

Speaker 24 reimagine Smoot Holly actually as having worked, which is the weirdest thing. And they blame the recession on

Speaker 24 further into depression on something else.

Speaker 24 Kind of feels like where we're at now when you see some of these guys saying, Well, we're just in essence front-loading the recession because we were going there anyway, and it was going to be way worse.

Speaker 24 And now we're front-loading the recession. And you got to trust Donald Trump.
He knows what he's doing. I mean,

Speaker 24 it's madness.

Speaker 1 Trump's more of a musical queen. You know, he's familiar with Katz, fan of the opera, Top Gun.

Speaker 1 I don't think he might not have seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Probably true.
Yeah, it didn't work. No, it didn't.
And we're finding that out as we tape right now.

Speaker 1 The Dow is down, looks like another 2.5%. NASDAQ down another 3% plus.
I mean, it got slaughtered yesterday. The markets.
We saw job losses already in various sectors.

Speaker 1 You know that, I mean, any minute now, they're going to be the little signs outside of stores because the businesses

Speaker 1 don't want the customers to be mad at them. They're like, sorry, we had to increase the avocado prices, but it's the tariffs.
It's not me.

Speaker 1 You know, that's coming. And it's like the Trumpers have no rationale for it, really.
I mean,

Speaker 1 there's going to be some magical golden age that come off the back of it.

Speaker 1 And then our old friends and non-friends, but the people from the pre-Trump time, like even Ted Cruz is out there like, well, I don't really like tariffs, but this is just a negotiation, right?

Speaker 1 And it's like, no, I don't, I don't think so. It doesn't seem like a negotiation to me.
I think the dude is just...

Speaker 1 insane and like really loves tariffs. And now he's going to be in a fucking stubborn off with every world leader around the globe.
So it doesn't seem great. What do you make of it?

Speaker 24 Yeah, look, my wife said something yesterday that I guess I had, I mean, I've thought about it, but not really these starka terms, which is like, you know, everybody's like, well, why is Trump doing this?

Speaker 24 And so the assumption for the MAGA is this is some grand negotiating tactic, like you said. Here's the truth, I think.
I think this makes him feel powerful.

Speaker 24 Now, listen, if you're a true narcissist, I don't even know if narcissist is what he is. I think, like, and I mean this, narcissistic.
Yeah, whatever the worst possible thing is, megalomaniac.

Speaker 24 All you care about is feeling powerful in the moment. You're impulsive and you want to feel powerful.
You want to have people grovel to you.

Speaker 24 And honest to God, I mean, there's no better way to be powerful than, frankly, than to tank the world economy.

Speaker 24 And he may not be intentionally tanking the world economy, but what he's doing is saying to the rest of the world that we're in control, which we aren't. He's going to learn that soon.
And

Speaker 24 here's the other thing. So we're going to watch, you know, the stock market's going to fall.

Speaker 24 there's going to be a day, it could be, you know, ultimately by the time people listen to this today or whatever, where it's going to kind of settle and you may get 100 points in the green at some point because ultimately this is just, it's when people make the decision, okay, now it's gone down enough.

Speaker 24 I'm going to invest some money. But that's the initial hit of what we're seeing from the tariffs.
That's the emotional stuff.

Speaker 24 The deep tariff stuff is going to last over the next, frankly, five or 10 years. You know, we talk about supply chains.
I'm watching even Mark Wayne Mullen, who says, well, it's real easy.

Speaker 24 You don't want the tariffs, just build your company here in America. Okay, it's a great idea.

Speaker 24 First off, you're then saying that that company can't really trade anywhere else around the world just to America. But let's say you're a company that trades primarily in America.

Speaker 24 You sell primarily in America. Great.
It's going to take you at least five years to build a factory in the United States, by the way.

Speaker 24 And by the way, there's a 99% chance that the next president of the United States will see the follies of this and lift the tariffs. So this isn't doing anything to return supply lines.

Speaker 24 And by the way, supply, this is another big point.

Speaker 24 Supply lines in the last five years have been rapidly on shoring or near shoring, including, by the way, Mexico and Canada from China, who we were supposed to not like in the past, after COVID.

Speaker 24 So COVID created a lot of re-shoring of supply lines. And instead of like taking that and incentivizing that, like we should have been doing, we've instead put these massive tariffs.

Speaker 24 And we're going to shoot ourselves in the sack. I mean, that's what I said yesterday.
It's like, this is a self-imposed wound for absolutely no reason. And this, China loves it, man.

Speaker 24 They're going to be so powerful from this because they're picking up the slop that we were leaving behind.

Speaker 1 Yeah, two thoughts on that. And, you know, one is just on the Trump psychology.
There's also the notion that

Speaker 1 getting inside Trump's brain is not a fun process, but you have to think about this.

Speaker 2 The dude became president fucking twice.

Speaker 1 Everybody told him it was insane. The first time he had no chance of winning, he didn't think he had a chance of winning.
He won.

Speaker 1 He gets indicted four times, doesn't have a chance of winning, you know, has his first re-election campaign event in his house in Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 1 The only guy that shows up is the guy in the brick wall suit. Even Matt Gates was like, I got to wash my hair that day.

Speaker 1 Nobody thought he could come back except us deranged Never Trumpers who are like, no, I mean, he might still win again. He comes back.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he has, like, in addition to his megalomania, he also really has bought the thing that, like, Trump, everybody is wrong, all the smart people are stupid, and Trump is right.

Speaker 1 Like, he really, I think he deeply believes that. And so, in this, in a situation like this, when all the smart people and the economists and the FT are out there saying,

Speaker 1 yeah, the globalists think it's going to crash, Trump is, is there like, no, they were wrong before. They were wrong on this.
They were wrong on the fires.

Speaker 1 You know, they didn't realize it was the water.

Speaker 1 They didn't let the streams go down there. It's only Trump that knows all this stuff.
I really think that he's embraced all that. And so it's hard to like rationality cannot break through.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, that's the one side of it. And then to your point on the onshoring, it's like, it's all so fucking stupid.
We're tariffing Madagascar, like 35% or something.

Speaker 1 Like 75, 70% of the world's vanilla comes from Madagascar. It's like, what are we doing? Are we in a, we're in a trade battle with them over what? Like, Madagascar is screwing us on

Speaker 1 the vanilla you know it's like your vanilla latte you want it to be more expensive now by 35%

Speaker 1 to like get one over on Madagascar you want what do you want them to buy more from us you know you want them to start buying more jeans well yeah and and the issue of like Russia I mean okay

Speaker 24 the MAGA defense now of not tariffing Russia and North Korea Belarus you know all the bad countries is well we don't trade with them anyway first off that's not true we do trade with Russia it's two billion dollars it's not a ton but we trade more with russia than we do with probably madagascar and any of these other little places that we put a bajillion percent tariff on and then we tariff of course penguin island you know and and then the diego garcia the only asset on diego garcia is a united states military base i mean what it goes to show and then you get into i even saw jim kramer a clip of him basically on cnn like yeah i feel like a sucker and and by the way i just want to say, for people that admit they were wrong, give them grace.

Speaker 24 We need this, right? It would feel very good to dunk on the people that admit they were wrong, but that's what we need.

Speaker 24 And, you know, we all, at least maybe not you original Never Trumpers, but we all have been in the position where we had to come to Jesus on that.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I might want to dunk on him.
Yeah, we can dunk on him.

Speaker 24 He's fine specifically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was going to save it for the end. I had to fuck around and find out segment of the pod.
I was going to say it for the end, but why don't we flip it? It's Friday. I'll do the serious part.

Speaker 1 I have a dark part. We'll do it now.
Here we go. There are a couple people I wanted to shout out.
There's a fella, we'll be nice to the first fellow. There's a fellow Richard Hanania.

Speaker 1 I think he did some pretty racist stuff in the past. I don't really know his whole background, but you know, everybody can turn over a new leaf, I guess.
He was tweeting yesterday. He's a very popular

Speaker 1 blogger in like the red-pilled tech world. Mark Andreessen and those guys.
Read him. Okay.
Anyway, he wrote this yesterday. For those asking, yes, voting for Trump was a mistake.

Speaker 1 I thought we'd get a repeat of the first administration, but we didn't. The signs were there.
I just did not take my own ideas about the awful elements of MAGA seriously enough.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing: on the one hand, it's like, we all fucking told you it wasn't going to be like the first administration. Anyone with eyes knew it wasn't going to be like that, but okay.

Speaker 1 But the kind of hilarious part of it is like, it's only been 70 days.

Speaker 1 It took 10 weeks for people to start doing the I screwed up thing. I mean, even I thought it would take, you know, six months, a year.
I did too. I did too.

Speaker 24 Well, here's it. Since we're going to dunk on it, let me just say this too.
Like,

Speaker 1 okay,

Speaker 24 I got it. Your financial pocketbook is taking a hit.
So now that it's affecting you financially, right?

Speaker 24 Now you all of a sudden care. Okay, good.
I'm glad that brought you over.

Speaker 24 What about when you had heard about Russia kidnapping 30,000 children from Ukraine and erasing their identity, and then you saw Donald Trump say, Yeah, I don't know whose fault this war is.

Speaker 24 Putin is actually a pretty good guy. We get along, and you see J.D.
Vance say, frankly, I don't care what happens in Ukraine.

Speaker 24 Or you watch the missiles from Russia blow up high-rises in Ukraine or blow up grain ships, shut down a grain corridor to starve Africa. So that wasn't the thing that made you dislike Trump.

Speaker 24 It was that all of a sudden your gajillions of dollars are now only bajillions of dollars.

Speaker 24 and that's what made you finally stand up okay i'm glad you came around but a lot of us it's not the financial side like i would actually take a recession if we were a decent country again over an amazing economy in an evil country it's the human aspect of this like look We can want to deport people that are here illegally.

Speaker 24 We can want border security, but you know what you don't need to do is do an ASMR video of dragging chains so that people can sit around and get their goosebumps up and feel like they're watching a patriotic video as families are torn apart and sent to Latin America.

Speaker 24 That is inhumane. That didn't do it.
It was the financial stuff. Good, but I'm glad you came around.
So welcome to the team.

Speaker 24 I hope, though, in the future, maybe you actually care about decency and not just the finance.

Speaker 1 Let's get that on TikTok. That was a good one.
Turn on the TikTok camera for Kinzinger right now.

Speaker 1 I don't know if this segment's going to need music because I feel like there's going to be a lot of this. I'll talk to Jason about this.

Speaker 1 We might need a theme song for the fuck around and find out segment. I've got one more, though.
I've got a short one. Dave Portnoy over at Barstool, the founder of Barstool Sports.
He supported Trump.

Speaker 1 His spidey senses had started to tingle during the Signal Chat situation, which he did a big rant about how incompetent that was.

Speaker 1 And here he is yesterday on his day trading show.

Speaker 27 Trump has put his tariffs all over the place. Get some wacky formula new tariffs.

Speaker 24 And everything's in the shitter because of it.

Speaker 27 I'm down $7 million.

Speaker 1 Down 7 million.

Speaker 1 How many do you think it's going to take to go for, how many million do we got to lose before we can go for Kami Kamala and realize that maybe the tax rate going up by 2% wasn't actually the biggest financial threat to your life?

Speaker 24 Isn't that amazing when you think about it? Like this whole, oh, well, they were going to increase our tax rates is a fraction of what it's going to cost these people in losses.

Speaker 1 It's amazing. A fraction of a fraction.

Speaker 24 A fraction of a fraction. And so, yeah, I mean, look, Portnoy,

Speaker 24 I guess there's part of me that, again, maybe I'm too young to be this old, but it's like, how is it that somebody like him is somebody we look to for how the political tone is going to go?

Speaker 24 This is a guy that drinks way too much, nothing against drinking, but he drinks way too much.

Speaker 24 And then he does videos where he's sitting on his beach house in Florida, and all he does on his videos is complain. It's all he does.
This guy's like, literally, and I give him respect.

Speaker 24 He built something out of nothing. He was originally just passing out newspapers as a kid, basically, and started this company.

Speaker 24 Frankly, Tim, my time in politics, this was a big annoyance of mine, is going to meet with like people that are worth half a billion dollars or billions of dollars, and they sit with you and complain about the parts of government they don't like.

Speaker 24 And I always left there feeling like, wow, money certainly doesn't make you happy because it doesn't make these people happy.

Speaker 1 Anyway, this is the part of the show where me and Kinzinger start to talk about our transition towards Bernieism.

Speaker 1 If you want to radicalize

Speaker 1 a classical liberal into Bernieism, all you got to do is make them spend time with cranky billionaires, whiny billionaires. It is enough.
It's a radicalizing experience.

Speaker 24 I know a guy that

Speaker 24 is an independent oil producer and just worth a ton of money. And every time I met with him, he'd be complaining because oil's down to 68.
He's only going to make however many millions this month.

Speaker 24 I'm like, bro, I'm hoping to make as much as you make in a month in an entire lifetime. Right.
And I would be happy about that. I would be excited.

Speaker 24 But listen, if it it takes $7 million, the good thing I'll give Portnoy some credit for is it's much easier for him for his business to basically be a Trump bro no matter what.

Speaker 24 Because that's kind of what that group wants. When he does speak out, it has an impact, and I respect that.
And I think when he spoke out about the signal chat, that was important as well.

Speaker 24 And so I will encourage him to do that.

Speaker 1 Have you talked to that oil guy?

Speaker 1 Because, you know, I was talking yesterday with Tracy Alloway who's at Odd Lots, and she was pointing to the Dallas Fed survey where they like survey a bunch of oil and gas guys.

Speaker 1 And it's like, things aren't actually great in the oil and gas sector right now.

Speaker 1 The idea that this is going to be a boom time of drilling for liquid gold because Trump is going to unleash the animal spirits. It's

Speaker 1 not exactly what's happening.

Speaker 24 No, I think oil's down 8%, even either today or in the last couple of days. And, you know what? It's got to hover around the 70.

Speaker 24 I learned this from Landband, by the way, one of the most annoying shows I've ever seen. I'm sorry.
We We don't need to get into it.

Speaker 24 But, like, how many times do you have to go back to the same storybook? Okay, anyway, what I learned in Landman.

Speaker 1 As a homosexual,

Speaker 1 the notion of a show about a Landman is so unappealing that I have no idea what you're talking about. But go ahead.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 24 Well, here's when I knew I wasn't going to like it, quick aside, is when they're in the bar and she comes over and she's like, guys, we got a special on Bud Light.

Speaker 24 And Billy Bob Thornton goes, how's that going for you? And she goes, like a fart in church, church,

Speaker 24 because of Bud Light, right? Anyway, so, but Landman taught me that $70 is about where oil producers need to be to be in a nice sweet spot between cheap oil and good production.

Speaker 24 And we're going to be under that. You're going to see.
A lot of these independent producers, once again, go under if this continues.

Speaker 24 And it's all because the people that are speculating on the price of energy are probably rightly assuming the economy is going to go into recession.

Speaker 24 And when the economy goes into recession, people don't use oil. Oil goes down and it just furthers the recession in the energy community.
And I live in Texas now. It's going to hurt here.

Speaker 1 It's another group of people that didn't see what was right in front of their nose.

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Speaker 1 All right, I want to get a little, well, it might go darker, it might be lighter.

Speaker 1 I was interested yesterday as the takes were flying by two things that you and my colleague Jonathan V. Last JVL said.
You gave kind of the bright side of this argument, and he gave the dark side,

Speaker 1 as is his tendency. You wrote this, this is the beginning of a massive fall of MAGA.

Speaker 1 No amount of division, fear-mongering lies, and cheap lines will overcome the fact that you just took many people's prosperity just because it makes you feel powerful.

Speaker 1 Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end. It's optimistic, look.
JVL wrote this. And just like that, the age of American empire, the great talks, Americana, ended.

Speaker 1 We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the U.S.
economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

Speaker 1 So, Adam Kinzinger, was yesterday the end of MAGA or the end of America?

Speaker 24 Well, look, honestly, I do agree with JVL.

Speaker 24 I don't think it's irreparable, but yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing I'm trying to get my arms around that I can't yet is literally we may have just taken everything that you and I learned about post-World War II.

Speaker 24 By the way, for anybody that somehow looks back at the pre-World War II era as a wonderful time in America, it wasn't. America, it's been great to live in America since World War II.

Speaker 1 That's about it, right?

Speaker 24 And so I feel like we have just bombed that whole order. And now, let's say we get, you know, Jesus H.
Christ as president in the next administration.

Speaker 24 how do you get Europe and these other countries to trust the United States of America again? I don't know. So I do think this has done mortal damage to at least the American empire, if you will.

Speaker 24 But I also think that when you hit people's pocketbooks, right, I've always thought that part of America's problem has been our success.

Speaker 24 We've been so comfortable that we have the luxury of hating each other and being annoyed by transgender issues and being annoyed by Bud Light because they sent a can to somebody we didn't like because we're comfortable.

Speaker 24 It's like Maslow's hierarchy, right? Let's call that those arguments over Bud Light. That's like self-actualization, sort of.

Speaker 24 Like you can argue about the pinnacle of issues, but you take away your economic prosperity that most Americans have felt.

Speaker 24 Even those that are in challenging financial positions have never really had to worry about starving on the street.

Speaker 24 You start taking that away, and all of a sudden, your interest starts working down that pyramid.

Speaker 24 And I got to tell you, I think once you mess with people's financial livelihood, there's nothing you can do to bring them back to saying that Donald Trump is good. Not everybody, look, there are some.

Speaker 24 I mean, literally, Donald Trump could skin a cat alive on TV and they wouldn't care.

Speaker 24 I think there are people that once they start really feeling that economic pain, maybe will never admit they were wrong, but will change how they vote in the future.

Speaker 1 I hope you're right. The concern I have, the thing that dances around my head on that, is I basically used to say exactly what you just said, like in 2018 and 19, and then COVID happened.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 And like, the thing, my shtick was always when I was going, like, when I was doing my book tour, you know, a common question a lot of interviewers would ask me is, what will break the spell?

Speaker 1 Like, how will they, what will change things? You know, what will make these people like come to the light? And my answer then was always like, you know, it's going to take some outside shock, right?

Speaker 1 Like, like, they're going to have to be forced into seriousness. There's going to to have to be some other event that

Speaker 1 makes people come to terms with the fact that this is silliness in games. And then we had a global pandemic and people got fucking crazy.

Speaker 1 People got even crazier. And so that kind of shook my confidence that

Speaker 1 a outside negative event will

Speaker 1 will bring people back towards reality or seriousness. Now, in that case, it was the Chinese or whatever.
It was either

Speaker 1 Chinese incompetence or bad luck or whatever, but it came from China. In this case, I guess the argument in favor of it is like, it's pretty much just Donald Trump doing this.

Speaker 1 Like, Donald Trump is just like, there's no, and I guess people could blame it on, could come up with something else to blame, but it's pretty much just Donald Trump.

Speaker 24 Look, I think it's going to, it's going to ride on something here, which is, are the Democrats able, and it's always on them because they're the opposition party, let's just be honest.

Speaker 24 Are they going to be able to form an argument pending this on Trump?

Speaker 24 Because listen, 90 of every republican in the house right now i mean i i put myself in that position if i was a sitting u.s congressman what would i be doing i would be preparing my arguments for why somehow magically this is the democrats fault that the economy has collapsed and trust me they will use whatever magic you know thing to twist into telling you and convincing you that actually it's the democrats that have caused this so democrats here's the point and i know some listen to this you need to start formulating your arguments, pinning this on Donald Trump and on Republicans.

Speaker 24 And by the way, please, God, the answer is not further left. It's not leftism.
I get it. You know, there's a group of Democrats that still believe they lost the election because

Speaker 24 they tried to appeal to people like me. That is not true.
You have got to make the case to the middle American that you are the Bill Clinton Democrats again. You care about the blue collar.

Speaker 24 You care about the working class. That is the only way you're ever going to come back and win.
What Corey Booker did in his filibuster, that showed a fighting spirit.

Speaker 24 Everybody has to show a fighting spirit. But again, the key to the Democrats is this.
I don't care if you speak for 25 hours or 25 seconds. The only weapon you guys have is messaging.
That's it.

Speaker 24 So go out and win the message here because that's going to determine who takes the ownership of this. Because trust me, Donald Trump is very good, as you were saying even on the show yesterday.

Speaker 24 he's an amazing political messenger.

Speaker 24 He's going to find a way to pin this on you, and you're going to be surprised and angry, and you're going to go out and say, Well, it's not my fault, of course, he's president, but unless you come up with a compelling argument, it will be your fault as far as America is concerned.

Speaker 24 You know, during COVID, by the way, the left went way too far.

Speaker 1 It's a little less complicated to do that this time of COVID. I mean, they control everything, and the economy was fine before he came.
Yeah, well, totally.

Speaker 24 And if you think about though, COVID, like, you know, yes, the right went too far in saying no masks ever. We're going to to have COVID parties.

Speaker 24 The left, some on the left went way too far with like masks all the time.

Speaker 24 I remember, was it my good friend Gavin Newsom or somebody that said, like, when you go to the restaurant, take your masks down in between bites of food? Like, that kind of stuff annoyed people.

Speaker 24 So don't do the equivalent of that, please.

Speaker 1 Trump sucks. It's probably pretty good.
Trump is really stupid and he bankrupt a casino and now he's bankrupting you. That was probably a, you know, welcome in.

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Speaker 1 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 1 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you. Same mission, new name, MS Now.
Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 6 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 9 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 15 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 20 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 23 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 1 I want to go back to the JVL dark side

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 as usual, he was channeling me because this is kind of what was rattling around my head before I saw that he wrote it, which is like, I really am not sure that it's fixable.

Speaker 1 I really do think something fundamentally has changed. And I don't mean whatever.
Like, it takes a long time for empires to collapse.

Speaker 1 I know that you're a straight man, so you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. It took a long time.
It didn't just happen overnight, right? It takes generations.

Speaker 1 So I'm not saying that, like, the whole country is going to collapse or whatever. We're going to become an anarchist Libya state.
But

Speaker 1 like.

Speaker 1 The world has changed in a way that I don't think is fully reparable, right? Like, it just has. And other countries are going to have to make calculations.
And they look at us and just be like,

Speaker 1 you elected your stupidest American a second time after he got indicted, after he got convicted on criminal charges. You put him back in there and now he's fucking us.
How could we possibly trust you?

Speaker 1 How could we possibly trust that

Speaker 1 you'll have a stable leaders in the future? Like you're acting like a Libya. Like you're acting like a failed state.
The world reserve currency is not the Turkish whatever.

Speaker 1 Like the lira is not the world reserve currency because people are worried that they can't trust the government, the stability of those countries. They felt like they could trust us.

Speaker 1 We've had decisions, but that our institutions were strong. And I just think that that has changed permanently.
And there was one piece of evidence of that, which is Mark Carney speaking yesterday.

Speaker 1 I want to play that for you.

Speaker 28 At the same time,

Speaker 28 Canada must be looking elsewhere to expand our trade, to build our economy, and to protect our sovereignty.

Speaker 28 Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of like-minded countries who share our values.

Speaker 28 We believe in international cooperation. We believe in the free and open exchange of goods, services, and ideas.

Speaker 28 And if the United States no longer wants to lead,

Speaker 28 Canada will.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's crazy that that is real. You know, I mean, we made mistakes, Vietnam or Iraq or whatever, but Canada wasn't out there being like, it seems like U.S.

Speaker 1 has joined the baddies, and so we got to find a new alliance. That is a new thing that's hard to change.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 And by the way, one of the great ironies is the conservatives were set to crush it in Canada. And that's not the case anymore because of Trump.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's a smart speech.

Speaker 24 And here's the thing. What the MAGAs will tell you is, well, this is really good because we've always wanted the world to step up and do more.
And that's not really true.

Speaker 24 Now, first off, I mean, yes, we always wanted Europe to spend more on defense. That's important.

Speaker 24 We haven't wanted Europe to basically become a competitor to us, kick us out of the realm, and basically be a competition.

Speaker 24 Because listen, you know, when the United States, for instance, liberated South Korea, when we took down the Nazis, we took down the Japanese, we invested a ton of money in rebuilding those economies.

Speaker 24 And we've gotten that back 100, 200, maybe even 1,000 times of what we've invested because we have great trade relationships.

Speaker 24 Obviously, Samsung, you know, you think in South Korea, you think of BMW and Germany, whatever. All this stuff has been beneficial to us.
We get to write the rules of trade for the world.

Speaker 24 We get to be the ones to determine freedom of navigation of the seas. This is one of the things that annoyed me about the signal chat more than anything.

Speaker 24 JD Vance, you know, on there talking about how basically Europe needs to be cleaning up the Red Sea and the Houthis. And, you know, stupid Pete Hegseth agreeing with it.
Well, guess what?

Speaker 24 The United States Navy has always claimed to be the ones that are going to enforce freedom of navigation of the seas.

Speaker 24 And by the way, every time we've bombed the Houthis up until the Trump administration, sometimes the French and always the British have been with us to help in those bombings.

Speaker 24 But instead, we have basically said to the countries in the past, we are going to be in charge of freedom of navigation. It's been beneficial to us.

Speaker 24 And now all of a sudden, we're mad at Europe for not doing it, even though we said this was our responsibility. And so, what we're doing is we're giving up these leverage.

Speaker 24 Look, I get it, the United States is a very generous country, and I honestly think we benefit from that generosity.

Speaker 24 But if you think that for 200 years, we've built this post-World War II order out of generosity and not because it does good things for us, you're insane.

Speaker 24 This is amazing for us, and we're blowing it up because somebody on Fox News wants to go on and make a five-second cheap line about how Europe needs to pull its own weight. And it's insane.

Speaker 24 And by the way, European, if you are invested in the American defense industry, look, I'm not giving you advice, but I would say get the F out of it because the American defense industry, a good percent of its weapons go to Europe.

Speaker 24 Europe has made it clear that they're going to buy European weapons now and get off American weapons. Portugal just canceled the purchase of the F-35.
Canada is considering doing the same.

Speaker 24 This is going to kill the American defense industry.

Speaker 24 And then we sit around and wonder what's happened to the American defense industry that we don't have enough shells to take on China, which, by the way, this administration actually doesn't want to take on China, let's be clear.

Speaker 24 And anyway, that's my rant for the moment.

Speaker 1 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution. They're a reminder of who this country belongs to.

Speaker 3 and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 1 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 1 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 1 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 1 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 1 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you. Same mission, new name, MS Now.
Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 6 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 9 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 15 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved, so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 20 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io/slash podcast.

Speaker 23 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 1 Since you mentioned the bombing of the Houthis, that stuff is still ongoing. It's kind of like gotten pushed out of the news, I guess, because what the world economy is collapsing.

Speaker 1 And I don't know that Donald Trump really wants to talk about it for some reason. But what do you make of what's happening? And we've continued to send more jets over there, more bombings.
I mean,

Speaker 1 part of the spin from MAGA out of the signal chat situation was like, yeah, sure, it was kind of dumb, but the operation was a huge success.

Speaker 1 It's like, okay, maybe, I guess, but like the seas aren't clear. I mean,

Speaker 1 we're still kind of getting into this. I don't know if you you want to call it a quagmire, but we're still involved over there.
So what's, I mean, you're kind of monitoring this stuff closer to me.

Speaker 1 What do you make of what's happening over there?

Speaker 24 Yeah, first off, they just shot down their third MQ-9 of ours. They've shot down 17 MQ-9s, which are the unmanned drones, but this isn't like a small drone.
They're the size of jet airplanes.

Speaker 1 They're expensive.

Speaker 24 They just shot down their third in the last month. So let's be clear about this.
They have anti-air capability, which is why the signal chat was so dangerous. And so what do I make of it?

Speaker 24 Look, we're doing the right thing in terms of, you know, when you find anti-air or you find cruise missile sites, you know, blowing them up or weapon stores.

Speaker 24 Yemen is, by the way, it doesn't look big on a map. I've been to Yemen, actually right before the Houthis took over.
It's a very dangerous country.

Speaker 24 It's actually a huge country, and it's very rough terrain. The UAE has tried to use troops in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia fought with Yemen for a long time, and nobody can beat the Houthis.

Speaker 24 I don't think we're going to beat them because we're not going to put American troops on the ground in another quagmire in Yemen.

Speaker 24 So the best that we can hope to do, which again is not a bad decision, is try to degrade their weapons as they come in to open it up.

Speaker 24 The problem, though, is the issue with shipping around Yemen is the insurance companies. And you have to basically clear the threat to get insurance companies to start insuring ships again.

Speaker 24 That's really the key to how to like kind of open up the Suez Canal. So that's a big concern.

Speaker 24 But really, if you actually want to starve Yemen of the weapons, you have to interdict them coming from Iran. And I haven't heard the administration doing that.

Speaker 24 And frankly, the last administration did a terrible job of that. And so as long as we just kill them at the end point and we're not blowing up weapons in transit, I don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 24 I also think it's possible, I don't know anything that you don't, but it's possible that this military buildup is kind of a cover for a potential strike in Iran, which I hope if that happens, it's not based on Kaznet and Yahoo's asking us to.

Speaker 24 I hope it's based on real intelligence that is saying, you know, for instance, Iran may be a few months away from a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 1 Well, here's the good news. those are complicated issues, thorny issues, require a lot of expertise.

Speaker 1 People are familiar with what happened in UAE, with UAE and Saudi when they fought with the Houthis. So, you know, there's a lot of ins and outs and what-haves-us.

Speaker 1 So, so we want to have the best people involved.

Speaker 1 And there's some news yesterday: four officials were fired from the National Security Council: Brian Walsh, who's a director of intelligence and a former top staffer for Marco Rubio.

Speaker 1 Thomas Boudry, a senior director of legislative affairs who previously served for Mike Waltz on the Hill.

Speaker 1 David Faith, somebody that oversees technology and national security in the State Department, and another official. They were fired because Laura Loomer,

Speaker 1 who's tweeting at me right now, actually, the kooky, unapologetically white nationalist, anti-Muslim, conspiracy theorist, 9-11 questioner, she was in the White House.

Speaker 1 with her new face talking to the president and I guess convinced him that he had,

Speaker 1 I don't know, neocon spies in his midst and that he needed to fire them. She also is pushing for the firing of Alex Wong, who's a guy I know who used to work for Romney.

Speaker 1 He has maintained his job so far, but she's accusing him of being like a Chinese operative because of Wong. He's a Chinese defense, his name is Wong.

Speaker 1 So that's the kind of stuff we're dealing with here. Somebody is just like, oh, the name's Wong.
He must be a Chinese spy.

Speaker 1 So that person successfully engineered the firing of four national security officials, two of which are former high-level staffers for Rubio and Waltz.

Speaker 1 So it seems like the MAGA blogger has more influence over our national security staffing than the Secretary of State or National Security Advisor. So what do you think, Rose?

Speaker 1 What do you think about that?

Speaker 24 Totally. By the way, you must be a,

Speaker 24 Miller's German, right? Is that German or is it Spit?

Speaker 1 Miller's German.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so you and I must be German spies, right?

Speaker 1 Kinsinger. That's easy.

Speaker 24 First off, someday you need to dedicate about 10 minutes to Mar-a-Lago face to understand that whole thing. Yeah.
Christy Noam among them.

Speaker 24 I have so many stories about Gnome.

Speaker 1 But anyway. Okay, by the way, and I just want to say, I support people that want to get a little Botox, want to freshen up, whatever.

Speaker 1 I just, I do find it strange when somebody's like, I'd like a whole new face.

Speaker 1 Like, I'd like to completely change my face and become a different person that is like in the uncanny valley between human and robot.

Speaker 1 Like, that's just, I don't, I don't really quite get the appeal of that.

Speaker 24 And Christy Noam rolls out her new face with pigtails, you know? Like, dude, what, what? Come on.

Speaker 24 And this is the woman that, by the way, when I was elected with her, she and her husband decided she was going to do no national TV because there were inappropriate comments about her on Twitter whenever she would do TV.

Speaker 24 It went from that to this. Anyway, okay, another story.
Laura Loomer, and I saw your guys' tweet back and forth.

Speaker 24 By the way, Laura, if you're listening, you can be nice-ish and still bat shit crazy, just so you know.

Speaker 24 Just not things aren't in conflict yeah yeah no the fact that she could go into the Oval Office is frightening this is somebody that is a 9-11 truther I was in a specific I don't remember which committee it was but a committee hearing that she interrupted back you know before she was in anybody's good graces she's nuts and literally nuts not just performance art here so she gets into the white house and in front of from what I understand in front of Mike Waltz is going after these and it kind of goes to him where he tries to defend these members and then she wins.

Speaker 24 The fact that Mike Waltz was overruled by Laura Loomer and then still

Speaker 24 put his head down and walked out into Trump's helicopter like a whipped puppy. Don't tell me you're an alpha male.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 24 Please stop saying that you guys are alpha males if you're going to let Laura Loomer come in and stomp all over you. Okay.
I want to be very clear about that.

Speaker 24 I met Mike Waltz in Bluffton, South Carolina Carolina when he was thinking about running. And I'm like, what do you think about Trump? I hate Trump.
Okay, I'll support you. And I supported him.

Speaker 24 He came in until he flew one day in Air Force One with Trump, and he was totally different, right? This is a beta male. I'm sorry.
It's okay to be a beta. Nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 1 It's America.

Speaker 24 It can be whatever you want, but quit trying to pretend like you're an alpha. And so, yeah, if I was him, I would have resigned at the spot.

Speaker 24 I would have said literally, and maybe the president wants him to resign and everybody wins. But I'd be like, Mr.
President, if you listen listen to her over me, I'm out. You don't need me, obviously.

Speaker 24 The fact that he then talked his tail and walked onto the helicopter is the one image of him I will never forget.

Speaker 1 Never. Yeah, it'd be one thing if it was like, you know, Doug Bergham over at the Interior and you got some staffer who did some tweets in the past that were mean to Trump.

Speaker 1 And you got Laura Loomer going into the White House and like, Donald, we got to get rid of the, you know, deputy undersecretary at interior. You might take one for the team on that one.

Speaker 1 I mean, I wouldn't. I would never be in Trump's cabinet, but you could at least understand it.
You're the fucking national security advisor. You're the national security advisor.

Speaker 1 Your senior director for technology and national security.

Speaker 1 Your top staffer that you brought with you from Congress that you trust, one of Rubio's top experts on foreign policy, are getting fired because

Speaker 1 Laura Loomer. said so, somebody with no foreign policy experience, someone who thinks 9-11 was an inside job, she gets to be in charge of the staffing.
And that is just madness.

Speaker 1 And it's just humiliating. And to go along with it, like, why? What are you, like, what are you even getting out of this? And I throw on top of that, my old boss, Susie Wiles.
What is she doing?

Speaker 1 I thought you were the chief of staff. Yeah.
Isn't Susie Wiles supposed to be in charge of the staff? She's getting, you know, like layered, I guess, would be one way to put it, by Laura Loomer.

Speaker 24 I don't know. And I'll tell you, the crazy thing about this, this is a moment where I had implied, it looks like we may be planning a strike against Iran.

Speaker 24 We are certainly having an anti-whatever campaign against Yemen right now. You know, there's still the Ukraine-Russia war that we supposedly were going to solve in 24 hours.

Speaker 24 You know, China is still growing. And at the same time as all of this, you know, the Laura Lumer National Defense Establishment, we also are now saying that we're going to cut the military 8%.

Speaker 24 and 90,000 active duty troops. Now, by the way, we have struggled in the past 20 years to grow the size of the army because because without a draft, you have to grow through incentives.

Speaker 24 And obviously, when the economy is good, it's hard to incentivize people to go in the army.

Speaker 1 So that's the grand plan.

Speaker 24 Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 Now they want to cut it. They're going to crush the economy, so people have to go into the military.
Yeah, maybe that's it. Brilliant.

Speaker 24 Brilliant. But now they want to cut the military 90,000 people.

Speaker 1 This is insane. Was that in the budget or the reconciliation bill?

Speaker 24 Yes. It's like put out as they're what they're trying to do in the budget or something.
Remember,

Speaker 24 they want to cut 8%,

Speaker 24 which they claim they do that through fraud, waste, and abuse. Guys,

Speaker 24 can we just drop the fraud, waste, and abuse thing? It doesn't exist to the level that people think it does. Is there fraud and waste? Yes.
Is it 8% of the budget? Oh, hell no.

Speaker 24 And by the way, we used to fight tooth and nail with the Biden administration, with the Obama administration, that we had to grow the defense budget every year by more than they wanted to grow it, or they were peace hippies.

Speaker 24 Now they're talking about cutting it 8%, and somehow that's still consistent with the conservative values we've always had since Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 24 People, can we get rid of this idea that there is anything conservative about the GOP anymore? The GOP is not conservative. The conservative movement, it's dead, basically.

Speaker 24 There's some people with conservative views, but the movement itself is dead.

Speaker 1 Yeah, kind of like the American Empire. Right.
So, you know, we've killed a lot of stuff the last 71 days.

Speaker 1 We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution. They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 1 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 1 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 1 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 1 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 7 They'll continue to cover the day's news ask the tough questions and explain how it impacts you same mission new name ms now learn more at ms.now are your ai agents helping users or just creating more work if you can't compare your users workflows before and after adding ai how do you know it's even paying off Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what what to fix.

Speaker 20 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io/slash podcast.

Speaker 23 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 1 In addition,

Speaker 1 while this is all going on, four Americans died in a NATO operation in Lithuania. Their

Speaker 1 funeral, their service was last night, first in Vilnius, and then they get brought to Dover Air Force Base.

Speaker 1 Traditionally, the president goes to those things to, you know, kind of greet the families and the caskets. Trump did not do that.

Speaker 1 He flew to Doral, his golf club in Florida, where he went to meet with the Saudis

Speaker 1 because the Saudi golf league, Liv, is having a tournament at his golf club.

Speaker 1 So our American first president skipped the services of the dead soldiers to go cover with the foreign autocrat that is trying to disrupt the American golf tour. That's what's happening.
happening?

Speaker 24 The level of self-dealing corruption that we are going to discover someday, you know, we're discovering it now, but I think when the Trump administration is over and we're kind of doing the post-mortem, no matter what our country looks like, is going to be astounding.

Speaker 24 And I really believe there will be new laws that will have to be passed in the wake of Donald Trump because of the absolute stuff that we used to think human decency just would prevent, that it doesn't prevent.

Speaker 24 You know, you talk a ton, and I would encourage you to keep talking about it, about the cryptocurrency stuff.

Speaker 24 I didn't even realize the depth of that until you had that one gentleman on who was really good talking about it. Zeke, he's really good, yeah.

Speaker 24 And the golf thing, you know, the PGA versus the live, like, this is a big battle right now. And shouldn't we be on the side of the PGA?

Speaker 1 I mean, probably should the president not care about this given the fact that the economy is collapsing. But if you were going to pick a side, shouldn't you pick the PGA side?

Speaker 24 Yes, absolutely you should. But he thinks the PGA is democratic now all of a sudden.
So there's something about that for some reason.

Speaker 24 Because anyway, and then about the soldiers, look, these are four Americans, one actually from my old district. They're on a recovery vehicle.

Speaker 24 They basically flip in a swamp that's like, you know, deep, deep mud, like kind of what you think about almost quicksand. So it took a week for Lithuania and the United States to recover their bodies.

Speaker 24 But if you actually look at what the Lithuanians have put out, their level of respect for these soldiers is something that'll put a tear in your eye.

Speaker 24 I tweeted one of the videos yesterday that the defense minister put out. They have been honoring these four soldiers as if they were their own.

Speaker 24 And you see this, like, this brotherhood between America and Lithuania and America, and frankly, all of our allies.

Speaker 24 And even though Trump and the leaders of the countries don't like each other, the brotherhood on the military level is still very strong. And

Speaker 24 I mean, literally, you see the whole country, a moment of silence for these four Americans. They come back here and Donald Trump doesn't even bother to show up is,

Speaker 24 you know, I'll just, all I can say is what I say basically to all this stuff. Had this been Biden, this would be Fox News' front headline every hour that he didn't show up to Dover.

Speaker 24 When it's Trump, like, that's crickets, right? That's okay. There's no consistency here.
Fox News and the Republicans no longer believe in any value.

Speaker 24 The only value is what is good for me and what can I convince people is good for them. That's it.

Speaker 1 I will go to your feed and we'll put in the show notes that the link of the Lithuanian thing because I would like to see it. Look, this thing is sad.

Speaker 1 Obviously, the deaths are tragic, but it is. It comes to this moment where it's like this, it's an artifact of a previous time where we really had these alliances and valued them and cared about them.

Speaker 1 I've been noticing for the YouTube viewers, you'll see this for the listeners, Adam has a statue of liberty behind him as your backdrop. Is that a comment on how

Speaker 1 we should need to give that back to the French? Or is there...

Speaker 24 Honestly, man, I think it's just time.

Speaker 24 At least let them, you know, what we can do for the next three years is they could take ownership in, you know, of it, even though we don't necessarily need to move it.

Speaker 24 Yeah, they can take ownership of it. And then we should prepare to move it.

Speaker 1 I think we should ship it back. Maybe we'll have away.
We're getting to that point. We can give it to somebody else.
I mean, we're not really,

Speaker 1 I don't think our shores are the shores of liberty. All right.
You've kind of mentioned it a couple of times. I just do want to close because I think it's worth mentioning because the Russia deal?

Speaker 1 I thought we did a deal. What happened there?

Speaker 1 We had this Trump and we sent Steve Wickoff over there and he met with Putin and Putin gave him that great painting and everything was going to be cool and it doesn't seem like everything's cool.

Speaker 1 Seems like Russia is still bombing Ukraine.

Speaker 24 Well, they are. And look, you know, Zelensky comes here, gets chewed out in the Oval Office, and Zelensky has agreed to everything that we've put in front of him.

Speaker 24 You know, a ceasefire in the Black Sea, which does not benefit Ukraine because they've actually won.

Speaker 24 I mean, this is like the most untold and amazing story is the Ukrainians defeated the Russian Black Sea Navy with no navy, you know, and energy infrastructure, you know, ceasefire, that would have benefited Russia because of their energy, the bombings that are happening.

Speaker 24 Look, Russia's not interested in peace, period. And by the way, Donald Trump, who said he was going to inflict intense sanctions or whatever against Russia if they didn't do it.

Speaker 24 Well, they didn't do it. And you don't hear anything.
And Russia doesn't even get put on the freaking tariff list. I mean,

Speaker 24 I don't know if Donald Trump is necessarily truly in the tank of Russia, but I think he feels a kinship to Putin. And I got to tell you, what was it?

Speaker 1 What would he be doing differently? What would he be doing differently if he wasn't?

Speaker 1 I also don't believe it. I also don't believe that it's actually like, because I think it's way stupider than that.

Speaker 1 I think he's just a fucking moron.

Speaker 1 But if he were a Russian asset in the White House, it's hard to think about something that he would have done differently the first seven years.

Speaker 24 Well, he'd be less obvious about it if he wasn't upset.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 24 Like, he wouldn't be this blatant. I think, you know, what was very revealing was in the Zelensky meeting when Trump went off onto how he and Putin together had to bear the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax.

Speaker 24 Like, Putin didn't have to bear anything. He loved it.

Speaker 24 But that's what you start seeing is I think he feels a kinship with Putin and he's jealous of the fact that he has control of his country, and Trump wants that.

Speaker 24 And at least we're doing the intel sharing with Ukraine. I think the aid has basically wound down, to be honest with you.
Ukraine can now produce 40% of its own weapons.

Speaker 24 It's going to produce 4 million drones this year, which is amazing. They did 1 million last year.
Europe is stepping up.

Speaker 24 So Ukraine's not lost without the United States, but there's no doubt it's going to cost more Ukrainian lives than it should.

Speaker 24 And I got to tell you, every day, I mean, it's not rare that I watch a video out of Ukraine and get pretty choked up watching this because it just reminds me of, really honestly, the World War II generation of Americans that just, you know, went to fight fascism.

Speaker 24 And,

Speaker 24 you know, it's, I don't know, it's inspiring to me, but sad at the same time.

Speaker 1 Slava. All right.
Adam Kinzinger. Have you said thank you yet? I've had you on quite a few times.
Have you said thank you? I haven't heard of thank you. Thank you, Tim.
Thank you.

Speaker 24 I so appreciate you. You're so amazing.
You're my favorite. You are very talented.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. Appreciate that.
All right. That's Adam Kinzinger.
He used to be a congressman, now he's got a sub stack. Go check it out.
Everybody else, have as good a weekend as you can.

Speaker 1 Don't look at your Charles Schwab account. We'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Crystal.
Peace.

Speaker 1 Makes

Speaker 1 me

Speaker 1 cry,

Speaker 1 watching the moon

Speaker 1 on

Speaker 1 the ocean

Speaker 1 where California used to be

Speaker 1 it's not half bad

Speaker 1 Spend half your life being sad

Speaker 1 Don't be scared

Speaker 1 Uh oh

Speaker 1 Just chronically impaired

Speaker 1 Uh oh

Speaker 1 Just take my hand

Speaker 1 Uh oh standing at the end of

Speaker 1 the American

Speaker 1 empire

Speaker 1 One

Speaker 1 last

Speaker 1 song

Speaker 1 here at the end

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 the moon

Speaker 1 they seem

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 sure

Speaker 1 At least that's the way

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 remember

Speaker 1 the war

Speaker 1 when New York used used to be

Speaker 1 is not that bad.

Speaker 1 Spend happy life

Speaker 1 being sad.

Speaker 1 Wow,

Speaker 1 don't you weep

Speaker 1 happy

Speaker 1 fast asleep,

Speaker 1 feeling uninspired.

Speaker 1 Uh-oh, standing at the end of the American

Speaker 1 Empire.

Speaker 1 And we thought

Speaker 1 that it's time

Speaker 1 to go.

Speaker 1 Heard the news on the radio

Speaker 1 one last round before

Speaker 1 we go

Speaker 1 through the air atmosphere

Speaker 1 glow

Speaker 1 and the heartsages carry along

Speaker 1 Sing the song that we used to know

Speaker 1 One last round before

Speaker 1 we go

Speaker 1 One last round before

Speaker 1 we go

Speaker 1 So sad

Speaker 1 The Bullark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown

Speaker 1 America, America,

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Speaker 24 Ships ready to speak the bombs and panels.

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Speaker 23 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

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