S2 Ep1058: Matt Yglesias: Elon's Smash and Grab

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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Just one more reminder: we're doing the rally tomorrow, Friday, June 6th at 5 o'clock in front of the Supreme Court in support of the legal team that is fighting for Andrea Hernandez-Romero, as well as the other Venezuelans that have been disappeared, to Sakote.

My guest today might think I'm raising the salience of that incorrectly, but I disagree with him.

And we can hash that out over the course of the podcast.

So come hang out with us at five o'clock.

We have a fundraiser at eight o'clock and a live show.

I think there are like three tickets left for it, so you better get it if you want to come.

On to the guest.

He writes slow boring on Substack.

He co-hosts the Politics with an X at the End podcast with Brian Boitler.

He's a columnist for Bloomberg.

It's Matt Iglesias.

What's up, man?

Hello.

What's going on?

Good to see you.

Yesterday, you attended the Welcome Fest, a forum for Centris Dems, which I was not invited to participate in or moderate, despite my status as the podcast home of this faction.

So I don't know if I've gone to Woke for Welcome Fest or what happened there.

Maybe invite was lost in the mail.

I don't actually like going to these things.

So I don't know why I'm complaining.

Why you weren't there?

It was good.

I read in the New York Times today that I was greeted like a rock star there.

Was that true?

Were you greeted?

That was not my actual experience, but you know, it was in the New York Times.

Did you sign anybody?

Did you sign any ladies' cleavage?

No, a number of people, men, gave me their business cards.

So, you know,

that's conference going.

But, you know, we had some good people there talking, some frontline members of Congress, etc.

Good.

We're going to get into that.

I want to get into what's happened with the Democrats, what they should do, how they can welcome people that voted for Donald Trump appropriately and strategically.

But first, I want to do a little bit of what's actually happening this year, in 2025, in the news.

You wrote, I don't know, maybe earlier this week about how Doge failed and why it matters.

I think that is interesting, particularly also in the context of the Elon Musk and Trump breakup, ongoing breakup

over the big

fugly bill.

So why don't we do Doge first and then the bill?

Why do you say it failed and why does it matter?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think a lot of people, sensible people, when Doge was rolled out, were like, this is stupid, right?

Like, this is BS.

This is just about Trump and power and whatever.

But I think it's just important to remember that lots of people, people who I know, like technology industry people who are just not super political, like they like love and worship Elon Musk, who's a very successful, very smart businessman.

And when he started saying, you know, we are going to find hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of waste and fraud in the federal government, there was real belief that he was going to do that.

The president of the United States said in his pseudo-State of the Union that there were millions of dead people on the Social Security Nubed, which is true, in fact.

And then he suggested that this meant huge sums of money were going out, being paid out in checks to dead people.

And so he was going to be able to massively reduce government spending without harming any kind of legitimate claims.

That's not true.

We've now seen that Musk has wrapped up.

They cut some spending, a fairly minor amount.

The cuts that they have done have inflicted some really big harms on people, although often foreigners.

But they're now saying, right, if you listen to Mike Johnson, you listen to anybody about this bill, they're claiming that they're going to take $800 billion out of Medicaid, but like somehow it's all going to be fine, that it's just like illegal immigrants and fraudulent claims.

I think Doge is important context for that.

Like you must have seen Dave, right?

The movie Dave?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I'm an elder millennial.

Right.

I mean, this is like an incredible trope in American culture that if you just like brought a couple smart guys in to kind of go over the books.

I got to tell you, I loved that scene from Dave as at the time I was, you know, probably a high school Republican, excited about the Bob Dole campaign.

And I was like, hell yeah, let's cut the fucking red tape.

Let's cut the waste and abuse out of this government.

Everybody tightened their belts a a little bit.

And this is how a lot of people see things.

And, you know, it's not true.

And not to say you couldn't cut government spending if you wanted to in the spirit of shared sacrifice or whatever else it is, but like millions of people are going to lose their health care when this bill goes through, just as Doge, you know, ultimately all they could do is like cut scientific research and foreign aid programs.

They just like did not find these quote-unquote fraudulent claims.

So I don't know.

I was like looking at the news this morning and the headlines about this legislation, which has passed the House and is pending in the Senate, they're like way down the page, you know, compared to other stuff because Trump is such a volume player in terms of like scandals and outrages and other different kinds of things.

But I would like to get more attention to this.

Thank you for not saying volume shooter.

So I'm with you on getting attention for the bill.

That's why it's going to be in the B block of this very important podcast.

By the way, we're one slot behind Megan Kelly on the new YouTube ratings.

So tell your fucking friends so we can pass Megan Kelly.

We got to do it.

And raise the salience of these issues.

Just really quick on the Doge stuff first, because there's one part before we get to the reconciliation, Bill, because

one part of what you said is important.

And I was glad that you wrote the article because you, I think, have readers in this world.

There maintains, like, people use the manosphere as a shorthand for like a bunch of different stuff, right?

Like, it's everything from like, you know, Charlie Kirk and, you know, partisan MAGA blogs, you know, to like bro podcasts where they, you know, talk about boobs to like very nerd tech podcasts.

And it's like kind of all to comedy podcast.

It's all lumped in together.

But there's a group of that, a subsection of that that still just kind of maintains this like idea that, oh, like this was good.

Like the Doge part was good, right?

Like that, that it was important that they took a chainsaw to the government and they're going to modernize some things.

And, you know, there, it's going to be just like, you know, when a private equity firm comes into a dying business and we're going to refresh it, and, and like, uh, and Elon, you know, like all that, like, myth, I do think persists.

Yes.

And like, it is important to just be blunt about like what actually happened with Doge.

Yeah.

And there was a good blog post written by one of the Doge volunteers who seems like a guy who went into this in fairly good faith and came in and he, you know, he talks about like, it seems like he did did like improve one software thing at the Veterans Administration.

But he also said that he found out that a lot of things that it seemed to him are not being done there correctly is just like

because they're following the law, not because people are being inept or anything like that.

And also just that there was much less waste than he had anticipated.

And so what happened is, because he wrote some blogs about this, he got fired from Doge, which, you know, I sympathize with on some level.

You don't want people just blogging about their secret government work.

I would sympathize that if it wasn't for, like, in the context of, oh, they also fired the DNI person that just put out the accurate memo about whether Venezuela is invading us and also fired the person that just accurately said the kill market.

Right.

Like, yes.

Within the broader context, it looks bad.

I think that if you look at this, and people should look at it, that like there's just, you know,

not much that has been achieved here in terms of any kind of real efficiency.

And, you know, Trump has this total disregard for the legislative process.

I have known people forever who are very critical of how sort of I.T.

procurement is done at the federal government.

This was a big thing in Obama era.

Like, there was a lot of folks talking about it.

It's something he talked about several times.

It should be fixed.

The idea of bringing some outside people from business to look at it is like seems reasonable, but you would have to like propose a law and work with members of Congress and do it.

And, you know, I kind of wish Obama had taken this on in a more serious way than just kind of talking about it.

I wish Joe Biden had.

I guess I wish Donald Trump would, but it's like so inconceivable that Trump would engage in like an earnest, good faith, bipartisan, good government initiative around contracting processes.

And the idea that what everything requires is this kind of like more like smash and grab, I guess it resonates with some people, but like all you're actually getting is this incredibly corrupt, incredibly lawless gang of people who just they want to be able to operate without constraint and they have no interest in fixing things.

Dealing with politics is frustrating.

Like that's a true fact about Congress.

But it just means like if you want to solve problems, you have to engage with the process, which they're not doing.

They have have legislation to cut Medicaid and do a tax cut and some zany other stuff.

So it's not like they can't write bills, but like this is what they have chosen to focus on.

And Doge is like a power grab and an ego trip and whatever, but there's no efficiencies forthcoming.

Yeah.

And as you mentioned before, but just to put a finer point on it, it's not just that they aren't really making things more efficient.

They also are doing material harm.

Yeah.

And there's some overlap in the Venn diagram between the effective altruist types.

Remember when that was in vogue?

And the people who thought it was great that Elon was going to bring in his tech guys to help make government more efficiency?

And what they actually did was cause horrific outcomes for the poorest people throughout the world to know actual end.

Yeah, I mean,

there's incredible chaos

unleashed on USAID, which, you know, USAID runs a fairly mixed bag of programs, but is some of the most cost-effective public health interventions in the world.

You know, I think credible estimates say tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of some of the poorest people in the world are going to die as a result of these disruptions in medical care.

Which also goes against the Elon natalism a little bit.

Like, I'm not as good at math as Elon, but having 10 Musk babies while killing 20,000 African babies, the math doesn't seem to net out there on our demographic.

That's not a great ratio.

And this was also an area where the Biden administration had, in fact, brought in like like a first ever like chief economist office.

They were doing more cost-benefit analysis on the USAID programming.

They were shifting funding to the sort of highest bang for the buck kinds of things.

And, you know, they just directed it all on the basis, it seems initially of some kind of conspiracy theories about USAID and Ukraine.

I don't totally understand what they were saying.

And then stubbornness.

Like they just didn't want to admit that they had this this wrong and they plowed ahead because, you know, Trump is a little bit cautious about political blowback, but these are things that impact foreigners.

Foreign aid is not a super popular cause.

I watched a focus group of like crossover voters who, you know, Trump voters who voted for Democrats down ballot.

And, you know, some of the guys in that group just had a, I think, a very...

callous attitude toward this.

I mean, they were not in denial about the fact that this was bad for the global poor.

They just didn't care.

But I care.

And, you know, I think there's a lot of people who at least profess to care about these kinds of things.

And it's, you know, it's worth understanding the big level of damage that has been done while under-delivering on savings by 90 to 95%.

All right.

Back to the bill, the big, fugly slut.

The main takeaways for you is what?

Well, I'll just let you cook.

Well, it seems like the budget deficit will get bigger, that

somewhere between 8 and 13 million people are going to lose health insurance, depending on how you count it.

We're going to cripple renewable energy deployment as well as the nuclear and geothermal industries in the United States.

And in exchange, I've been doing pretty well for myself, so I'm going to get a hefty tax cut.

So that's nice.

You know,

I'm excited.

You're kind of in the best spot here because you're salaried.

So, like, really, the people that are going to do the very best are people at the top of the tax bracket who are salaried.

Maybe this is how we can get the negatively polarized these guys against it.

It's like professional athletes are going to be the people that do the best.

Doing well.

Yeah.

The guys kneeling during the anthem are going to do the best.

Maybe we can negatively polarize some Republicans.

No, but I mean, you know, it's very bad.

And, you know, we are at a time when the budget deficit has started to have a meaningful impact on the economy, on mortgage rates, on home building, things like that.

You keep seeing different things in the bond market and the dollar, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, Trump has backed off a little bit from the craziest aspects of his trade policy, although he keeps then, I don't know what, what's the reverse of backing down.

It's always two steps forward, two steps for...

Reverse Taco.

Yeah, I don't know.

Right, exactly.

So we don't know where that's going to land, but we're piling on, you know, very fiscally irresponsible and yet also very cruel.

I mean, I'm talking about the deficit here.

And, you know, if you want to reduce the deficit, you have to cut some programs.

It takes some political courage, et et cetera.

But I think to do that by targeting the poorest people in the country for cuts in their programs, like that's really awful.

That's not how, you know, serious

budget wonks, whatever it is, think about the world.

And yeah, it like gets bad.

This is something I've been struggling with all week.

So back in the glory days of the Blogosphere, you know, when you were on Wonk Blog and you guys,

you and Ezra and others would hash out debates with nerdy Republicans and you guys would talk, go back and forth on the merits of Obamacare implementation and various legislation.

And like this time, I don't even know who's for this.

It feels totally like inertia that Donald Trump just wants something.

And so they have to give something to him, like a Christmas present.

And like on the merits of the bill, it's very challenging to find somebody who is like, I'm very excited about this on the merits.

I think it will be good for people.

That is true.

There's also been, I mean, as you know, a lot of transition in and out of the party coalitions.

I think the kinds of people who are capable of doing writing and math.

You want God on Heritage to be putting out white papers about how great this is.

Does that exist?

I don't feel like I've even seen that.

I put out a tweet asking about this yesterday, and somebody's like, the gun guys are very happy because one of the crazy things tucked into the bill is like they're getting rid of the excess taxes on various types of firearms.

Tax on silencers, right?

So you're going to be able to, I mean, that'll be good.

You know,

nobody wants loud noises as people shoot at each other.

We want to make sure we're incentivizing silencer purchases.

No, but you know, I mean, it's true.

I mean, I'm looking at like Heritage, right?

And like,

what are their top videos that they're pushing out?

Ending birthright citizenship, America's on track to lose a nuclear war with China, the truth about Trump's new self-deportation application, and time to shut down the Department of Education.

They don't seem to have that much interest in discussing this tax, secret Chinese links behind anti-Israel groups.

I just pulled up National Review.

They do have an editorial from the editors endorsing the modest Medicaid changes.

So there you go.

It doesn't feel full-throated, but there's something there.

Trump as art czar.

You know, I mean, I think the most partisan Republicans aren't aware, I think, that this is not

a strong

topic for them and they simply have material on other subjects, you know.

But it's the only thing they're doing.

Yes.

And it's literally like they did the Lake and Riley Act.

So that would be within the Glacius mode of passing something that is good for them from a salient standpoint, not that you're necessarily supportive of the specifics.

But like strategically speaking.

But like then they decided this is the only thing they're going to do this year.

Right.

That's crazy.

Right.

I mean, Trump in his first term, he tried and failed to do a giant health care cut, and then he moved on to just a deficit finance tax cut and so now they are stapling those two ideas together into a bill but the difference is is that you know that fight over aca repeal in 2017 that was like a huge deal like i remember jimmy kimmel talking about it there were protesters going it was like a big focal point of discourse and it was very bad for Trump and Republicans.

And they seem to me to have succeeded in kind of pushing a multi-trillion dollar piece of legislation into this kind of stealth mode.

You know, some of this is just like Democrats are incredibly demoralized compared to where they were in 2017.

There's just not the same level of resistance, energy, and vibes.

This might be a gift from Musk, but this might be changing.

I think it might be too early to render a verdict on whether this breaks through to the Jimmy Kimmel level of attention.

Because, well, A, the Senate hasn't passed, right?

Like, I think that there's still some hurdles ahead.

I hear you.

No, I agree.

I mean, it's not a done deal.

It's just we have gotten potentially close to the finish line without a lot of attention.

On,

as you say, like, this is their legislative agenda.

I mean, they do other things, obviously, but like, this is what Congress is doing.

Well, I mean, that's what Congress is doing.

Yeah, right.

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Okay, I want to get into kind of deeper on that and how to fight that, how to increase the salience and the strategy and democratic factional infighting.

But I have two funny stories I want to talk to you about first.

Can we just do two funny bits?

Because the first one is one that I think is a shared interest of ours.

And that is this.

Jeffrey Epstein, major investor in Peter Thiel, story from the New York Times yesterday.

In 2015 and 2016, Mr.

Epstein put $40 million into two funds managed by a firm co-founded by Mr.

Thiel.

That investment is worth nearly $170 million now.

2015 and 16, that was well after everybody knew he was a pedo, that Peter Thiel was

with him.

It's one of the important things for me, and I think for you as well, that we reorient the Jeffrey Epstein killed himself conspiracy theories towards Trump.

You know, now we have Cash and Dan Bongino talking about

the same thing.

It was really a suicide.

Yeah, they're part of the cover-up, it seems like to me.

I don't know what you think.

Jeffrey Epstein was, this was before my time, but he was a math teacher at the high school that I attended.

Really?

Yes.

And the head of school at the time who hired him was Bill Barr's dad.

Okay.

So it goes really deep.

It's interesting that Bill Barr's dad placed Jeffrey Epstein into a school.

Yes.

So there would be underaged boys and girls.

It is interesting.

I have a lot of interest in this.

And yeah, so Bongino in on the cover up now.

And I have a lot of questions.

I mean, in all seriousness,

who was he?

He was the labor secretary in Trump's first term.

Yeah, a customer.

He was the U.S.

attorney who cut the mysterious sweetheart plea deal with Epstein.

And then as soon as that became a big news story, he resigned from the cabinet and went somewhere.

And then we just like never, never heard from him again.

Maybe he's on an island.

Maybe, yeah.

I've got a lot of questions about that.

I do, too.

I mean, the death did happen while Donald Trump was president in a federal prison.

And, you know, one of the biggest acolytes now of his vice president, we've learned, has had a big financial dealing with him.

I don't know.

It's just something worth continuing to to look into.

Another in the fun story category.

I don't know if you saw this this morning.

Megan McCain is selling a bottle of COVID shot detox for $89.99.

You know, so if you got the shot and you regret it, you can pay Megan and her partner $89.99 and you'll get this kind of bottle of sludge that you can drink.

And I'm just wondering if you have any interest in that, if you have any partnerships that you want to promote right now.

I'm open to it.

I mean, I've got

it, seems to me, I mean, you would understand this better than I do, but conservative media has a lot of questionable product hawking as part of its core.

Do you feel like you're missing a model?

I mean, I do.

I mean, back when I was at Vox and hosted a podcast there, we had ads for like mattresses and home security systems.

They seem like pretty normal products.

And I was always thinking, like, can't we be selling some gold bars and like survival seed kits?

Like,

this good stuff out there that people might need.

I do wonder kind of how that would work.

Like that you took the COVID shot in 2021.

Everything turned out fine.

You're fine.

You're alive now, unlike the million people that died of COVID.

And you now you take, you drink something and you're like, you want that's going to cleanse your system of stuff that was in the shot you took a half decade ago?

Yeah, it's going to like unvaccinate you.

It's, um, I mean, I don't know.

You know, I'd like to learn.

This was Trump's vaccine in the first place.

So, you know, I would like to learn a little bit more from So, anyway, maybe Megan will talk about it.

People talk about studies.

One last kind of hot button story.

Did you see that this will transition us nicely into the Democrats?

The president's press secretary, the former president's press secretary, Corrine Jean-Pierre,

she's announced that she has a book

she's coming out with.

She's no longer a Democrat.

She's an independent.

She is.

The reason for that is because people were too mean to Joe Biden.

And so she doesn't feel at home in the Democratic Party anymore.

And I got to tell you, my contempt for these people grows astronomical.

Every day, it's like an exponential growth of my contempt for the people that were around Joe Biden.

What do you do?

This is a bad person.

What does this person do?

You know, this is ridiculous.

The whole situation with her, I have no real opinion about her conduct as press secretary.

It wasn't that great.

But it was clear.

You can just be king.

It wasn't that great.

It was clear that the president and the rest of his team did not have confidence in her performance.

She was not being used the way that a normal press secretary is.

And yet, they did not want to fire her and replace her with somebody who they did have confidence in.

Why do you think of this?

I don't know.

I mean, they were incredibly averse to making any kind of personnel changes, right?

I mean, the only cabinet change that happened across those four years was the Secretary of Labor left to run the hockey players union.

And so then the Deputy Secretary of Labor was put in as acting Secretary of Labor.

I'm not like continuity.

I'm not like, you got to fire this guy, you got to fire that guy, but like there's some mistakes.

They could have moved.

Nobody does it, right?

I mean, I was in a management role once in my life, hired a bunch of people.

I would say 90, 95% of them worked out great, but that still leaves you with five or 10% that didn't.

It's awkward and annoying to get rid of people who are bad fits for the roles that they're in.

But, you know, you just, you had an administration that, for whatever reason, was incredibly averse to moving people around, to firing people, to bringing new people in.

And, you know, they clearly had developed a lot of groupthink and insularity around what they were doing.

There are two things I want to throw out there.

Two things you got to throw out there.

One is Joe Biden was not making really controversial decisions internally.

And I think he was a long time not a particularly great decision maker.

I think that you could ask any of the Obama people from when he was much younger,

VP, about how he's kind of all over the map sometimes on stuff.

And they did a lot of stuff where there was consensus, and there's no doubt they achieved a lot, but like on things like this, you need the first, the boss, to be like, we got to get rid of this person.

And he's not really that big of a decider.

And as he aged, he probably seemed to be even less

interested in making those kinds of decisions.

That's one.

And two, overconcerned about identity stuff.

Like, if we fire a black woman press secretary, even though we have plenty of black people in this administration, obviously Joe Biden wants to have a representative staff and cabinet.

He spent a lot of time on that.

But even still, I don't want to deal with one day of people on Twitter saying that we did something inappropriate.

Well, the dynamic that you had, right?

I mean, Biden is an old white guy, and his key team of advisors is also a bunch of old white guys.

And they were clearly very sensitive about that.

And so they went forward, they really went hard on diversity in hiring for other kinds of things, in part because they believe that's important and in part to shield themselves from criticism, you know, from the fact that the president and his core team actually had very little diversity.

Some of that meant that, you know, they hired people who, sometimes people who weren't good, but sometimes like Javier Becerra

wanted to be attorney general.

He was the attorney general of California.

Making him attorney general of the united states would have been super duper reasonable but for whatever reason biden fell in love with the idea of merit garland as attorney general so then they like wanted to have real original sin well they wanted to have a latino person in a prominent cabinet role so they offered becera health and human services it's a worse less prestigious job than attorney general but also one that becera wasn't as well qualified for

and then they didn't have confidence in him in that role.

So the relationship between HHS and the White House became very, very kind of toxic.

And in that case, it's not even like, well, they were like too eager to elevate black and Hispanic people because they wouldn't give him the job he wanted and he was well suited to.

He was just being handled in this very sloppy kind of way.

And it's true.

I mean, if you go back and talk to people who I know from the Obama years, I mean, their critique of Joe Biden was always that he is not a crisp decision maker who thinks things through in a kind of well-ordered sort of way.

But, you know, Democrats, I mean, this is a podcast of its own, but like Democrats as a whole have a lot of hang-ups about identity that make it challenging, I think, to make clear decisions about different things and particularly personnel in different areas.

And

I know like my father-in-law is an old, like, you know, George W.

Bush Republican, really didn't like Trump, kind of reluctant Biden-Harris voter.

Is he listening right now?

I just want to shout out your father.

Well, find him if you're out there, Doug.

But like this stuff drives him crazy.

Like I grew up in like progressive

circles.

So it's like normal to me.

And this is like one of these things.

I think like rightly.

I assume Doug isn't a fan of the alternate, which is the reverse identity type of politics where you're hiring wrestling executives to run the secretary of the Department of Education.

This is like an old-fashioned guy wants you to say you're hiring good people for things.

You know, I mean, I think.

Weekend talk shows.

It makes a lot of sense, right?

And so, yeah, now, I mean, we have just an administration run by like B-tier Fox News hosts.

But, you know, Biden was not doing the best with this kind of stuff.

And, you know, Jean-Pierre's attitude toward this, I guess she thinks this will sell books, but I don't think it will.

I don't think anyone else is.

I don't either.

It's coming out.

It's just as likely she cancels her book tour.

And who would want to talk to her at this?

Oh, I'm a principled independent because people are mean to it.

Like, what?

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There's an article you wrote recently, which is why I initially reached out to you, that I could not be more full-throated.

on your side of and I think it's just important to talk about, which is the Democratic Senate.

Yeah, it's not good.

And Lauren Egan wrote about this for us in the Bullwork on Sunday.

If you want to check out her reporting,

and it does seem like at least there's some thinking happening about this, which is good, because I think there was a period of time where there really wasn't that much thinking about it.

And I think the Democrats put up a lot of like generic Democrats in places where generic Democrats have no chance of winning just because of inertia.

And if the Democrats are ever going to induct the Senate, as your article lays out, they need to win in places like Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Texas, where Kamala Harris lost by quite a bit and where Democrats haven't won statewide in a while.

Yeah.

And so that means doing something like not a little different on the edges, but like trying some things quite different.

So anyway, talk about that.

Right.

So, I mean, you know, Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump.

That is a really big deal.

And for people's emotional state, Trump being president, you know, is what at the end of sunshine.

I've been going through a lot.

it was the change it would have taken for her to win, right?

To narrowly win, was pretty modest.

It's modest.

So you could say, you know, if the message had been a little different, if events in the world had been a little different, it's just, it's easy to.

She could have been a little bit stronger.

I thought she'd run a good campaign, but right, like, like you could imagine a pretty modest change in events on an Earth 2, where we are

discussing the Kamala Harris agenda right now and with too much, a lot fewer listeners.

But Democrats in the Senate who ran ahead of Harris, right?

I mean, we had a number of people, Gallego and Slotkin in particular, like won seats in states where she lost.

Gallego, really, particular is the one that won actually more votes than her.

The Slotkin and Baldwin won a lot because of dropping.

With under votes, right?

But Democrats were nowhere close to winning a Senate majority.

No.

You know, that

Sherrod Brown and John Tester are good candidates who ran well ahead of Kamala Harris, but didn't come close to winning those races in Montana and Ohio, because Harris lost those states by a huge amount.

And if you look back to 2020, right, I mean, Joe Biden won the popular vote by a large amount in 2020, but he carried 25 states exactly.

If you held every single seat from a state that Biden won in 2020, you get a 50-50 Senate.

That's hard to do because Susan Collins, for example, is incredibly difficult to defeat.

Fucking Davos Dave McCormick just won.

So that can't happen for six years.

You can't win Pennsylvania.

And there's McCormick.

And you want to win those 25 bluest states, but you also have to be having...

viable campaigns in Florida, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and Alaska.

Those are the next six states.

Now, you know, those are conservative states, but if you can win three or four out of those 12 Senate seats,

you're in the game.

You're also putting pressure on senators to, like, you want to be in a situation where if Ken Paxton defeats John Cornyn in a primary, that should endanger the seat, right?

Where you can like punish the Republican Party for putting forward corrupt people and psychopaths and stuff like that, even if like a nice guy who's doing an okay job can win.

And the difference between Harris winning and losing would be small.

We have factional arguments in the Democratic Party because you know people care about things.

But if you're saying we have to do X to win the presidential election, like that's not true.

Like small changes could turn defeat into victory there.

But in the Senate, we're very far.

Like something has to be done that is a lot different.

And some of that is the recruiting of the candidates.

But I think that it is hard to be relying so much on people running against the National Party.

And I think that the leadership, whether that continues to be Chuck Schumer or becomes Brian Schatz or Chris Murphy in the future, needs to like move the caucus in a direction where you're not running with like a backpack full of lead against you.

Because, you know, Sherry Brown and John Tesner have like those are good politicians guys like Colin Allred, Tim Ryan, who've lost badly in recent cycles, those are good politicians.

They're smart guys.

They know what they're doing.

They run ahead of the national ticket.

But there's only particularly if you're not an incumbent, right?

Because if you are Susan Collins, you can do things to sort of credibly commit yourself to differentiating.

But it's hard for a challenger to just be like, oh, I'm so different.

And your opponent is like, well, no, he isn't.

I don't think that there's an easy answer to this.

I think it's the important thing to say.

Yeah, I see.

So I have my opinion right now about to share.

I don't think my opinion is a silver bullet.

I agree with you that it would help for Democrats not to be, you know, running these states, not to be so burdened by having like whatever the backpack full of lead by the party brand issues.

I think changing the party brand is probably tougher than what I'm about to suggest.

I don't think the Democrats should try, should not try to do it because it's hard, but I think it's a little tougher.

Here's my thing with John Tester and with with all of them.

I love Claire McCaskill.

She's my BFF on the MSNBC set.

I love Heidi Heitkamp.

I've had her on this pod before.

My husband worked for her.

But all of these people went down the same path, basically, which was they ran as kind of conservative Democrats.

And then over time, because of national pressure or whatever, they really started to seem much more like regular Democrats.

Then they thought they could differentiate themselves by talking about local stuff.

And that really worked in the 90s and 2000s.

I'm going to, I took a very important position on the drilling and this random part of North Dakota, or I took, you know, whatever it is.

That doesn't really work now.

And like, to me, I think that John Tester would have been much better suited to win, and maybe he still couldn't have.

But in the future, if the voters who don't pay that close of attention to Senate and congressional races like they do presidential races just know one thing about you.

And the one thing they know about you is that it's different from the Democrats.

And I literally don't care what it is.

Like, I have candidates try to call me, and that is my advice for you.

I was like, I want you to pick one thing and have it not just be like kind of a thing you mentioned sometimes that you run ads about the last three months.

I want it to be the one thing that people know about you.

Like, if they ask you one thing about candidate X running in Iowa, J.D.

Shulton, I guess, just got in.

I want the one thing people to know is that you think the Democrats are really stupid when it comes to ethanol, guns, whatever.

I don't know.

You pick it, like some cultural issue.

And I just think that a lot of these candidates are reluctant to do that.

And I've talked to one of them who tried this at a very local level.

And he was like, Tim, it's annoying.

I go to the county meetings and people yell at me about this.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's right.

People are going to yell.

And that's good because people are going to only know that one thing about you.

And you can still be a Democrat.

I'm not asking you to like, you know, be a troll who pokes Democrats in the eyes all the time, right?

It's tough to do.

And I don't even know if that'll work.

Well, and I think that these things have a feedback mechanism to them.

Right.

So that it would be good to have people who are more strongly differentiated.

I think it would be good for the National Party leadership, though, to address itself to the more progressive donors and say, look, the amount of squeezing that we did on these people was a mistake.

That like you wanted us to get Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp and all these people to, like, walk the line for us.

Yeah.

And we did it.

And, like, the upshot is that now we don't have those seats, right?

Joe Manchin was constantly being set up to be this, like, huge villain.

Which maybe helped him?

In some ways, but it ultimately just got him to quit.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Like, he didn't feel like he was a valued and welcomed member of the Senate caucus, whereas Tester had a much happier time.

But I remember, you know, 2009, 2010, I was super frustrated with all these conservative Democrats who were out there.

And I was like, oh my God, John Tester won't even vote for the goddamn DREAM Act?

Like, what is going on?

But that was the version.

I don't know if it's a good time to go back.

It's complicated, though.

Probably would have been better for them to just jam through like medic, whatever the public option was.

Some healthcare stuff, yes.

Yes.

But the version of John Tester who had me tearing my hair out was the version who got re-elected in 2012 and 2018.

Because as much as people on the internet may find that, like, I'm some incredible villain,

like, I voted for Kamal Harris.

I voted for Hillary Clinton.

I voted for Joe Biden.

John Tester's constituents did not do that, right?

Like, you got to not just take like some like dipshit centrist substat guy like me and be like, well, we need people like that.

Like, you got to be more conservative than that, at least on something, right?

In some key way.

And like, maybe it's immigration, maybe it's gun.

You know, like me, if it was me, like, we could have English gun laws, French gun laws.

But, you know, I live in a city.

Like, I'm a politically moderate person, but I'm not interested in owning assault rifles or silencers with non-tax silencers or having shootouts on the street, things like that.

But, you know, the politics of national gun control have not gone anywhere for Democrats, right?

So it's like you have like Biden and Schumer and others like talking about assault weapons bans, and then there's no way to like win in the states that you're trying to target.

It's not progressives

number one or number two or number three or number four or number five actual priority.

And like, you're just gonna have to have, as you were saying, a bigger tent in which a lot of the candidates have one or two things that they are like clearly broken from the party with, and where the party leadership is saying,

and that's fine.

They're saying, I disagree with Governor Bashir, Senate recruit Bashir, about X,

but

we want him in the caucus.

Like we want a bigger tent party that has more heterodoxy around cultural issues, that reflects the breadth and diversity of the United States of America.

We expect our Senate candidates in Kentucky and Louisiana and Montana and Texas to reflect the values of the people in those states, which are not the values of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries' constituents.

And, you know, it's tough.

Some of the people that hate you on the internet would say this.

And I think that they might have a point.

The problem is I just don't know that this person exists.

That the way to do it is not to do what Matt Iglesias is suggesting, but to run a candidate in Montana or one of these places, Alaska, who hates companies.

and wants, you know, to arrest bankers

that did bad things, right?

And who wants socialized health care, but who also likes guns

and is maybe a little bit more moderate on immigration and guns, but that the great differentiation is away from the Democratic establishment on their corporate shilling.

What do you make about that idea?

I actually think that as sort of narrowly phrased, I mean, I think it is true that in rural America, if you can position yourself as antagonistic to Wall Street, say, right, which is like a foreign kind of thing, that there is some real juice in that.

At the same time, I mean, I was moderating a panel that Jared Golden was on.

And he's got some of that like populist vibe to him on economics.

He's very pro-labor guy.

But he was like talking about some regulations that the Biden administration tried to put on the lobstering industry in Maine related to saving right whales.

And he was like very opposed to that.

That was like part of his like local shtick.

And I mean, I don't fucking care.

But like, I think politicians, particularly politicians who are, you know, facing some some natural skepticism the voters have to be supportive of their local businesses and local economic interests

which means you know if you're talking about alaska there's a really big oil and gas in alaska and do you think that your apply guys would really like a candidate that was about drill baby drill in alaska and also was you know against the gun bill that biden passed yeah uh but also is a socialist i just like i think that that is like a white whale that should be tried maybe in some of these states, but I don't know that any of the people on the internet that hate Matt Iglesias would really like that candidate that much.

That's my question about the economic populist strategy is like, how does it intersect not to the kind of like internet villain businesses, but to the businesses that like actually exist in

in the places where we're talking about running candidates, right?

You know, whether that's agriculture in Iowa, you know, other kinds of things there.

Because it seems to me that the relationship to the fossil fuel industry that the Democratic Party has is just really tough.

Like, we know that Pennsylvania is a state that Biden won, that Harris needed to win to become president.

And, you know, we know like John Fetterman, Bob Casey, none of those guys are for fracking ban kind of stuff.

And Ohio is an even more important industry there.

Texas, Alaska, it's a more important industry there.

So

you can work that into an abundance framework that we're going to have an abundance of natural gas, or you can work it into a populist framework where it's like, I'm going to get you cheap gas.

You're going to fight for the workers there, the landmen.

It's just a tough one.

I mean, like, the climate movement has a lot of clout inside the Democratic Party, but I think does not have a realistic path to majorities in Congress.

But to me, that's like a much more concrete and like actionable question than this sort of like vague anti-monopoly kind of stuff.

I want to be clear.

I think that the Democrats should try

a fucking landman who likes oil but is also a socialist and hates bankers in one of these states and see if it works.

And I think they should try a Mark Cuban type candidate and see if it works.

And I think that it needs to be something different.

Okay.

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I guess it kind of overlays a little bit with Welcome Fest.

Yeah.

A couple of things things I saw, I did not watch all the panels.

Once again, I wasn't invited, so I didn't get to see all of it.

A couple of things I saw that caught my eye that are Matt Iglesias-coated.

One was some guy was talking about how Democrats in Florida really fucked up by fighting the don't say gay bills.

Yeah, I don't know.

Reagan opposed the Briggs initiative in 1978.

So I think Democrats opposing it 47 years later, a version of it being the thing that constantly in Florida, I'm not sure that's quite right.

This kind of goes, though, to your theory, your unifying theory of the case about salience of issues.

And maybe there's some of these issues that shouldn't become as salient as they are and Democrats shouldn't fight about them.

And I guess my issue with that is...

I don't share your view that like random mid-bench Congress people's tweets like matter at all as far as what the salience of issues are with people.

And I think that the salience of issues is like driven a lot by the president, which at this point we can't control, and driven a lot by what people are actually interested in.

Like one example in addition that don't say gay bill, and then I'll let you respond to his ram yesterday was like, Democrats shouldn't talk about the trans sports thing because

you know it's not a winner for us and there's only 11 trans and this is a popular opinion among democratic politicians.

But my point is like people like talking about the trans sports thing.

And why do people like talking about it?

Because it's something everybody can touch.

Like everybody can grasp and understand that there's a girl, you know, who transitioned, who, you know, is born a male, who's in a shot put competition and wins the medal.

And like, that's an interesting thing for people to talk about it, whether we like it or not.

And some people that are talking about it are going to be bigots, and some people that are talking about it are just kind of trying to understand and think through it.

And like, that is just something people naturally talk about more than like Medicaid work requirement

because people don't.

like understand Medicaid work requirements and not a lot of people experience it.

A small group of people, it's really important too.

So like that's like my main issue with all this.

I think that ignoring this stuff is not really the right strategy, but why don't you go away?

I agree, particularly on the trans issues.

You can't just tell people, no, you're wrong to think that this is important.

People feel how they feel about things.

I also did not see Andy Rotherham's talk.

I just saw Jay Weigel tweet

quoting this one thing.

But I do know Andy, and like, I think the steel man version of this is that Biden-era Democrats, from the president to the Secretary of Education on down, seem to me to completely lose focus on the question of school quality and like actual education in the schools.

And if I ask them about stuff like, what about this city in California that's like getting rid of advanced algebra?

Or what about this idea that like we need to ban cell phones in schools or something?

The answer that they would give would be, well, you know, like, this is not really a federal policy issue.

Like, we don't want to wade into it.

But they would wade very aggressively into some of these, like, southern library shenanigans and other kinds of things.

Or the renaming of a school.

Right.

Because what they were doing, I mean, this goes back to

your criticism of Biden's management at the top is if there was something that just united all Democrats, they would talk about it.

But if it was something that was divisive amongst Democrats, they didn't want to take a position on it.

And Democrats have always been the party that is more trusted on education.

Like Democrats fucking love education, love teachers, love schools,

like to spend money on things, you know, et cetera.

And between COVID school closures, then all the problems that were happening once kids went back to school, a lot of these kind of culture war controversies that started coming out, the Biden administration was not like conveying that it cared about whether kids were learning in school and that this was like a point of focus for them.

I totally agree with this.

And so I guess maybe my issue is, I think sometimes there's like this idea that like, oh,

focus on this, on these like boring substantive things instead of these other things everybody's talking about.

And I just don't think that's possible in this world.

And so like, for example, in the school stuff, like you mentioned the phone saying, everybody has an opinion on this, right?

So like Democrats really leaning in on that.

and being like, I'm going to be the guy or the woman that's like, we shouldn't have phones in schools for people under eighth grade or whatever it is.

And I'm going to talk about that.

I'm going to go and podcast about that.

Like, that's interesting.

People will talk about that.

That's interesting.

Or on the don't say gay thing, like maybe rather than not talking about it, or rather than calling them all the bigots or whatever, you can just say, do you really want the most racist mom in your community determining what books are in your kids' schools?

I don't.

I'd rather the principal do it.

Right.

Like, I just think that there are ways, like, and like, there was this time about, oh, Greenland's a distraction.

And I'm like, I'm kind of like, why don't you make it their distraction?

Like, you are having issues right now, and Donald Trump is sending spies into nuke.

I don't think that's a good idea.

I just think that Democrats should actually play the game and find ways to engage on cultural stuff that is more broadly popular.

And that's Trump's secret sauce.

He's tabloid.

Like, play the tabloid game back at him, I guess, is my point.

Yeah, it is just true, right?

That like Democrats' strongest hand is on relatively boring, slightly technical stuff related to healthcare and taxes.

And that's a problem for them because you can't like force people to decide that medication.

Is that true, though?

I think so.

Is that true?

Well, I mean, it's true that like if you could get people to only talk about those questions, that would be advantageous to Democrats.

But as you say, you can't do that, right?

I do think, though, that you can try to

tie things back to make sure that you are mentioning, right?

Like, as these things go on, because if you're trying to get a bigger tent of people, you're trying to try more things, you're trying to shake things up, you're going to get the question.

Those candidates are going to get the question.

So like, so why are you a Democrat?

Like, what's going on, Tim?

And if it's you, the answer might be like, Donald Trump fucking sucks.

This guy's a dictator, et cetera, et cetera.

But that's not a good message if you're running in a state where Trump won 56, 57% of the vote.

I'm not running for Senate in Louisiana.

No, no, absolutely, absolutely.

But I do think the most natural touchstone to be like, why am I a Democrat running in a red state with some more heterodox stands and cultural issues is this stuff that goes back to health care,

social security, tax fairness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That is the connective tissue that, you know, amidst different kinds of factional controversies and like different opinions about guns and library books and all kinds of other things.

Yeah, if the Louisiana person called me and Since I should answer that question, I'd say, well, Jeff Landry just increased the sales tax here while cutting the tax on the richest and like do you want to pay more money at the grocery store and the gas station like working people are getting fucked he says he's for the forgot like that's what i would say here so you're right like that's how you kind of but you can kind of make that into a more more cultural thing by being like working folks like me like i ideally like you would find somebody in louisiana that yeah who's credible and authentic and and in that way and can just be like i don't want to fucking pay more money at the gas station because Jeff Landry wants to give a tax cut to his pals, right?

Like that's good.

That's that could probably isn't going to get you elected, but that's plausible.

It's something,

right?

I mean, and you, because you want people to think of the Democratic Party as the party that looks out for the little guy, right?

And I think most of the positions the Democrats have on cultural issues are ultimately downstream of that.

People may lose sight of that, right?

But the reason Democrats became the party of civil rights, the party of feminists, the party of environmental protection, the party of gay rights, et cetera, is downstream of an earlier identity as the party of the little guy.

And so, like, sociocultural minority groups are little guys, like vis-a-vis mainstream society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But it always works best when you can, like, emotionally, intellectually, and coalition politics-wise, like foreground this kind of general commitment to like the people versus the powerful, something, something of that nature, rather than coming across as

obsessed with micro-identities, as kind of individual considerations, or as like an elite diversity.

We're caring about elite interests, right?

And this was the issue of the democracies.

Yeah, I agree with that.

But also, I mean, I think we often get like diversity

as an elite interest, right?

As like, we're really obsessed with gender dynamics on the corporate board of directors.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, this goes to the student loan thing.

Like the student loan bailout was like, again, I mean, you could frame that as a helping the little guy, but like it was probably easily reframed as not helping people that didn't go to college.

Well, and you just, you would have to, you would have to follow it up with like some kind of

discussion of like, what is higher education for?

Like, like, like, why, why is this good?

Like, what, what are we trying to do?

And then the student loans can fit into that or not, depending on what it is you're saying.

And look, I mean, we had a president who could not communicate on his own behalf and had a team that didn't.

But, but, you know, Hakeem Jeffreys and Chuck Schumer don't have that excuse.

And it's not like they're doing light years better in terms of explaining

how do these positions that they've taken relate to like our society and how they think it should work.

Yeah.

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Okay, this takes us back to the immigration thing, which is my final point.

Well, we have one fun topic at the end, but which is my final point.

Once again, come to our rally tomorrow at five o'clock at the Supreme Court.

And maybe Democrats just aren't capable of doing this, like the actual candidates.

So, this might be my version of the far leftists.

Like, if we only had an anti, you know, Wall Street candidate that also was a gun owner, then we could really win back the working vote.

But, like,

I just think about the Joe Rogan thing.

And I think about this in the trans context, right?

Where it's like, in the same way that, like,

oh, it's only 11 people who, you know, only 11 trans athletes in college who are competing.

And the same way that argument doesn't really work because some people out there care about the 11 people in college that are trans athletes.

Can't you flip it on this thing and be like, I'm focusing just on the 11 people they kidnapped?

There's a makeup artist.

There's a guy who has an autism awareness tattoo.

You know, there is whatever.

You find eight other people.

They kidnapped 11 fucking people.

And guess what?

They might come kidnap you next time.

You don't know.

If they can kidnap somebody and send them to a foreign prison, they could kidnap anybody.

That resonated with Joe Rogan.

And I think that that is a way into the issue that conceivably Democrats could win if they were disciplined about it.

And I don't know that just like because immigration, generally speaking, is a better issue for Trump, I don't know if it means that that's smart to not engage engage on that, in addition to the obvious moral principle that this is outrageous, which I know you share.

But just on the strategic point, what do you think?

I mean, look, I think the Romero case that you are focused on has to be the single

weakest ground for Trump in the whole immigration firmament.

I find the facts of the Garcia case are just not quite as favorable as I think Democrats sort of want them to be at times.

But, you know, I don't object.

You don't object to our rally tomorrow?

Will you attend?

You're not going to attend, but you're not going to object.

Yeah, yeah.

No, but listen, I wish that some of the creative flying to El Salvador is a stunt, right?

Which is not in a bad way.

Part of politics is stunts, right?

I wish that we had some of the creativity around stunt generation that was put into that.

Like, what is the flying to El Salvador of Medicaid cuts, of the impact on electricity prices that the energy provisions of this bill are going to have?

Because, you know, like it just, it matters, you know, like you have to come up with way, try to come up with ways to drive attention to stuff and not just be purely sort of position takers.

Because I do think it is clear that like Trump and J.D.

Vance are eager to fight about immigration.

And part of their eagerness to fight about immigration is that I'm not 100% sure that Democrats know

what their answer is to the question of what do they think should be done vis-à-vis the couple million people who entered the country during the Biden years.

And I would feel more confident about picking on these most egregious abuses that Trump is doing

if I understood like what Democrats'

bottom line was on this question.

Yeah, there are a lot of issues that Republicans don't have a solution to that they fucking demagogue on because it's interesting.

My argument is that in this particular case, you're overlapping something that's interesting that people can talk about and just chat about.

Be like, do you think that it's really a gay makeup artist that we put into a foreign hole?

And like, it's a fucking horror movie?

You know, imagine like getting grabbed off the street.

It's like, oh, we don't like your tattoos.

We're going to send you to El Salvador and put you in a Robocop prison, Right.

Like, I, so I, I don't know.

I mean, there are other examples about this.

I'm just honing in on this because it's what I'm focused on.

But like, I don't know.

I mean, there are, there are a decent number of things that the Republicans like lean in on that are that are niche issues.

They don't have a solution to the fact that the Disney movies had lesbian kisses in them and they don't like it.

They didn't like have a policy, like a global policy solution to that.

They just were like, I'm fucking pissed that Buzz Lightyear had a lesbian kiss in it.

And I don't, you know.

I don't know that complaining about Buzz Lightyear was a great winner for for them, though.

You know, I mean,

look, immigration, though, has become like a huge bleeding sore for Democrats vis-a-vis public opinion.

And

it makes me a little bit queasy

when I see elected officials.

Now, look, if you can get Joe Rogan interested in this, which it seems like people did for a while, like, that's amazing, you know?

And if Chris Van Hollen was on the Joe Rogan show to talk about this, maybe not ours.

I think that would be great.

But okay, it's whatever.

Well, whoever it is, you know what I mean?

Whoever's interested in it, right?

Like, I think that would be great because you're reaching an audience of people who Democrats don't have, but vis-a-vis somebody who is sympathetic to your point on here, you could make like big new ground, et cetera, et cetera.

But it seemed to me that, you know, Democrats got their asses handed to them on the immigration issue in 2024.

And then there was a lot of eagerness to be like, ah, Trump's gone too far.

Like, we're going to, we're going to nail him here.

And Trump has gone too far.

And that is an important point to make but

we have some work to do amongst ourselves in terms of articulating like what is the position that we have now I think I kind of think we were talking about you know things that would have made a difference I mean I think if Kamala Harris when she was asked on the view about disagreements with Joe Biden I think if she'd said like look obviously he was too slow to take these actions on border security and like once he did it it started working and by the way, in my fantasy world, when people are like, why are you so mad at Joe Biden?

One of the things that I would fly back in my DeLorean to do, which I said at the time, was that Joe Biden should bring Kamala in to the White House and say, hey,

kid, put you in a tough spot here.

Here's what we're going to do.

You're going to go say this on the view.

And then when people ask me about it at the next press conference, I'm going to say, you know, I should have listened to her.

I don't know if that would have worked, but it would have been preferable to what happened, which was like pressuring her to like run cover for it.

To not, right, exactly, exactly.

So if you had to pick like one thing that could have been done differently, like I think that's, that would be the thing.

But now I hear a lot of Democrats who

are like,

well, I'm for being tough on the border.

I'm for borders, which is good.

But like Trump has secured the border.

Right.

So we're like now moving on to this secondary question where like he is trying to get rid of this large population of it's some longtime undocumented people it is some people who had pending asylum claims it's some people who had temporary protective status or um parole you know this like a very miscellaneous bag but it's millions and millions of people and they would like to get them all to leave the country and democrats need to think about what they want to say about that i think like in a in a big picture way right and the closest i saw was chuck schumer saying well you know like our goal is to get a path to citizenship for all of these, however many million people it is.

And I'm not sure that's a great take.

That's much more complicated than opposing the kidnapping.

Right.

I concur with you that it's much more complicated than opposing the kidnapping.

I don't know, man.

I just think that they don't actually have any pressure.

My advice on this, it would be to say, hey, I don't think the government should be able to kidnap people because of their tattoos.

And I think that, and I agree with this administration that we should get out criminals.

And it seems concerning to me that the administration is focusing on kidnapping people over their tattoos and taking police resources away from finding criminals and using it instead on raiding Kin Seneras.

Like, I don't think, you know, like, that's, that would be my message.

If we can talk about crime, you know, and I saw Kelly and Gallego had a letter about this today or yesterday.

And, you know, I mean, I think that's good.

I don't have any tattoos.

So, you know, it's a no.

All right.

We've gone way over, but your article today was on daddy blogs.

And so people should go check that out.

But I'm still Slow Boring, but I guess I have just two follow-ups.

One, how much of the housework do you do around your home?

And do you have any daddy blog?

If you did start a daddy blog, is there any topics you'd like to see explored?

My housework is egregious.

Well, what about the parenting?

What about I'm like a filthy person?

I like to think I'm like an okay parent.

How many hours a week do you think you're spending parenting versus podcasting?

Parenting,

it's too many.

Too many parenting or too many podcasts.

I mean, you know, parenting is a joy and a delight.

I spend many hours attending swim practices, which is one of the most boring sports for a person's child to take up as a hobby.

But it's a good time to get some reading in, et cetera.

So, I mean, my daddy blog would be just mostly about youth sports, like 10-year-old soccer teams.

You know, I've got a lot of questions about the coaches' lineups.

You and JVL strategy.

That could be a mutual thing.

JVL loves writing.

He does like one try out a quarter about youth sports.

So maybe you guys can have a joint sub stack on that.

All right.

That's Matt Iglesias.

His sub stack is so boring.

You should check it out, especially if

you find him annoying on Twitter because sometimes he's better in long form than he is on Twitter.

And it's much more reasonable there.

And so I hope to see some of you out tomorrow in DC.

And for the rest of you, we'll be back here for a Friday podcast, which I'll be doing from our offices in DC.

We'll see you all then.

Peace.

Look inside these walls and you see them having withdrawals of a prisoner on his way.

Trapped inside your desire to fire bullets that stray.

Track a tire, just tell you I'm tired and ran away.

I should ask a choir, what do you require to sing a song that acquired me to have faith?

That's the rank I spin.

I should pray for the record.

I recognize that I'm easily pray.

I got eight alive yesterday.

I got hand in my city building.

It's probably big as a building.

Me jumping off of the roof, it's me just playing and safe.

But what am I supposed to do when the topic is red or blue?

And you understand that I ain't.

But no, I'm accustomed to just a couple that look for trouble and live in the street with rank.

No better picture to paint than me walking from Bible studying Carter's homies.

Because he had said he noticed my face from a function that took in place.

They was wondering if I banged.

Step on my neck and and get blood on your Nike checks.

I don't mind, cause one day you'll respect the good gear, Mad City.

Last hallucinations, baby.

Deal education, baby.

Wanna reconnect with your elation.

This is your station, baby.

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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