Find Out: How Democrats can fight back

Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the Find Out podcast. This is episode three.
I can't believe we've already done or we're about to do the third one of these. We're going to be tackling a pretty controversial topic tonight, and that is how do we actually bring more men back into the Democratic fold? Obviously, we all know that men are the worst demographic, white men in particular.
And in order to win elections moving forward, we are going to have to build a coalition which includes more of them. So who better to talk about how to bring more men back in than six white dudes on this podcast? So, guys, I think we're going to probably ruffle some feathers with this one, but we're here to talk about difficult things and make change and make sure that we win elections moving forward.
So I don't know who wants to be the first person to dive into this topic, but how about if I ruffle all of your favors, your feathers, go for it. All right.
So I've been bugged all week long with something that we were saying and doing last week. In my view, we were talking about AOC as a possible candidate and women in general.
And on one hand, I totally get the argument about, you know, look, we had two women candidates and they lost and there's this aura of, oh, women can't win and stuff. But when we were talking about all that, that question, can a woman win, along with what would the military think, has been bugging me all week.
Because when we do that, what are we doing? We're doing the right-wing work for them. We're setting up the excuses.
We're preloading it. And I think we have to take accountability to that.
That's fair. You're not the only one who lost sleep over that one.
I thought about that. And I was like, I think we fucked up a little bit.
But it's a good opportunity. I think, like, I'll clarify because I'm the one who brought up the military aspect of things.
Yeah, it was you. I didn't want to say your name.
It was you. Fuck it.
I think it's just... You can complain to me.
That's fine. It wasn't...
For me, it's not a comment on a female. It was a comment specifically about AOC and her background being so far from the military.
I personally think, you know, I've made this argument a lot of times because I've gotten a ton of comments from people, you know, followers of mine thinking that, oh, Harris lost because she's a woman. I completely disagree.
I don't think she lost because she's a woman and I think a woman can win. I know maybe some people here don't agree with that necessarily, but I don't think it's so much a female problem.
But again, the military thing, I don't think it's also a female being commander-in-chief. I think it's the specific background of that particular female we're talking about.
I'm like, I don't think people are going to be super keen on her specifically being leader, but like Hillary Clinton would have been an amazing commander-in-chief. Kamala Harris would have been an amazing one too.
That wouldn't have concerned me at all. It's really just about the, you know, the resume.
So, so I want to, I'm going to push on that a little bit because, you know, I think that, you know, when we have had leaders in charge, uh, with a military background, how has that worked out for us? And the answer is it hasn't worked out very well. George W.
Bush had a military background mean when he showed up um you know and he lied us into what i would say is the worst foreign policy disaster in at least 50 years he had military experience um you know i i mean the generals that uh that trump has put in military experience none of that went particularly well um you know i think that when we put military leaders in charge, I don't think that I have necessarily seen a better success rate than when we've had civilian presidents with no background. Like I give you an example, Bill Clinton waged an air campaign in Bosnia, which was successful and we didn't lose a single person.
That doesn't mean that like everything he did in foreign policy was right. But the reality is like when we put military leaders in charge of the military, I am not seeing a success rate that, that lends to this credence that let's say AOC couldn't be in charge because the experience.
There's a reason why the founders set it up so that the civilians ran the military or the bosses.

Yeah.

I mean, for me, it's not so like I'm not advocating for a military, you know, somebody with a military background to be the president. It was really just like in that last three weeks of the election, when you have people who don't really pay close attention coming in, their value system is different from the ones who are paying attention now.
Right. And it was that was really the context of the argument of AOC even being a candidate, which is like right now, anybody who is really activated on the left really likes AOC because she represents the vision of what the left sees as the right way forward.
But the middle of the country will look at somebody like that and go, she's what, 40 and has never had anything even close to something high stakes in terms of what has been in her purview when it comes to things like that, that are national security concerns. That was really more of the framing that, you know, contextualize that.
But my whole point is we don't ask that same question or have that same critique over any, we don't ask those questions for a male candidate. That's my point.
That's fair. Like this was a conversation and this is Chris for people who don't know my voice.
This was a conversation between me and Zach last week. And and I think is he's right, because we're not talking about who is actually qualified.
We're talking about who is the person who votes for Trump twice in a row. who do they think is and their vote matters as much as mine.
I am a combat veteran. I am someone who grew up blue collar, went to a great high school.
You know, I got a degree from Columbia University. I've been working in veterans organizations on DOD and VA policy my entire life.
I think that Hillary Clinton would have been an incredibly effective commander in chief. However, back in 2016, everybody cared about fucking emails.
And those same people who were obsessed with emails right now are like, no, it's totally OK for Pete Hegseth, this fucking part time major, you know, who served in the army, kind of, sort of like it's OK if he's using signal to broadcast troop movements and attacks against our foreign enemies with the vice president of the United States and Tulsi Gabbard,

two other veterans who I served in Iraq the same time that J.D. Vance was there.
We were a few miles from each other. Fucking Tulsi Gabbard, she's been a member of Congress.
She served in the military. She's, I think, a lieutenant colonel, right? Like these people who ultimately decided that, no, Hillary Clinton's too much of a risk went and were like, I'm going to vote for that fucking idiot I saw on TV because I just consume late night television and think that anyone I see on TV is brilliant.
So Zach is not talking about AOC and her qualifications and what we think is right. Zach is talking about what these fucking morons who think that Pete Hegseth is a genius and who think that anything that Elon Musk does is is like manna from heaven.
That's who we're talking about. We're not talking about AOC.

And up, sorry, Tim, up a click from there is the same thing we were talking about last week, which is we're always fighting their battle. We're always refuting their message.
It's not about tax cuts and the deficit and the debt. It's not about military leadership because 700-year-old Captain Bonespurs, who actively despises military service, he despises all service and he pities it.
He doesn't—pity is not the right word. He looks down on it and he thinks people who serve are just suckers.
I mean, I know there's the suckers and losers and there's the controversy around that. I believe it.
But you don't have to believe that he said those words to look at his actions and just very clearly understand that it's not just military service, it's service. Anyone who serves anyone is a sucker and probably getting taken advantage of, and that's why he didn't serve then.
That's why he doesn't serve. He doesn't compromise.
He doesn't do anything for anybody else. So the hard question I think we have to grapple with here is like we all know this, right? And I think all of these are good points.
But how do we start to actually combat that and bring some of those people back? Because the reality is we've talked about this in the first two episodes. Like we can't win elections moving forward unless we get some of those guys back it is it is mathematically impossible we cannot do it so what what is it going to take like what what are some tactics that we can take to try to bring these people back i'm just going to throw it out there me calling these people fucking idiots is probably not going to work.
So I'm just going to, I'm just trying to say that like I, yeah, me, me ranting about how they're fucking morons for like caring about emails and then suddenly, you know, troop movements before an attack is, yeah, you know, they, they are, you know, that's, that's what they're, they're're using the like Trump creates chaos and it keeps people on their heels and it creates this environment where they're afraid to mess with him. Would you pick a fight right now? Would any of the six of us pick a fight right now with Jasmine Crockett or AOC? Oh, hell no.
annihilate all six of us at the same time?

And if you want to lean into those sexist Republican stereotypes of the chaos and all of that, they can go there with their own heads. I'm not going to because I trust AOC and Jasmine Crockett's judgment more than I trust Donald Trump's judgment.
But if they think that picking a fight with somebody like AOC is less risky and chaotic than picking a fight with somebody like Trump, I could make a pretty good argument either way. Yeah, that's true.
What does Luke think? He's the young one. Well, first, I'd like to apologize for the RFK voice.
I was going to say, we should have introduced him as RFK Jr. Yeah, I've been sick the last couple days.
It's the third, right? RFK the third. Yeah.
But first, I'd like to push on what Chris said, which was that calling them fucking idiots doesn't work. And I disagree.
Because, like, right now, there's this stereotype that, like, if you're on the left and you're a guy, you're a fucking loser. Like, you're not a man.
If you make the stereotype that if you're on the right, you're a fucking idiot and you don't understand anything that's going on. There's this like, then you have to pick between which stereotype you want to choose.
And I'd sooner be the fucking soy boy than the idiot who doesn't understand anything. God, it's hard to take myself seriously like this.
No, it's good. I think the hard part is that they don't see themselves as idiots because they live in a different realm of reality, right? Like the right builds a different reality where it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong.
As long as you follow what they say is right, then you're right, even if you could be factually disproven. So, like, I kind of don't I look I think going back to episode one, we talked about this a lot, which was there is a segment of this country we're never going to get.
And I think we're talking about that segment right now. I think exactly.
Yeah. That's the challenge.
It's like, we're not going to be able to get these guys who are entrenched. The group I'm talking about, even in relation to the AOC conversation, is the group in the middle that just kind of makes a gut call.

And I think that the gut call comes quite a bit from what they feel coming from the party. And the thing that really pisses me off is that the authenticity of the right, as we know, is dog shit.
But to them, it's real. They think that they're an authentic party because they're just saying what the fuck is on their mind.
And I think that is the biggest hindrance the left faces right now, because the left has tried to be very inclusive and thoughtful about how they talk and trying to make everybody feel like they're included. But in that endeavor, I think they've gone too far.
And now the left is in a position where people don't feel like they can say what they think. And that is making them come off as inauthentic, even though they're not.
So to me, changing the way we talk and what we're willing to hear, I think that's a huge thing. So we're kind of talking about, I want to hear what everybody has to say about this.
We're kind of saying two things at once, because we've got Luke saying, call them fucking idiots. And we've got Zach saying essentially like the opposite.
So, so where, where do we think that where's the middle ground here? Cause I, I agree with you both. It depends on the audience on the audience but like that middle group right calling the middle group fucking idiots is probably not the right right answer right i don't but go ahead good i try not to call the middle group the fucking idiots they're the chronically misinformed people who don't understand what's going on they're not fucking idiots they're people that have the short-term memory of a goldfish who don't understand like these things take time.
So like saying, oh, I'm better off than I am. I'm worse now than I was four years ago.
Isn't an effective way to vote. Like you have to speak to them differently than you speak to the entrenched fucking idiots.
Yeah. So Luke is getting at like the guy that I was talking to you guys about before we we hit record today

who are reaching out and and saying and, you know, the feedback that I'm getting, I respect a lot. And guys like, listen, you know, people call me an extremist because I just want people to leave me the fuck alone.
I just want to protect my family. I want to make sure that my kids aren't getting indoctrinated at school.
And because of that, the left calls me an extremist. And this is a guy who listened to our first two episodes.
And that's the feedback he's getting. He's saying, he's like, listen, you guys are like, I'm listening.
I'm trying, but you're not giving me. Sorry, I hope he's I hope he's listening because I feel that same way.
And all six of us feel that same way sometimes. And it's a reflection.
And I hate to say the P word, but it's a reflection of the privilege of being born in a world where your default position is not under attack. We can just, it's the libertarian dream.
It's the libertarian default state, which is I wake up every day and everything is fine. Why are you guys telling me I'm shit for not changing my behaviors to try to accommodate somebody else who I don't even know? And I don't necessarily have to care about what they do and what they what they do in their own home and who they are that is no concern to me but that doesn't hold up at a social level at a community level at a national level and so I would just ask that individual to to to think does everyone else have the the right to have the the same perspective as you and still have a thriving country or is maybe there a little bit of earned pressure or just natural pressure that comes along with the fact that you are not under attack right now well and i think i one of the challenges i think that we're facing in this country because i agree 100 with everything you said but you said, but like for those people, let's just, let's go with, with white men, for example, right? Like the reality in this country is that white men have a leg up on everybody else, but that doesn't mean that life is easy.
And I think that the part of the problem has been, at least from the perception perspective, is that the, the, the position is white, you white person, you've had it easy, get out of the way and let like give somebody else a chance. And the reality is for that person who maybe like, you know, grew up poor, like you telling them that they have privilege is just, it's going to fall in deaf ears because they've had a hard life.
And I think we have done a bad job there of saying, we're not saying your life is easy. We're saying that somebody else, a person of color, a woman has it harder, but you both have it hard.
And I think that is where we have failed. And I think that is what has driven people into this right-wing fever swamp, where basically you can say whatever you want and there are no consequences, but it's a community and they're welcomed.

We don't do that. And some of that is because some of those people say really like cruel things to other people.
And so then we react to that. But in a lot of cases, a lot of these people just want to have a job.

They want to get married. They want to have two and a half kids.

And they want to be able to retire before they're 95 years old. And I feel like the Democratic Party's positions and policies line up perfectly with that.
But we are swinging and missing at about 100 million Americans who just think all we want to do is turn everyone trans and basically like turn the country into

like a China, Russia, North Korea death spiral of bullshit. I don't know.
Can we still do those things though? Can we? There's a third thing that we haven't talked about. What I want to know is I want to know what led young Vic into the military.
I want to know like how you felt when you were that age.

Because I can tell you what I felt when I was 18 to 21. And I was one of those.
I was right-wing. I was libertarian.
Vic, what were you like at that age? What led you to the military? How do you feel around that age? I've always been left-wing. My dad was always, I even talked about it in one of my videos when I was like 12 years old, I asked my dad was difference between a Republican and Democrat.
And he said, a Republican fights for the company and a Democrat fights for the working guy. And I became a Democrat.
I can't argue that they're doing a good job of it. But that was back then.
And as far as why I went in the military, my family, it hasn't been a, your grandfather was in the military, so you will be too. It wasn't like that, but military service in my family is just something that we do.
So when I turned 18, I was like, I want to serve in the military. And that's how I ended up there.
Another example of a, sorry. Go ahead, Rich.
rich go ahead i was just going to say another example of a simple salient message you know you fight are you going to fight for the people in your community or are you going to fight for the billionaires the the oligarch or the the other you know and they've done a good job of flipping that script on us oh 100 like if if you send that message out today message out today, people are going to go, Democrats don't fight for the working man at all. And that's I mean, it's incorrect if you just look at policy.
But in terms of how they position themselves, it's terrible. And it actually even can get spiraled out to other things like the most, you know, I live in a swing state.
So I during the election, I just saw a thousand ads. And the ad that played the most was the trans stuff where they're going, they're not you they're for they them and it's just the way that they take it away from like democrats don't care about the regular person they care about this niche group or that niche group and it's like it's the most inaccurate thing humanly possible yet somehow it's resonating with so many people because it's simple and they just buy it but how do we we how do we reverse that? Right.
Like, I mean, this is this is the problem. We all like know the problem.
Right. We know that our policies like even look at 2024, like Kamala lost by a fair amount.
And our policies across the nation passed in states. Right.
Even in Missouri, there were like laws, the very progressive laws. Lucas Kuntz lost by like 25 points in that Senate race.
Yeah. How do we reach out to these guys? And I really I'm going to lean on Chris and Vic here, partially just because you both of your military background, which tends to be dominated by the right.
How how and but like I'm also sure you have tons of friends on the right, like, well, Vic, you've been a left for a long time, so maybe, but Chris, you know, um, what is it? How do we even start? Well, we start, I mean, one thing that we haven't talked about in this conversation, you know, we talked about the idea, in my opinion, that the left is always telling people how to think and what words to use and things like that. To me, that's an idea.
And we talked about how young white men are being told about how being left is weak and all that stuff. But what we haven't talked about, and it goes to the how do we get them back, we have to start putting water on the fire that they're using to light these guys up we got to start exposing the charlie kirks and the joe rogans and all those idiots who don't believe anything they say they're only they're only doing it to make money we got to start exposing those guys i i can't tell you how painful it was to listen to all those episodes of that idiot just to get ready for this tonight i i i think he did it i think um you know to to pull around to messaging and and how they've exploited generations um they started with they've started with young men now.

They understood this.

And they started with a message that's as simple as, Vic,

the one you just called out, which is being a boy is not bad.

Being a man is not bad.

Masculinity is not toxic.

And they flicked that directly on us when we called out their toxic behaviors.

And they said all masculinity is all of our behaviors.

We are masculinity.

And so if you're attacking any of those things, you're attacking all of us and you're attacking the entire community of men, and they hate men. And it was that simple.
And they don't have the burden of truth in right-wing messaging. And that is the most suffocating reality to deal with when you're the one saying, well, there are shades of gray in this conversation.
And they go, well, that's actually interesting because there are not shades of gray. You either hate men or you are a man and you believe that men should run the world.
And that is when you're 12 and 13 and 14, a much simpler, much more attractive message than, well, maybe you have all of these layers of responsibility to people you've never met well i was actually going to go to chris because like i i wanted to ask him because like he has self-proclaimed said that he was right wing i i think you said all right but obviously in the mid 2000s i didn't say all right no no or far right far right. Sorry.
But like a very different description 15 years ago. So you were all the way over there at one point.
And you are now with us on this journey. So what was the flip? What did it take? Yeah.
So so people nowadays like who know me, follow me on TikTok. It's likely because of the white dudes for Harris thing,

where I did like one super viral TikTok video. The closest thing that I have ever done to getting involved in a presidential campaign is in 2008, when I was, you know, six months, less than a year out of the military, was running around my hometown spray painting Ron Paul revolution on the train station.
Wow. And that is the type of Republican that I was.
And I gravitated towards Ron Paul for the singular reason that he was anti-war. And the thing that broke me of that right-wing fever,

of this belief in, like, Ron Paul preached all sorts of stuff.

He gave me a reading list, which radicalized me further.

I was like, yeah, let's go back on the gold standard,

not knowing shit about economics.

That's who Ron Paul's followers are. That newsletter, right?

That was that thing back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the thing that broke me out of it was i got involved in the anti-war movement uh the peace movement and i got involved with an anti-war activist i was a young woman uh who was a refugee from iraq and her family previous, had been refugees from Palestine.

And she and I were polar opposites. I was watching Glenn Beck on Fox News and feminism was a bad word to me.
I'm not exaggerating. Right.
And I met this self-described hardcore feminist. And because we had the mutual experience of like real, real deep military related or Iraq related trauma, we bonded over that.

And that those polar opposite political beliefs kind of, I think, blended together a bit.

And that that's what broke me.

Otherwise, I literally would probably have been an oath keeper.

It's like the Ron Paul campaign is where the oath keepers came from.

Thank you. bit.
And that that's what broke me. Otherwise, I literally would probably have been an oath keeper.
It's like the Ron Paul campaign is where the oath keepers came from. I was right there.
I mean, it's exposure to something you weren't being exposed to. That's really what it is.
Like so much of this is just like these people need to hear something else and they need to hear the conversation. If you heard, and it's not, it's not, I don't, it's the hard part is, even hearing us, if you could agree with a lot of these things, the reason it worked for you is because you had a personal connection with this person.
It's like, that is a, is a huge element of this. And I think, you know, given the fact that Democrats do much better with women, the women in the lives of these men, I think is a, is a huge element that is, you know, unfortunately not tapped into, but it's not so much we can do about that particular element of it, unfortunately.
But I, but I think like what we're doing here and not, not to pat ourselves on the back, but I'm going to pat ourselves on the back is that there isn't, there are not places on the left that they can come and get this type of information from people who look and sound like them. And I'll be honest, like, I think this is, we are in a very precarious situation because the right is also, and Taylor Lorenz, the online reporter has covered this a lot, that they're now starting, these right wing people are now starting to talk about, uh, gossip, like, um, the whole situation with, um, Oh God, uh, what's her face? Uh, Ryan Reynolds, wife, uh, Blake Lively.
And the whole thing with that movie, like the Megyn Kelly's of the world and all of these and like lips of tick tock, I think maybe even like are talking about this as a way to pull more people in to indoctrinate them. Like this is only getting worse.
And that's why, like, I mean, look, like no one was doing it and we stepped up and did this. But like the reality is like we need need like 50 of these across different demographics.
It's really concerning because they are like, they're really smart about it. And like, that's why like shows like this matter.
And we need to get like more people out there, but it is, it's really concerning because it's, it's continuing. Yeah.
I mean, I, I just, I don't know. It's just like a real problem.
Yeah. I want to, I want to, I want to play off what was what Chris was saying, Chris, I don't know if you've thought of it this way, and I'm sorry for throwing this out on the live mic, but I took the ASFAP, right? I'm wildly out of my depth here, but I took it, and I, too, scored fairly well.
And the recruiter at the time told me, oh, don't worry, you won't be up on the shore with the bullet sponges. He tried to appeal to me in a way that did not resonate.
And I was so disgusted by that pitch that he thought that I would be so callous to the lives of others that well don't worry you're safe and and and that that was going to sell me on it I at that at that point it took me 10 years to come back around on the idea of the military not being a terrible force in the United States and I think this this like taking young men I mean this may have been intentional or not, but taking young men and selling them a false bill and getting them on board with something they weren't fully on. I mean, you are the poster child for what we're trying to do with this country.
And Tim, with your permission, if I can hard pivot to a topic that's very dear to me very recently, it just it has me thinking about adolescence, which is a show I just watched. I just finished and I won't spoil anything if anybody hasn't finished it yet.
But for dads, for men who were raised in a similar environment where masculinity is maybe narrowly and maliciously defined. It was a bucket of ice water over our heads.
And it caused a lot of, I think, parents and a lot of maybe teenage boys and girls, if they've watched it, to do a lot of soul searching. And part of that comes back of that comes back to, uh, in the show, a heavy dose of alt-right internet led content creator, uh, you know, this hyper masculine alpha bro movement telling little boys that there's only a very, very narrow way to be a, a boy or to be a man.
And that only if you become that thing will women be attracted to you. And they call out something in the show called the 80-20 rule, which is that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men.
And they use that to then box you in and say, if you want to be part of that 20% of men, you have to do this thing, and you have to do this thing, and you have to say this thing, and you have to act this way. And this is what our opposition is up.
This is what our opposition is doing right now, which is saying you have to be jacked,

you have to be healthy, you have to be financially well off, and if not a millionaire.

Yeah. And you have to be all of these things.
Otherwise, you are somebody who will go extinct,

You will not have a girlfriend. You will not hook up with anybody.
You'll not get attention. And then they all dogpile on top of that person and create a victim.
And when you're a kid, that's a real thing. When you're an adult, you grow out of that a little bit.
And you can just be like, you know what, fuck guys. Like I got a wife and she's awesome, which is where I'm at in my life.
But when you're impressionable, which is exactly when the right wing goes after you, whether it's military recruitment, as I found out and Chris found out, or whether it's just a kid in America or a kid in the world these days, that's when they go after you and we have to do something about that. So Luke, as the youngest person here, who is the closest to teenage years, even though you're not there, you're hearing all of this conversation from people who have been out of the dating scene for quite a while and probably decades for some of us.
And how does this resonate like, how does this resonate with you? Does this, does this sound like your friends and you like walk us through like what a, what a 21 year old is thinking about masculinity and all of these things in 2025 and what he's hearing. Yeah, exactly.
There's a guy at my gym who we're're we go about the same time every day and just about every fucking day we end up in the sauna at the same time but this guy every fucking day is listening to either joe rogan ben shapiro or charlie kirk and since your phone will fucking explode if you take it in the sauna he's got that shit set outside full blast so you can hear it through the door oh god it's fucking insufferable but you know for the first like two weeks i was like fine whatever i'll just fucking i'll wear my headphones in and i won't listen to it and then eventually it got to the point where i was like i don't want want to listen to it at all. And so he was listening to it.

I came in and I said,

the fuck are you listening to that for?

Like,

not everybody wants to listen to that.

Cause I had been approached by other guys who were like,

yeah,

can't fucking stand that.

Is he your age,

Luke?

Yeah. He's my age.

Yeah.

And he,

he goes,

well,

it's the best way to get truth.

And I said, really? I was like, that's the best way to get truth and i said really i was like that

is the best way to get truth he goes yeah they tell how it is and i said well funny you should

say that i said it's my great shame to admit that when i was like 14 and 100 pounds lighter

the only thing i had going for me was that i was pretty smart and i was a big fucking bench

Thank you. like 14 and a hundred pounds lighter.
The only thing I had going for me was that I was pretty smart and I was a big fucking Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder fan because what I would watch is those

videos where he goes on a, you know, a fucking college campus and he's got,

he sounds really smart.

He's got all these sources and shit and people come up and he fucking,

Oh, he owned that lib.

And I thought that was just a cat's ass.

And then it's supposed to be a good thing.

My dad says it all the time.

I'll tell my cat,

but like,

I probably watched that shit for like a year and I thought it was just awesome and then suddenly i watched one video where he where i think it was steven crowder went after this trans lady like real hard and was calling her all kinds of just terrible shit i was like see that's not what i'm in this for like i like the intellectual side of it even though it-intellectualism. But I was not in it for the fucking bigotry.
But I don't think everybody gets that far. So the cruelty actually got you out of it.
Yes, but I don't think most people get that far. The cruelty is a feature.
Yeah. Well, that's the Adam Serwer piece that was like, the cruelty is the point is one of the best, I think, to this day, pieces on trumpism like the reality i keep saying reality in every episode i gotta stop saying that word but they but like that's that's a feature it's not a bug so i think the so yes it i i believe it it is a feature and and i study the far right and and that's my opinion based on, you know, my studies.
But the perception for the listener is that the listener is constantly being attacked. It is that the listener is on defense and that it is the Ben Shapiros and the Charlie Kirks, the Stephen Crowders who are going out there into hostile territory and who are staking, you know, planting a flag in the ground and saying, you know, I can be here, too.
So I don't think that the average listener and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt as best I can just for the sake of the show. I don't think that the average listener recognized, recognizes that they're being infantilized by these people, right? That is what it is, is Charlie Kirk thinks that all of his listeners are little defenseless babies.
And he is feeding them the information that they need to to reinforce that right it is not they don't believe that they're attacking people they believe that they're standing up for themselves right i wish he had our listeners who are the smartest kindest best people i mean they're the best people on earth thank you for listening if they could have listeners like our listeners if people are listening right now or i mean they're next level and we live in utopia right you know what i'm so glad that i got to hear all that from luke because i grew up in a day where there was no internet and AM radio was still a little bit balanced. So I often wonder, as I'm listening to Charlie Kirk only for the purposes of tonight, as I'm listening to that crap, I'm sitting here thinking, how on the fudge do people not see through this? How do they listen to this

and think there's any credibility at all? So I'm glad to hear that perspective from Luke. I think they're not looking to challenge its validity.
That's the thing. It's like the left is always on defense right now, trying to like poke holes in what the right is saying.
And the right is just going forward like, no, this is it. This is right.
It's literally presentation. Their presentation style is incredible.
Like, you know, as much as I hate the right in all of their policy, I admire their ability to market and their ability to present because they could give a fuck about if they're right or wrong. They're right.
That's it. They just they are going to stick it in your face and go, this is the answer.
And there isn't a world where it's not. The left is much more context, like Rich said earlier, the left is open to gray in conversations.
It's not just black and white. And that's challenging for a lot of people who are just looking for clarity.
And when there's no clarity in a situation and then somebody shows up and goes, no, here it is right in front of your face. It's an easy win.
And the left is missing that opportunity because we are more thoughtful about how we approach things. And that's a good thing.
But at the same time, if we want to figure out how we can restructure messaging to be in a position to actually change people's minds, we have to meet them where they are. And where they are is that they want a simple conversation.
They want a simple they don't want to feel like they're being preached at. They want to feel like they're being told information that's true.
And right now the left just comes off like we're just waffling around and trying to give all this context. It's just a waste of time.
And like, and this is me saying this, most of my content is like contextualizing, you know, stuff with, with data. But which is interesting because like I, you know, my channel does well because people do want to know the information.
It's an important thing, but the presentation style of most of the party is fucking terrible, and they just need to understand, just go right at them. Attack.
Be on offense. It's enough with the fucking defense.
It's pathetic. Well, I think that they have built an ecosystem in which you can literally go through your life and never actually listen to a democrat so you are constantly hearing right-wing misinformation on fox news in the in the you know in the gym um you know on your way home am radio tv now we're talking about like the celebrity gossip stuff like they have built a world world i mean i have friends that like they are perplexed as to why i'm a democrat they're like those people hate freedom they hate everything about america and i'm sitting here being like i mean i was on in dc on 9-11 i was a 701 pennsylvania avenue between the white house and the capital and like like i was in the i mean i wasn't like in middle of it, but like I was 22 and I was scared out of my mind.
And like the next day when all the American flags went up, I was like, fuck yeah. And you know, like, I'm like, I know I'm somebody who loves this country.
There's no, like we all do. And it's, we just, we do have horribly miserable job of like explaining that.
And I think because we're always trying to talk about policy. I mean, it's last, I just laughed was last week.
We talked a little bit about Medicare for all. And like, you know, Zach Vick and I were sort of like, well, you know, I can't do it in two years or three years.
Imagine a Republican saying that they're just like, we want this. Shut the fuck up.
And like the reality is like, we have to do more of that. Like it just like stop selling pieces and sell a brand.
Really? It's it's two to three times the work. Right.
You have to do the marketing and the messaging and the PR and the comms, and you have to do the 90% of the work that is the policies that are logically and mathematically defensible. Right.
They skip that entire part. They just say everything will be fine.
Yes. You deserve this because you're great.
If we just were either dumb or reckless or gutsy enough to just go out and say, you as Americans deserve $50 an hour in free health care, and I will make it happen, period, people would go, I don't know how that's possible, but they are so confident in their pitch that they must know something I don't know. And all I have to do is say, trust me, we know all of the smartest people.
We will deliver on that shit. Don't even worry about it.
Just go to the park with your kids and we will take care of the mess. And people, that is all they want government to do, which is solve problems and go away.
Right. And that's the thing is like when you get i completely agree with that and trump did it more so in this election than ever where he just didn't even try to substantiate what he's claiming he just said this is what i'm going to do it doesn't matter how it worked the first time so right it worked even better this time but like concepts of a plan right exactly it doesn't matter but the whole premise of this is like Democrats are in a position now where if you are able to do what Rich is saying, then you're able to just go one to one of what is actually being promised.
And if Democrats are coming out and promising, we're going to give you free health care, we're going to give you free child care, and you're going to get the minimum wage to a living wage. It's a home fucking run.
And you just have to do it in a way where it makes like you're confident in the pitch. But other but Democrats never have confidence in this stuff.
They come out flat as shit and they go, oh, we're going to do it by cutting this tax. And like I'll just say this last thing.
The worst thing that Democrats do is attack billionaires. It's the stupidest thing they do all the time.
They always bring it back to as long as we tax the billionaires. nobody's buying it.
It's a loser argument. People have just fallen.
It falls on deaf ears. You have to just ignore how and just say, we're going to do it.
Don't demonize the whole class of successful people because that turns off a lot of men. Men look at billionaires differently than people in this call.
Look at billionaires on the whole. They look at them and go, those are successful people.
Why are you trying to attack them? We're attacking success in America. It's a huge mistake.
Don't make a person a victim. Just tell me the fucking plan.
Naturally, I disagree with Zach on all of that last part. Well, remember, if you're not, if you don't like the message, you might not be the audience.
Right. No, I mean, in fact, look, I I'm not saying that we shouldn't go after billionaires.
I'm saying stop talking talking about it it's like i think this polarization of like there's the working class people and the billionaires it's a we've tried that message for what 10 years hasn't worked it's just because we talk about it and we don't do it because the billionaires and the consultants are running too much shit yeah i'm not sure we've ever really done that to be perfectly honest like i mean we we we talk about it right but like you know we have plenty of billionaires on our side not as many as the republicans and we really don't go into that yeah and the fact that like the trump administration has more billionaires in in positions of power than ever how are these people supposed to be helping the american public they have no idea most of these people got in these positions because their daddy gave them something, which is what Donald Trump got. He got $400 million when his dad died.
Like it, like I have no problem with success in this country. And like Mark Cuban's a perfect example.
And he is actually the one that is the most articulate about this. He's like, tax me.
Like I have more money than I could ever spend. I'll send you my check and like that's the patriotic thing to do not these people who are like ditching like they want their tax cuts and so they're willing to just like melt down everything else so that they get a little bit more so they can like maybe elon could be the first a trillionaire like it's just madness and so i i get what you And like, we should not like criticize success.
But there's a fine line here with that. And also just serving one group of people, because they fund everything.
Oh, for sure. I'm not saying we serve them.
I'm just saying like, the democratic messaging structure in this is not working. We need a new one.
That's my that's my point. I think I think I mean, I 100% agree that that you're on to something, Zach.
And I think it's because when you look at who does the right demonize, they demonize immigrants. They demonize, you know, trans people.
They demonize people you never want to be. Yep.
And if we demonize millionaires and billionaires, I had a friend 25 years ago and it was the most beautiful statement ever. He said, every Republican is a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire.
And now I think it would be a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire. But the point is, we are attacking their aspirational state when we go after the wealthy.
And what Republicans would do is say, why do Democrats hate the middle class? Why do they hate working people when they attack a $50 an hour minimum wage and they attack universal health care for everybody? Instead of getting to your point, Zach, caught up in, well, we're going to offset this marginal tax rate to pay for it. Nobody gives a shit.
I don't even know what that means. And I just said it.
And let alone the average American voter. So if you have to keep it very sharp and very pointed, and that is not a thing that Democrats are good at when it comes to messaging, because we just always want to.
We're excited by the details. We'd like the details.
I love the weeds. But average voter just goes, tell me what you're doing for me and tell me that it's not going to be a problem for me.
Yes, exactly. Maybe the message should be, hey, dummy, you're never going to be a billionaire under their policies.
But you could still win the lottery. And then at that point, you don't want the death tax and the estate tax.
They will always get me started on that one. They will always come back around to defending wealth.
Yeah. I mean, it's really it's like going back to earlier in the conversation when we look at like, why are men drawn to this? It's because they're drawn to success.
A lot of these younger men are drawn to what success, why they like Elon Musk, because he's a self-made, he's not really self-made, but they see him as a self-made guy. They think that Democrats don't like success.
And then they draw the conclusion down to like Democrats enjoy people who need like they only give a shit out of people to be pulled up. It's like that.
We care about everybody, including the people who need to be pulled up and the people who are, you know, doing fine. Like everybody matters.
It's not just about that. I also want to inherit $400 million.
Sure. 100%.
Right now, if Donald Trump's dad said, here's $400 million, I'd go, sweet. I'm going to fix things.
I'm not going to break things, but I would, I would take all of the money. I told my wife I was going to marry her for money.
And she said, okay, but I'm broke.

And I said, oh shit, I guess I'll marry you anyway. You'd already given the ring.
So you're

just like, well, this is it. Yeah.
It's a tough one, man. I mean, it's one of those things where

like, I just don't like my big, when we get through these conversations, my big question

is how do we get out of the hole we're in with this stuff? Like we've identified all the problems

I'm sorry. I just don't like my big when we get through these conversations, my big question is how do we get out of the hole we're in with this stuff? Like we've identified all the problems, but what's the solution? Right.
Like that's the thing that's so annoying is like they're killing us right now. Right.
And that's what I think what we need to get at is like, how do we attack? Right. Because our attacks so far haven't worked.
So like what's the right attack to go after they're, you know, really entrenched with a lot of these groups? We need to un-entrench them. How do we do that? Let's remember the pendulum will do a lot of work for us.
Let's never forget that. It's hot right now.
It feels insurmountable, but the mountain will drop itself by about 90%. And in four years, I don't want it to be this way.
I don't want people to suffer. But in four years, I don't think it's going to be great.
And all we need to be is the person, the candidate, the party with a message saying, you always deserved better. And we can let bygones be bygones.
We have to move on because this is our values. Hopefully, we will remind you of this and we will all remember this so we don't have to go through this over and over and over, even though we always seem to.
It can't be hopefully. We have to make sure it is.
Right. That's the thing.
Well, that's the, yeah. You know, I think about the guy that I brought up before.
He, he's a Long Islander, right? lives i think he lives in nass County. It's where I was born and raised, which has a Republican like MAGA county executive.
Long Island has become kind of like Trump country outside of New York City. So the perception and the reality there are two different things, like the crime rate in Nassau County, it's one of the most wealthy places in the country.
It's also one of the safest places in the country. But the perception is that like there are gangs running rampant, right? Like the MS-13 is going to get your daughter thing.
It's like real there. I thought that was a rating on Netflix, by the way i was like ms 13 that's appropriate for my kid right is that so like you know i and i'm you know i want to be thoughtful and and respectful like what does this person want to hear from the democrats like if we believe the data says that crime is just simply not bad and that the police there are paid more than any other police and that they have a per capita higher rate of policing than just about anywhere in the country.
Like it is safe, but you don't believe it. What do we say? How do we how do we fix that? Yeah, that's a very difficult thing to do because it's like again to complement their ability to message they they find like these little instances of like we arrested an ms-13 guy in this county that's really safe the county is now super dangerous like no it's not it's one it's like you know all the different times that one little thing happens they amplify to sound like it's happening all the time because they're very good at fear-mongering and it's like democrats i don't think democrats should stoop to that level because it's just not them but it's just a hard like what you know it's so hard to push back against that because they only tell you the shitty story when 99 of it is good and the one percent's bad it seems like 100 shit we need the democrats and especially the the left-leaning media to stop saying things like, well, what he said might not have been accurate and say he's a fucking liar.
He lied to you. Nobody says Trump lied.
Nobody says Hegseth lied. They say, well, what he said wasn't actually true.
Yeah. Misstatements.
Yeah. False.
Well, all the all the all the when those those guys were up on the hill the other day talking about signal they all lied they knew that was classified i mean like any idiot on like would know when you looked at that stuff that that was classified information and it's like i don't recall and bought out of you know they lied and like it is like i think they're getting a lot of shit for it but the reality reality, the media does not say they lie. No, there's not going to be any consequence for this shit anyway.
Yeah, no, no, not at all. Well, they'll just pardon any pardon anybody who does anything.
So it doesn't it doesn't make a difference. I just did a video about this the other day.
Like, I think that what I want to hear from Democrats and maybe this is like the aggressive testosterone man side of me. right? I want to hear from Democrats, and maybe this is like the aggressive testosterone man side of me.
Right. I want to hear not lock them up.

I want to hear that's a fucking felony.

Like, here's the law. Here is what happened.
That is a felony. And when we get into power, we will absolutely make sure that we prosecute felonies, not not lock him up, not let.
I don't want them to simplify it. The the shit the Democrats were doing at Harris campaigns, not all the time, but at some of those arenas, they were chanting lock him up that that dumbing down of prosecution of the law really fucking bothers me as an investigator, as someone who like is involved in making sure that hate crimes get prosecuted.

I really hate when people treat justice like that.

But I want, you know, for Democrats running in 2026, in 2028, to be talking about impeachment, indictments, prosecution, preservation of evidence, because we know that Pam Bondi is not going to hold anyone responsible. We know that that Kash Patel leader leading the FBI is FBI director.
We know he's going to hold the FBI back. But I want to make sure that that prosecutors, that investigators, anyone with the legal, the statutory authority to be engaging in investigations right now, that they're fucking doing it and that they're preserving evidence and that these people are held accountable and they they get a fair trial.
That's what I think that's the perfect message. What is saying.
Yep. And I think we are going to wrap it up there because we have been over an hour for the first two episodes, and we are going to cut it just short.
So I want to thank everybody for listening tonight. We want to hear from you.
Please go to our Substack at findoutpodcast.substack.com. Tell us what you think about this.
We've got lots of things to talk about coming up, so make sure that you're following us on Substack and all of our social channels. I want to thank my five buds here for doing this tonight.
We're doing this on a Friday night to tell you what kind of lives we leave. We're all sitting online at 8 o'clock on a Friday night.
I had two beers, so I don't know about you guys. That's why it's okay that we're doing this.
Everybody had a little bit of a drink, I think. bit of a drink I think guys we're not making a sacrifice it's all Luke Luke is the only one sacrificing to hang out with us that's true thank you Luke and to your half a million followers who are listening to the show that's a a weird thing to say.
I know.

Six months ago, I had zero.

Damn.

You'll lose half of them with that voice.

You got some more about it.

I almost made a video about it.

You should do a video about it.

But anyways, we got to wrap because we got to cut this off before an hour.

Anyways, thank you, everybody.

We will be back next week.