Democrats have an identity crisis. We try to solve it.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Find Out podcast, episode 23.

Hope you all had a great long weekend.

Unfortunately, we had some bad news over the weekend.

Obviously, an awful situation unfolding in Texas where I think it was like 10 inches of rain fell in a couple hours or 20 inches or something.

The loss of life is catastrophic.

It's 80 at this point.

That number is expected to go up.

And we were planning on talking about this, but since it's such big news, I think we're going to have to dive into it for a few minutes.

Obviously, there have been lots of back and forth about the federal government's involvement or lack thereof.

A lot of questions coming not just from the left, but also from local Texas officials on the ground critiquing the National Weather Service and not getting accurate data on what was happening.

So we're going to talk about this briefly, and then we're going to go into the meat of the conversation, which is more around democratic messaging and how we fix it.

But let's dive into this first, guys.

The Trump administration is furiously pushing back on the notion that the Doge cuts, and we have to be very clear, we're talking about Doge cuts here, not cuts from the big bullshit bill, because that just got signed.

So that's not really on the table, but the Doge cuts, there have been articles about the National Weather Service reeling from people taking early retirements, which tend to be the most experienced people.

So what do we think?

Do we think that the federal government dropped the ball on this too early to tell?

Plenty of blame to go all around, probably.

Let's dive in.

Yeah, so I woke up, you know, it was a

Saturday morning, I think, when shit was hitting the fan and it was obvious it was going to be really bad.

And,

you know, my natural inclination was to just go immediately to,

you know,

because that's what they're saying, that the forecasts were insufficient and all this.

And that's what the government officials, the Republican leaders were saying.

And

so I wanted to rush to, well, obviously they cut at the NWS and so the forecasts.

And so then I started looking it up.

It turned out that the actual scientists were actually doing their jobs like A-plus.

They had prioritized balloon launches.

They were working, you know, everybody was staffed up is everywhere that mattered.

And

they were predicting a ton of rain and a ton of potential floods.

And so then, you know, it came around to, oh, well, what are they doing with this information then?

Where did these predictions go?

And that's where shit really went sideways because the local officials, and this is what we're all learning, you know, over the last day or two,

they have no warning systems because the local, you know, Kirk County was 75%

MAGA Republican in Trump's favor in the last election.

So like, let's just say it, you know, they don't, they didn't want to pay for the infrastructure because it costs tax dollars.

Hard things are hard.

Hard things are expensive.

And most of the time, you get lucky in that kind of a situation.

And this time they

were extremely unlucky where at, you know, 5.34 a.m., they got these flood warnings and

there were no humans on the ground to take that scientific information that was coming in and turn it into an actual plan to get human bodies to higher ground, which is the hardest part of anything, is making humans actually change their behavior.

Yeah, it's, I don't know.

I mean, to me, like, I look at this and the bigger picture of how bad is this season of disasters going to be, you know, because it's not just this area where this happens.

It's going to be terrible.

It's going to be horrible.

Like, FEMA got cut tremendously.

I think it was like 20% of staff and 30% of their funding, like a large amount of cuts.

So, like, we're just starting to begin hurricane season.

And I just, I can't even imagine how bad it's going to be when they realize, oh, we had that for a reason, didn't we?

And it's like, whoops.

I mean, it's, it's.

You seriously can't just nuke a hurricane to make it go away.

Unless you want a radioactive hurricane.

Yeah.

That's true.

I think that's how we get a sharknado, right?

It's ridiculous.

I don't know.

I mean, it's one of those things where like Doge stripped the humanity out of the whole process and just went, let's just cut line items.

And it's like, that is not how you run an effective country, especially a first world country is supposed to be like world class.

This is not world class in terms of protecting your citizens at all.

So I'm nervous about the next few months for sure.

Yeah, I mean, I would say Texas does not have a great track record of managing crises.

And I put a lot of this blame on the governor, Greg Abbott.

You know, we saw a few years ago.

when Texas decided to basically unplug from the national grid because it didn't like the federal government oversight, and then lives were lost when people literally froze to death while Ted Cruz went and hung out in Cancun.

And

that was a direct result.

I mean, there's lots of factors involved in that with weather and things like that.

But, you know, this is when everybody says, I hate regulations.

Well, that's what you got.

with that grid.

Same situation here where the state has continually and the local levels have continually reduced services for people in

service of tax cuts, which mostly go to wealthy people.

And so we're not there yet to be able to point a finger at anybody, but

I'm not surprised.

And it sounds like at this point that there's more fault at the state and local level than at the federal level.

Now, I think these Doge cuts are going to be devastating for.

other events in the future.

But this one seems like a Texas one.

And I think, again, just the absolute failure of Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans to keep their people safe.

They just, you know, they claim that they do these things.

And then look what happens.

This is what happens when you do not invest in public safety.

The entire point of government is to protect people.

That is, that is it.

Like, that is the point of government, period.

Full stop.

The reason why we collectively as human beings form governments is for the protective, for the collective protection.

We have watched a catastrophic failure in Texas at the local level.

You know, as we've been talking about, Elon Musk was allowed to come into government empowered by Donald Trump,

not because he did it on his own.

Donald Trump told him to do this, just started cutting across the board.

And at the same time, we have sadists like Ron DeSantis and

Donald Trump and the DHS secretary all joining together to build a concentration camp in a fucking swamp in the middle of

a hurricane-prone area.

So, what we're talking about now is

negligence,

but the next disasters that we are going to be talking about are

purposeful.

Yeah, the goal of the Trump administration currently is to cause harm to human beings here in the United States.

And I think that

Americans need to really internalize that we live in a country now where our government

is building camps to concentrate certain populations in areas where they expect people to be likely to die.

due to natural occurrences.

I thought when I first saw the pictures of the alligator Alcatraz sign, I thought that was like AI slop.

I didn't realize it was real until today.

I thought that it could not be, they could not be embracing this idea so hard.

Like, I got state documents that came that they got yesterday suggesting women and pregnant children or women and pregnant women and children are all going to end up there too.

Yeah.

Really?

I mean, it, it is wild.

We, we now live in a country that is building concentration camps in Gator-infested swamps.

And

a large portion of this country, let's say, I don't know, 30% of Republicans who are die, like I'm trying to minimize it, right?

30% of Republicans who are die-hard MAGA.

I'm trying to give everybody the benefit of the doubt that I can.

There is a tremendous population of Americans.

who are pro-concentration camp.

Yep.

We have fallen so fucking far in the last 10 years.

It

never fails to surprise me and break my heart.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't want to get dark, but sometimes you have to a little bit.

You know, I visited Buchenwald when I was 19, and that was a massive concentration camp.

And I can't even, I don't like talking about it because I usually end up just sobbing.

But when

you go there, this is my point, most people look at it and feel the most deep sense of humiliation that a human body can feel.

I mean,

we're not genetically

unlike the people who did that.

It was only 100 years ago, less than 100 years ago, that that was happening.

And

most people go and see that and they think, how can I be related to the species who did this to itself?

And that these individual people, some of whom are still probably 90 and 100 years old, walking around on planet Earth with children and grandchildren,

it's just absolutely embarrassing.

And yet it's clear that the unthinkable is also true, which is that a very small percent of people, I think, look at this and they see just a blueprint for how to

They just look at it as ideas like, hey, this is how the most effective awful people

made sure that their awfulness uh you know became a process and a reality because they still think i mean you read the white nationalist shit they very quite clearly obviously and say it out loud anymore think that you know there's a very specific type of person who's the best on this planet yeah and everybody else should go away how they go away you know first it's deport them and then it's not a very short path apparently or a very long path apparently for some of these people to get from deport them to deport them to a terrorist camp in some other country where they've never been

to put them in a place where they could just die.

And then how much farther is it at that point to just kill them?

Because that's, that's the last piece, which is like have them march in a direction until they die, which is the first thing that they did, all the way to never mind, just burn them all alive.

Yeah.

I also think that most people, even the ones who support this stuff, not like white nationalists, but like people kind of in the middle on the right, they don't make this connection at all.

Like they look at the Holocaust and go, it's nothing like that.

We're not trying to actively

like they don't look at it as a history book thing, right?

It's isolated entirely because they don't think the goal is like exterminating people, which it isn't.

I mean, it's just to get rid of them, but you know, they don't connect the humanity of what happened in the Holocaust and what happens now.

So, like, I think they hear this narrative about it's bullshit, but it's like, I don't think they can even realize hearing this conversation how close they are to that being true.

Like, they're like one or two steps away from this being like, this is exactly the same thing.

So I think like, you know, it's one thing to

make the comparison back when Trump was running and he was making, but now he's doing stuff that's like, ooh, okay, you're inching closer to this shit.

People don't realize it though.

Like, and that's the magic of what Trump has done is that like he's doing it so slow that people don't notice.

And eventually you arrive there and go, this feels natural.

This is fine.

And that's the scary part.

Slow.

I mean, he's been off in office six fucking months and he has a concentration camp and there are still fucking idiots that are like, oh, yeah, let's go.

I don't get it.

He did start with the border wall and birtherism, you know, 12, 13 years ago.

Sure, but like

the otherizing everybody is the slow burn.

And then, you know, from there, it's, it kind of goes in lurches where he does something really awful and then he walks it back about 80%.

Right.

You've, you've acclimated.

Or he covers it up with a bunch of other shit.

Well, yeah, you change the baseline at that point.

Like, that's what he does.

Right.

The baseline is slowly acclimating.

And, you know, now with deportations, if somebody's wrongfully deported, we go, yeah, that's like the 14th person who is wrongfully deported.

They don't get the treatment that, you know, Obrego Garcia got.

Right.

And I would just step back to let people know, because we kind of dove into this.

What we're talking about is a facility that was literally built in the middle of the evergreen glades.

Trump himself, DeSantis, Christy Noam, the

Secretary of Homeland Security have all toured it, done these photo ops.

It's literally people in cages, which we were talking about before.

The other part is it's already flooded.

Like this is, this is a flood zone.

Like as Chris was saying, like they don't give a shit what happens to these people.

Now, do they have the same mentality of the Nazis who are like, we want to exterminate the Jews?

No, probably not.

They just don't want them to be here, but they don't care what happens to them.

Right.

And there are definitely people in MAGA who do want to.

I'm not trying to defend.

And you're right, because if you look at the comments, especially if you look on like underneath things that Republicans say, and you see the comments that are coming from people talking about, oh, those gators are never going to be hungry again.

And they're saying all of these dehumanizing, dark as shit.

Dark, dehuman, humanizing, horrible, horrible

shit.

And they love it.

And this is why we keep going back to that Adam Serwer article about the cruelty is the point.

Some of these people are foaming at the mouth to watch.

undocumented people suffer.

And I just, it is mind-blowing to me that millions of people, because if it's 30% of MAGA, it's tens of millions of people in this country who want these people to suffer.

Yep.

It's scary.

It's a scary thing, especially to like somebody who's Jewish and I have family that, you know, this was my life.

It's a scary thing that we're inching back towards that because you would assume after that, the whole world kind of went, we're not doing that again.

And now it's like, well, wait a minute.

Just give it a second.

We might try again.

It's like, what?

And it's like you go back to World War II.

What was the purpose of exterminating a bunch of Jews?

Nothing.

It was a PR campaign against the Jewish people.

That's all it was.

It's the exact same thing here.

What is the purpose of exterminating all these people or getting them out of the country?

I mean, like, maybe you could have like a little teeny bit of like a political purpose of like, well, there's taxation elements of everybody.

You don't exterminate people for that or throw them to South Sudan when they are from Ecuador.

It makes no fucking sense.

That's the kind of shit where it's like the teeny little steps become a huge amalgam of nightmare shit.

So I was trying to figure out how I was going to pivot us, but I think this is because this is such a hard topic and we kind of covered two things that we will talk more about.

But with these horrible things going on, Democrats still pull worse than Republicans if you're talking about just blanket, like, you know,

token.

That's a good pivot.

Yeah.

Oh, well, thank you.

You know, we're still suffering.

And, you know, we saw

how the tax bill fight went down.

So I think Zach had the idea.

We're going to see how this worked worked because I'm going to kick it to him in a second.

Zach had the idea of like doing a bit of a Democratic messaging workshop.

And we want to also hear from you all about what you think.

We certainly don't think we have this 100% right, but we thought it would be good to start showing people how the process is of kind of deciding on this messaging thing and see if we can help Democrats improve that.

Because if we can't win with a literal

concentration camp being built in the United States and very clear evidence of state and local, mostly Republican officials just not preparing for storms and seeing this inevitable.

We are in a world of hurt.

So, Zach, save us.

Yeah, no pressure at all.

I mean, I think, like, the reason I wanted to do this is because Democratic leadership isn't doing it.

Like, that's the, like, so people like us who have a platform and have a big conversation happening, we need to start having the conversation of like, all right, we have a brand problem.

We need to solve it if we want to win again.

I mean, look, midterms, maybe we don't need to solve it.

We'll probably walk in with a win regardless.

But 28, by then, we got to figure out what's going on.

So like, I kind of dip back into my old life where I worked in advertising for many years.

And when you have either a brand that you need to change the messaging around or a new brand, you go through a kind of a brand building workshop where you figure out what does the brand stand for?

What do you want it to stand for?

What do opponents think it stands for?

All that kind of stuff to figure out how you move forward.

And I think right now, Democrats have no fucking idea what they're doing from all these different angles.

So like, I came up with a little structure.

I'll, you know, I kind of stole like a truncated version from the advertising days.

So, I'll start us here.

Part one is always defining what we currently stand for.

Like, where do, where are we today?

So, the first question I'll pose to everybody is: what do Democrats, not anybody else, just current Democrats who want to vote for Democrats only, what do they believe the party currently stands for?

What do you guys think?

Exactly.

The silence is loud.

We don't have to ask this question because

on the Democrats' website, there is a 92-page PDF that tells you very specifically,

very like so specific.

It's almost like a migraine what we stand for.

Yeah, that's the pain.

It's like when I would do this exercise in the past, it'd be like, pick two words, three words that you think define the party at this point.

Because like, I think it's me personally, I think it wildly depends on who you ask within the party.

I think there's factions of this this party that are like aggressively different in how they see the future of the party.

So like, I think, you know, you look at moderates and they're going to look at it one way.

And you look at leftists, they're going to look at it a totally different way.

But like, just for us, what do we think the party stands for at this point?

Like, if you could just pick one word or two words that go like, this is what I think Democrats stand for.

What are those words?

I'm going to try.

I'm going to say three words.

Sorry.

And this is what I think.

Democrats think.

I'm not saying that we communicate this well, but I would say that Democrats, generally speaking, are for success for everyone.

Okay.

I like that.

Success for everyone.

Does anybody else have anything?

I mean, a lot of them are like purely anti-Trump.

Like they don't really, they don't have a leg to stand on by themselves, really.

Like they don't have, well, not all of them, but a significant portion of them seem to base their entire existence off of being the antithesis to what Trump is, which doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a platform of their own, but it gets kind of tiring and it doesn't change very many minds.

Right.

That's a good point.

And it's a lukewarm antithesis.

It's not a, it's not an equal and opposite reaction entity.

It's holding a

baseball bat and an Instagram picture.

Exactly.

What's nothing to do with that, Akeem?

What are you going to do?

You're going to hit a book?

Like, come on.

This isn't tough.

It wasn't that long ago that Donald Trump posed with a picture of a baseball bat and Democrats, I think rightfully, because it was next to a photo of what I forget if it was Joe Biden or if it was

Harris or whatever, but like that was a perceived threat in that context.

And now we're just like, we're just going to

do the same imagery that Donald Trump does.

But my one word

description of what I think the Democrats stand for right now is

conservatism.

I think that the Democrats are a conservative party.

And that's coming from a former

Republican, a former libertarian.

I think the Democrats right now, the image, the idea that they project is we just want to preserve things.

We are like the true conservative.

We just want to conserve things.

Yeah, I would get behind that.

As opposed to progressive,

which, which is

achieve positive change.

Right.

So I think right now we have a Democratic Party that has defaulted to, oh, God, let's just keep it all together rather than let's build something.

Yeah, they don't want to build.

So that, do you think it's, that's how Trump and Magic sort of like carved out the change maker mentality that they seem to push forward?

Because they're not pushing progressive stuff, but they're pushing change.

And I think you're right.

Like Democrats don't feel like the party of change anymore.

I think they're like Obama made it feel that way.

And then when Obama went away, it's like, well, where did all the change go?

And like, we kind of hung with Biden and Biden.

Yeah, like, I think Biden was a good president, but a lot of people look at him and go, he just kept shit status quo and we all suffered for it.

Even though that's not necessarily true, but they just don't realize what he did yeah i would actually argue that joe biden was a far more progressive president than barack obam i agree with you with

the bills that were passed and you know you said like hope and change i mean i worked for the president uh on the campaign and in the administration and we did we ran on change and we did get uh we did get health care yeah for 20 million americans but it was very it was mitt romney's plan yes like this was a progressive health care plan it was his plan it was it was whatever they called it in Massachusetts.

But like, yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, I think maybe like,

what did you say?

Oh, Romney Care.

Romney Care.

Romney Care.

They just called it Romney Care.

Good branding.

But

yeah, I mean, I think corporate, like I feel like the Democratic Party right now is conservative is a good point.

And I think corporate.

That's interesting.

All right.

So I agree.

And that's part of the survival mode, like harm reduction approach of, you know, Chuck Schumer, like on the first thing, but

voters want disrupt when, when, when you are not happy with any big thing, you want disruption and you're hoping that it's positive change.

But most, I mean, people are very familiar with the idea that if something is bad,

doing the same thing cannot possibly be the right option.

And so doing anything different,

maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't, but like, please, God, don't stay standing here when we're not happy.

So just change anything and see.

And Trump has always been the chaos and disruption.

It always ends up poorly.

But when your only choice is, well, what if we try to make it a little bit less worse, but we don't change anything big?

Or what if we break everything and see what happens?

A lot of people go with the break everything and see what happens, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's why Trump got elected.

So I'll distill this down to one sort of brand on top of it, which is risk averse, I would say, is what I'm hearing from Democrats.

Okay.

So if that, I mean, I think that most Democrats would agree with that, even if they don't like it, which I don't think any of us do, but I would agree with that.

So, here's a tougher question and a worse question, but an important question, which is, what do opponents like MAGA, what do you think they think Democrats stand for?

We know what we think we stand for, but what's the perception of our enemy?

Yeah, I think the portrait that they paint is

the exact opposite of what we just said: that they're like X, that Democrats are like extreme fucking radicals that only want to protect, you know,

LGBTQ plus people and they don't give a fuck about anybody else and they want to make billionaires pay so much because nobody else deserves to pay anything and they're socialists.

And I think that's, I mean, it's like an antithesis to what they actually do.

Yeah.

No, I think that's true.

The caricature is, is, I mean, they've, they've successfully landed the caricature, which is that we don't care if you lose your health care.

We don't care if you lose your, your, if you lose your job and your income.

We don't care if you're paying 10 times as much as the grocery store as long as you don't misgender a blue-haired person from San Francisco.

And like, that is the, I mean,

I could walk into any bar in the red state where I'm at, and I could make some joke along those lines, and 85% of the people would buy me a beer.

You know, they would be laughing their ass off.

And because that's just 100% what they believe, that as long as you don't hurt a very weird person,

everything else is fine.

That's really interesting.

So it's sort of like what Democrats believe about ourselves is really we're kind of shitting on ourselves because we want to be the people that are actually going out to try to make this progressive change, but we're not doing it.

And the Republicans are looking at us and going, no, all they're trying to do is pull the country as far left as humanly possible and make this radical change.

But internally, Democrats are going, we're doing jack shit.

That's a very interesting dynamic.

And I think like there's portions of it that are true.

And it kind of goes into the next question for me, which I think is like, what are our greatest assets and liabilities?

And I want to start with liabilities because it it sounds like we're right there right now.

Like, I think for me personally, our biggest liability is that we don't control these narratives well.

Like, all of these things are controllable.

There's a reason that this is happening, and it's because they are better at this exercise that we're doing right now.

They nailed this shit, and we didn't.

And so, to me, that's our biggest liability.

But I'm curious if you guys see other, like, for example, the woke element.

While it's not true on the whole, what the MAGA folks pitch, there are elements of truth to that.

So what,

how, like, that's been a huge debate, I think, post-Harris losing, is how do we handle the woke, you know, label?

Do we try to embrace the goals of it, but rebrand it, or do we abandon it?

What do you think?

So this is where I struggle because I know what politically probably makes sense, but also like in my heart would.

not be right,

which I struggle as a white guy to talk about without coming across as making it all about me.

And I was talking to a friend earlier who was talking about how he like, he ordered something at a coffee shop

and he

referred to the person handing him the coffee as her or she or something like that and got lectured about using gendered terms.

Now, that person who was saying you should use the

terms is probably right.

But that message for a lot of the country that is not still, has not not caught up with the rest of us related to some of these issues sees it as a like, shut up.

I'm going to tell you what you, how to, you can talk to people now.

And it plays into the Republican narrative that, you know, I think their overarching message about Democrats is Democrats want to control every aspect of your life.

Right.

And

anti-freedom, which is, of course, bullshit, but like,

but, you know, how do you, how do you protect the most vulnerable people?

And I obviously put our trans community in there without alienating people who don't understand that issue, but if you give them enough time, probably would come around, but like on their terms.

And this is where I struggle because I don't want anybody misgendering anybody.

I don't want anybody, you know, I want the trans community to feel as safe as I do, as, you know, me in the most privileged class in this country.

But some of it kind of feels like you'd have to kind of push the issues

down or to the side a little bit in order to get this group of people who feels attacked every time they say something and they feel uncomfortable.

And so then that's prohibiting them from coming, if that makes sense.

No, it makes sense to me.

I mean, I definitely have noticed the same thing.

There's a very walking on eggshells kind of type of conversation that happens on the left that doesn't happen on the right.

And I think that's sort of the central problem that we face with this stuff.

But I also think like on the greater scheme of things, protecting the vulnerable is not something Democrats should run away from.

It's something they should embrace, right?

And that it's just a question of how you frame it correctly.

So to me, like my approach would be we need to be more inclusive of what it means to be vulnerable.

It doesn't have to just be people who have been, you know, minorities within the community and been facing pushback.

It's also working people who are struggling living paycheck to paycheck.

Those are also vulnerable people.

Like we need to recast how we need to embrace vulnerability and protecting vulnerable people, but at the same time, define that group as a much larger group.

Because I think that's where working people ran to Trump.

They went, This guy's looking out for me.

Democrats are looking out for, you know, whatever the fuck was in his ad, they, them, or whatever.

Yeah, that worked.

But if we had just figured out how to smush those groups together and be like, we're looking out for all you guys, I think it would have been a very different thing.

Are you guys familiar with the term bike shedding?

No.

So, so bike shedding is a new term to me,

and I learned it from TikTok,

but it is the idea that that you're spending too much time on on trivial or menial matters so the like example is someone says okay it's time to build a bitch uh a bike shed like a republican is going to go okay we need a carpenter we need wood and we need nails and it and it gets done the democratic way to do it is like okay well we need to source the the nails from uh an indigenous you know population we need to make sure that our wood is renewable.

We should think about whether or not we want to use tin on the roof because it's recyclable.

So that's what bike shedding is.

And I think coming from my voice, this is not necessarily going to resonate with a lot of people.

So I want to refer people to the person where I've, I think, who is

perhaps the right messenger on this.

So if you go to TikTok, you go to Note Brigade 1,

there is this,

there's this queer woman.

She's an expert in authoritarianism, in fascism, and she actually studies extremist populations.

And she has been doing videos expressing her frustration, where she is a member of multiple targeted populations.

And she is frustrated with progressive organizing because of this bike shedding thing, where everyone is demanding purity rather than acting together with fucking urgency because, you know,

under, you know, their

opinion, their professional opinion, like the risk of fascism coming to harm them is very high right now.

And fighting over like,

are we going to get our shit printed at this store versus that store is like a real fucking distraction that in the end will result in people getting harmed because we're wasting our fucking time.

So, our liability, one word, Zach, for the marketing thing, is bike shedding.

That is our liability.

I think there's a lot to what Chris is saying because I think you could see that in the federal government too.

And that's as someone who worked in the federal government for five years.

One of the reasons I left the federal government was that the president's term was going to end in a year, but another was just the bureaucracy was killing me.

It was killing me.

Like, for example, every

Interior Department Department website, which includes National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, all this, we're all on different platforms, different hosting, paying 15 different contracts for 15 different things.

And I was trying to simplify it so that it would all be under one platform.

Everyone would have control over their own pieces.

It took me two years to get a contract vehicle through.

Of course.

Two years.

And you can only hire people from a certain selection of candidates.

And it favors big businesses because they could spend the money on dealing with all, going through all the process and everything like that.

And I think Democrats should be for fixing that.

Like we, we got into a place where we

made a lot of bureaucracy.

And at first, I think it probably made sense for what people were doing, but then no one ever really like looked at it and go, especially in like a digital age and go, well, maybe we don't need to do it this way anymore.

And I just think that

whoever said we were for the status quo, it feels right because we are just like, no, government's good, keep it.

And it's like, well, government is good, but there is a lot of improvements that could be made and actually save a lot of money.

Yes.

But we don't talk about it.

I think that's, that's dead on.

I mean, one of the, I mean, clearly our liabilities are that we're kind of, we're attached to trying to make sure everything is just so.

Right.

That's, I think that if you really, all of this stuff comes down to that, not just what we're just talking about here, but also the language we use and the way we're trying to interact with groups.

Like if not, if everything is not just so, we get very nervous.

Like, oh, we don't want to offend this person.

We don't want to do this thing wrong.

And just fucking do it.

And that's the thing where it's like the Trump administration has sort of set the table for the next Democratic administration to come in and at least be more aggressive because he's been insanely aggressive with how he's approaching things.

And it's to the detriment of the country, not because that this is the wrong approach to how we structurally do things, but because his ideas are bad.

So I think if you zoom out on this, it's like our greatest assets are that we have good ideas, and our greatest liabilities is we we have no or that we have no way of actually implementing them without constant fear of doing it wrong or offending people.

And that is a huge problem.

But our messaging is the problem, which is why we're having this conversation about branding.

And I think that we don't do a good job of acknowledging the problems with the systems that we've got.

We're like, oh, yeah, there's always things we could be done.

Well, what are they?

Like, tell people how you're going to improve the government.

If you're going to spend all this money, like, how are you going to do that?

How are we going to get better candidates into the federal government?

That's another problem that you are not allowed to hire just anyone off the street if their resume is the best.

You are not allowed to do that.

I have tried it.

I tried fighting against it and I lost.

And it wasn't even a close fight.

Like, I just, it was just no.

Right.

So, these things, when people hear this and they hear about preference and all this stuff, they lose their minds.

And I think we have to have a real conversation about that because just telling people, oh, Trump's bad, and we're just going to go back to the way it was is a nursery.

i mean there are a couple of layers to unpack with with the liabilities but i think the the first thing that that i come that comes to mind is how we talk to ourselves and this is why it doesn't work here because

you like it just looks like a bunch of people in power lecturing people who are not in power basically as far as social groups but i'm going to say

as a person, there are things about me that are not the power class.

And, you know, this is what I tell myself when I wake up, up, non-religious in this country, for example.

We are tougher than

we want to feel like.

Like when you wake up in the morning and you just feel like the world is crashing down on me and everything is terrible, whether it's a relationship or it's addiction or whether it's politics or whether it's economics, you are tough and you can do.

things that maybe you don't think that you can do.

And I think that we have to be better at telling ourselves that because if you are a person who is in the 0.0001% of like social groups, the people that the right always wants to punch down on, like, what are there, seven trans women in collegiate sports out of 500,000 athletes, and they are obsessed with those seven people, those seven people, they are tougher than every MAGA in this country.

Because the MAGAs wake up every day in a country where they are on the king, they are the king of the hill.

They are on the top.

Everything is working in their favor, and they still find a way to cry and be a little tiny baby bitch about every single fucking thing that happens.

And then a trans woman shows up and she goes, I just want to play volleyball.

And she's 16 and the entire world is calling her a disgusting monster and saying, I wish she could be deported.

That person is tough.

And so just own that.

Know that you are tougher.

If you're a barista getting,

if you're a barista getting misgendered, you already know how tough you are.

So don't, don't lean into being the victim.

I think that's something that Democrats really need to tell ourselves.

Then the other piece is,

what are we saying to the world?

That's the messaging.

That's why we're here.

You can't just hyper focus on that part of it.

We all know that's there.

But we have to talk about it in a way that relates to more people.

Because if everybody is equally as self-I don't want to say self-centered, but focused on their own lens or seeing the world through their own lens, which we all do.

you have to find the biggest possible lens to apply so that everybody can empathize with what you're trying to say.

And then the last part is, how do you win?

And so, you know, getting there, you don't talk about all of the, all of the things when it comes to winning.

You talk about the thing that 50%, 51% of the people can go, that's the one thing that I'm really excited to vote for.

And you have to know that the rest is going to come along with it.

You know, we know that our empathy and that our values are coming along with it.

We just have to trust the process.

That's the thing.

And that leads into when you pop back in, we were talking about, you know, like, who is our target audience?

And like you say, it's, we need to have a message that reaches across, but we also have to know who not to talk to or not to worry about talking to.

Like, I think so many people, like in the comments of all my videos, are like, MAGA's never going to hear this.

I'm like, it's not the point.

I'm not trying to get MAGA to change their mind.

I'm trying to get people in the middle who are on the fence about Trump to change their mind.

Those are the only people we should be focused on in terms of like people who don't currently agree with us.

So, you know, I think like, if just for me personally, if we're talking about target audience, it's pretty much everybody but MAGA.

At least that's my perspective.

And I'm curious if you guys have a different perspective on it.

So I think the question is:

and this is something that's going to, you know, there's going to be lots of debate over this.

Are we trying to convince the folks in the middle and the minorly to the right, or are we trying to reach the tens of millions of Biden voters who didn't vote in 2024?

And I'll give an example of why I tend to lean towards that.

You just have to look at my city, New York City, and look at what Zorin Mamdani has done in building a coalition to take down

a legacy

political operative, a very, very smart person, an Andrew Cuomo.

If you look at the voter registration tallies, new voter registration tallies in New York City

right before the deadline here,

and again, this is generally an off-cycle year, so these numbers tend to be down.

They smashed the record for a candidate bringing a new vote.

40,000 people registered to vote for Zoran Mamdani.

And I think there's a message in that.

And, you know, because if we had held the Biden coalition together in 2024, we would be talking about President Harris right now or President Biden, I guess.

It's, you know, however that would have fallen, gone through.

Let's talk about that.

I don't want to talk about that anymore.

Did he drop out in time?

I'm not kidding.

So, so I, I, you're, it's an interesting balance.

Are we trying to drive a surge?

And he, he overwhelming

young people.

Actually, I think the 18 to 24, the 18 to 30 block for him was his biggest demographic, which like never happens because young people just generally don't tend to vote as much.

So which of those audiences, or is it a both?

I think you can do both.

I really do.

I really believe you can do both.

I think it's just, it comes down to an exercise like this of like, how do you appropriately message both things?

Like, it's like, I think I said it in our last episode or the episode before, we're like, take something that people who vote for Mom Dani would love, like universal healthcare, right?

A lot of people want it.

It's a popular idea.

But then you look at people in the the middle and they kind of go, ooh, I don't like it because it feels like it's dangerous fiscally and it's going to be too expensive.

If you pitch that idea as the biggest corporate tax cut in American history, you can get those people in the middle to come in while not changing the policy at all.

It's just a, like, that's the reason I think this exercise we're doing here is so important is that Democrats just go all in on the wrong message all the time.

Like they try to feed the wrong mouth.

And it's like, look, you need to do both of the things that Tim is talking about.

You got to bring in the people who are in the middle, but you also have to bring in the people who sat at home.

Those are different groups of ideologies, right?

And they both can be hit.

You just have to understand how to finesse and kind of get through the middle.

But it's a hard thing to do when you have a bunch of leadership that doesn't give a shit.

And it's not just corporate.

Small business owners, you don't go to them and you say, you have to provide benefits for your workers because it's the right thing to do.

Like you can try that.

But that person is saying, hey, I make $32,000 a year trying to get this goddamn business off the ground and I need to hire 12 people.

And if I do that, I'm going to need to either give them benefits or pay them twice as much so they can buy their own benefits.

Small business owners, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, these people who want to do something good, they all hit a break point where they start to have to offer the things.

You know, they got to get workers' comp insurance.

Like there's certain costs that are just built in, but then you get to this next wave where if you're trying to offer competitive, you know, compensation packages and you're trying to become a real business that is catastrophically expensive and very difficult to manage and navigate just from a legal and compliance issue, not to mention how you actually pick the benefits and have something that employees want and will stay for, like

you can take that all off the table.

So now starting and growing a business becomes 10 times easier because you're not trying to take care of the families that work for you.

You're just able to actually do the job, do the work and deliver the value to your customers, knowing that your taxes, your corporate taxes, your personal taxes are taking care of not just your employees and their families, but everybody.

That's absolutely right.

I mean, I think it's unfortunately that group tends to vote for the right at this point because they just prioritize cheaper, cheaper and easier.

And that's what the right sells.

But if we were able to sell a message where it's like, talk about fucking cheaper, it's like not even close.

Like they want to give you a little marginal tax cut.

We want to eliminate an entire expenditure from what you're dealing with and take it on ourselves.

It's just a messaging structure.

It's this, you know, that's the biggest problem.

So like I think the average cost for health insurance nationwide for an employee, just in case people don't know this, is about $800 per employee per month.

That's

crazy.

That's the starting point.

So if you've got 10 employees, that is $8,000 a month, your business has to produce just to pay for health insurance for those workers.

It's wild.

I've said, I mean, as a small business owner myself, I've said numerous times that I wouldn't have started my business unless my wife had really good health insurance because I wouldn't be able to.

And then I ended up hiring five or six people.

Those jobs don't exist.

Now, you just look at that across the board.

And those were, you know, those are decent jobs.

And, you know, there's a lot of red tape around hiring and needing, you know, if they work a certain amount of hours, you got to give benefits, which in this new gig economy.

is a bit antiquated.

It depends on the type of job.

And I think that's stuff, again, I think that's stuff that Democrats could really talk about.

And I have never understood why we've never taken the economic lens to healthcare, especially from a small business.

Makes no sense.

It is killer.

And

I mean, if we were for that or talked about that, I mean, I'm not saying we're going to get an avalanche of changeover, swing, swing over votes, but like, I think we have to start talking to people like they understand it and not in these 10 million foot view positions because now you're like, how does that affect me?

Well, it's the same thing with like childcare.

Anything universal like that, it's like right now, the big banner on it is too expensive or like socialist or whatever.

But if you put the big banner on it, it goes cheaper, better, easier.

It's a totally different story.

And like, I, you know, the next question on my list is how do we define the enemy of the party?

I think the enemy of the party right now is

this mentality within the party.

I mean, I just can't,

I think that we're

the definition of holding ourselves back.

Right.

We have a ton of policies that people would love if they understood how they could affect them.

And we just don't communicate that at all.

I mean,

I see that as a greater enemy to the party than MAGA, personally, but I'm curious if you guys agree with that.

I think that we should, before we move on to defining the external enemy,

staying on what is holding us back from reaching our desired audience,

there's a very big and important

debate that I think is going on.

It's like the AOC Latinx versus the Ruben Gallego Hispanic, right?

The Democratic Party has largely adopted the language of Columbia University, where I went to school, which is Latinx, right?

It is the reason why they use the X instead of the Latino or Latin A is because it removes the gender from the language.

Spanish and other Romance languages are inherently gendered languages, so there's a lot to unpack there.

But on Columbia University's campus, I took a class with Ed Morales, who wrote a book about Latinx and the identity that has been created in this kind of ivory tower

arena that the Democratic Party is trying to inject into the United States, and it is not attracting the population that considers themselves Hispanic.

And every time that I see Ruben Gallego, senator from Arizona, who had previously been a congressman, every time I see him talk to Democrats and say, this is not resonating.

I'm a Hispanic man from Arizona.

Fucking knock it off.

Like he gets shouted down.

So

I don't know how we overcome this.

Do we

split our communications talking to the Latinx and the Hispanics community?

Like,

how do you split that baby?

I mean, I guess the question I have is, because I think it's a it's a not a huge group of people within the democratic party that is trying to shout him down i think it's like you know kind of armchair leftists to a certain degree they're just sort of you know keyboard warriors

like

i

if we said i mean this is being you know really just like minimal about it but if i was like hey guys shut the fuck up we're gonna go along without you how many of them would drop out and not come along versus still just going you know what i don't like the fact that they put me in a corner but at the same time they represent everything I believe in.

Like, if we adopted all their policies, but told them, hey, shut the fuck up.

We're trying to do something here and you're fucking it up.

Do you think they would run away or do you think they would hang with us even though they're pissed?

I would twist that a little bit and say, I think part of the problem that the Democrats have had is that we do not listen to people.

And if a,

I am a white man from Maine, so like, I'm probably not the best person to be commenting on whether it's Latinx or Latino and whatever.

But if the community that you are trying to help is telling you that they do not identify that way, stop doing it.

Now, there may be a percentage, right?

I don't know, because again, I don't feel like I'm the right person to really be weighing into this.

But if a community is telling you, like if Ruben Gallego is Hispanic, like if he is saying stop it, at least stop it in Arizona.

But I mean, I guess it comes back to that thing I've said a bunch is like, what problem are we trying to solve here?

It's the gender, is it, it is de-gendering terminology?

Is that like, again, like, should a political party be focused on that or actual solutions that help people's lives be better?

And I'm not saying that degener, de

gendering doesn't help people, but like, overall, like, I don't think we should be word police.

Luke, it reminds me of when we started the podcast.

And we all viciously hazed you.

Do you remember that?

No.

We viciously hazed you.

You don't.

Well,

one of the commenters was very upset that we hazed Lou.

Oh, I remember that part.

And they told us that, what was the word they were?

You guys were grooming me.

You were all grooming me.

To be a.

And the first thing that comes to my mind is, sorry, Rich Reed.

I love the negative comments.

No, yeah, that was a video.

I think the words you used were that you were grooming me to love Biden like he was my dad.

That's it.

Have we gotten you there yet?

Nope.

Nope.

Well, that's why we're still here then.

Keep working.

But

it reminds me, or reminded me of that exchange, because did anyone ask Luke if he was a victim of that exchange?

Or did we assume that he was a victim?

Did we, were we looking for ghosts?

Because we do that.

We fantasize about a victim taking place.

And then we say, have you considered that some people, you know, Jason Pargan talked about this the other day?

It's like, you know, well, that's ableist to say, just leave your house and go, you know, learn a new sport.

It's not, that message isn't to that person, you know, that

you can't say everything to everybody all the time.

And I think that's the other problem is

we have to understand that some Hispanic people will want to be treated in one way and others will want to be treated in a different way.

And so saying we have, we have to victimize the Hispanic community first.

We have to put them in the assign a victim mindset to them, which is something the right always says is the victim mindset, but we have to assign a victim mindset to them.

And then we have to behave.

We all have to, as a monolith, behave in a specific way so as to not harm that victim that we have just manifested out of thin air.

Ask the fucking person, Are you hurting right now?

If so, how can I help you personally?

Rather than saying, like, you are a member of a community that we are ruining, whether you like it or not.

And we will, but don't worry, we will protect you.

And they're just going, what the fuck are you talking about?

So, to your point, Tim, yes, listen not just to the community, but listen to the person.

They might not care if they get misgendered or not.

I mean, that's right.

They might just be, you know, they're that tough.

And they're just like, fuck it, dude.

I've been dealing with that my whole life.

Like, it might just be that simple.

No, I, I, and I, but I think it's also like, this speaks to a broader issue, which is like, we're we're policing everything all the time.

Look at, we just had July 4th.

I made a post on threads about

Jason Kelsey getting ripped to shreds because he pretty much said, like, hey, America's great.

We should all put aside our differences and appreciate our country.

And everybody fucking decimated this guy.

You're privileged.

It's like, yeah, maybe to a certain degree, he is privileged.

But distill this guy's message down.

He's a regular dude who's not a Trump supporter, not a MAGA guy.

And he pretty much was like, I like America.

And I want to celebrate it today, the end.

And everybody just fucking eviscerated this guy.

And it's like, I get it.

There's pride in America is probably at an all-time low for really good fucking reason.

But we shouldn't be assaulting potential allies because they like America.

It's like, dude, what the fuck are we doing?

It's across the board.

We're just like letting people who are angry ruin our narratives here.

And that's why we're called anti-American too.

Like, people think Democrats like hate America.

It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?

I love America too, because I see MAGA just like, I love my body, but when I have a virus in my body, I try to get it the fuck out of my body.

It doesn't mean that I now hate my body and wish I were dead.

America is not dead because America, I mean, you can just literally now read our founding document.

You can say the Pledge of Allegiance, and it is wildly incompatible with the things that these people are doing.

Like the word indivisible is in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Take out the under God part, right?

Or keep it either way.

They are incompatible.

So like

you can proudly say, I believe in everything America stands for because my understanding of America is this, not that fucking monstrosity tumor that is growing on the side of its face.

We're going to chop that shit off and we're going to cure it.

I love this country enough to call it out on for what it is.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

I think the virus is a great analogy.

Like, it's 100% sure you're not going to just, you know, just hate yourself because you're going through a temporary pain.

But I mean, it does, it just like,

I think we just, in the end, zooming back to where we were before, we just kind of cower to these people that create these narratives.

We don't push back on these, like we do to a certain degree, but the overarching narrative becomes Democrats hate America.

Democrats only care about these particular vulnerable groups.

None of that is true, but at the same time, we don't control the narrative at all.

So I think that that's sort of like a core problem that we're facing at this point with our

I love this country enough to critique it.

Right.

Right.

What world is a thing that you like?

You have no critiques of it, right?

Right.

Like even like...

You have to give up on something entirely to stop complaining about it.

Right.

I mean, think about our kids, right?

Most all, but one of us has is children.

And we all think our children are perfect, right?

But

there are things that they do that you don't want them to do.

And if you just allow them to do whatever they want for the rest of their lives, they will turn out to be miserable human beings.

So, like, you have to like, and it's the same with this, like this, this experiment that we call America is always trying to form a more perfect union, right?

That implies we aren't there.

So, it is okay for us to say America's not doing so great right now, even though we love it.

So, you're saying MAGA is a five-year-old high on candy, running into traffic, and we are the people stopping the five-year-old from running into traffic and saying, don't do that.

That's a terrible idea.

And they go, but I want want to.

And you go, well, I have to win this fight because otherwise you're going to die.

I mean, basically, yes.

You're full of good analogies today.

Yeah, you are.

Wow.

You got to make all these into videos.

Yeah.

You got to script all these out.

So I threw us off because

Zach was moving on to the next thing.

So I want to bring us back on track.

So we were at part three.

How do we define the enemy of the party?

Zach, do you want to kind of I think we kind of just did to a certain degree.

I think the enemy is

us in a a way.

Like, unquestionably, the enemy is Trump and MAGA.

Like, that's all the enemy of the party, but like, that's so cut and dry.

Like,

I think that the biggest challenge we face is internal versus external.

But this is a debate that the party has because a lot of people don't think that.

A lot of people think just rail against Trump, attack MAGA as hard as you can.

Don't worry about what the Democrats stand for, whatever, all that stuff.

Let's just keep this completely focused on Trump.

And my argument back to that is that was what Harris attempted after about the first month of her campaign.

Once she really got rolling, she just pivoted hard, just attacking Trump.

Fucking fell like a lead balloon.

It was a terrible, it didn't work because people, they know he's bad.

Tons of people who voted for this guy know he's bad.

They don't give a shit because she didn't come to the table and go, hello, this is what I want to offer you.

Here's a clear description of it.

Here's why it's better and different.

She just didn't do that.

And I think that that was to her own detriment.

And that's why the internal is a problem.

I think going, you know,

how many, what level do we want to win on?

Because we will win in 2026.

Like, we will take the House.

We have a possibility, you know, we have a chance at taking the Senate.

If we, if we are just, if we just say the enemy of the party is MAGA, that will get us a certain, like the pendulum is going to come back.

How far and how hard remains to be seen.

But that will get us to that point.

But if we defeat this thing that we're talking about here, if we defeat the enemy within where we can't say certain things and we can't say that, you know, the economy is the most important thing to people.

And they say, yeah, but what about marginalized communities?

We say the economy is what helps marginalized communities.

Power and money are the same goddamn thing in this country.

And if you create an economy that keeps wealth where it belongs, which is with all the people doing the fucking work,

those people become more powerful.

And then they become non-marginalized and they have power and they elect representatives that represent them.

That is how this thing works.

But you can't be talking about that nth degree of misery.

You have to be talking about the thing that protects everything, which is keeping wealth in the middle class and below.

And when you keep wealth down there, it empowers everybody.

I like your framing, but and this is another problem for the Democratic Party is our over-reliance on wealthy donors.

And that makes doing some of those things very difficult.

Also, weaning yourself off that money is also very difficult because of the

Citizens United ruling, which basically means there's unlimited money.

So if you don't take that money, you're at a disadvantage.

But our donors don't like those things.

Like, I mean, you look at the freak out of the donor class in New York City about getting taxed roughly $2,000 more a year if you make a million dollars.

And they're like, oh, they're looking at Eric Adams, the most corrupt, horrendous human being on earth, that we're all of a sudden going to toss all our values in the trash for this like

wannabe mobster that runs the city.

If you could tell, I do not like this guy at all.

It's an accurate description.

I mean, you're not being mean.

You're being accurate.

No, and we all said this was going to happen.

He's not, he's not the smartest dude, and we're seeing corruption in real time.

And he got out of it because Donald Trump won.

But, but regardless, but like, that's what I'm saying.

Like, these people who make gobs and gobs of money are willing to turn to somebody like that, who literally has done nothing to improve the city over four years.

And he's theoretically a Democrat.

Like, we have to, we have to, we haven't squared these two issues with the wealthy supporters of the Democratic Party and the working class part, because I agree with you, Rich, that that working class and middle class messaging is far more effective than what I think the wealthy donors want, which is just stay the course.

Yeah, it's a real issue.

What did we spend $2 billion in the last election and we didn't lost?

Donald Trump in 2016 and in 2024, he just, he had no ground game.

I mean, I remember we so loudly laughed and mocked him for having no ground game, for having incompetent field organizers or just no field operations at all.

He said, I just move speeches.

I just do speeches.

You know, he just goes around and he does rallies, and everybody shows up.

And lo and behold, it works both times.

I don't, I don't think we, I mean, you've got to do the speeches.

People two out of three times.

Two out of three times.

And one of the times, 10,000 people were dying every day because of his neck, in part because of his negligence.

We don't have to open that Pandora's box, but yes,

it has, it proved effective for him 66.6 repeating percent of the time.

And I think, you know, we have to do the speeches.

I mean, Obama did tours.

He crushed rallies.

Like Obama did that better than anyone.

And yet we now have this amplification engine of social media and influencers.

So, or sorry, content creators.

And we are all here to do that work as well.

So bring us the Zoran, you know, bring us the voice, bring us the personality, the person who could just say affordability, affordability.

Have I talked to you guys recently about affordability?

Yes.

And then let us do the details.

details let us do the rest of the of the legwork i think we can we can do that and that will save us from having to have two billion dollar campaigns that lose seven out of seven swing states well i think democrats

yes i mean sometimes we think we can spend our way and organize our way to victory and we can't we spent more money and we had a better ground game But ground games only work to an extent if you have the right messenger and people know what you're fighting for.

Barack Obama, which is a once-in-a-generation talent, no doubt about it,

had yes, we can, was very clear in his position against the war, and was very much a change candidate, which every election we have seems to be a change election.

No one's like, let's just keep the course, you know?

And so we need that, but it has to be all of those packages together.

Otherwise, it doesn't work.

Like you can't run a 70-plus-year-old candidate on change.

Right.

It just doesn't

challenge.

Yeah, it's a challenge.

But I mean, if you, if you look at what made Trump successful the two times out of of three that he won, it's that he really just embraced a specific marketing tactic and just pummeled people to death with it.

That's really all he did.

He just went, I stand for cheaper things, the end.

It was, that was the baseline of it.

So like, that's why we're doing this exercise because Democrats didn't have that.

Democrats had all these different segmentations of, okay, we're going to focus on this message with these people, this message with these people.

And in the end, it just felt like a conglomerate of nonsense and white noise, and it just didn't feel like it had any cohesion.

So that's why we're doing this now.

And that brings us to our real final question: sort of, is like, what is the core of what our branding needs to be?

How do we actually take this whole conversation and distill it down into a little nugget that we can use the same way Trump uses to just pummel people with this is who we are, this is what we stand for at the end.

What is that thing?

Instead of workshopping through it, when I look at what is the new course identity/slash/emotional center of the brand, how is that delivered to the audience?

Luke, do you want to just show us how you channel emotion

and channel and deliver emotion with a get fucked segment by chance?

I mean, I can.

I think it's

like the easiest person to immediately tell get fucked is Donald Trump.

Like, it's pretty much just like right off the bottom.

Evergreen.

Evergreen.

Yeah.

So Donald Trump, you can get fucked.

You misogynistic, racist piece of shit.

But I do think there is something to like,

the thing I love about what you do is not just the fact that you're, you know, extremely fun to watch, is you're extremely direct.

People like directness.

Democrats are not direct.

They're not at all.

And I think, like, almost the core idea that I get to is like, we, we know where we, like, policy, we don't have to really debate policy.

We know what we want.

I mean, yeah, there's some friction between, you know, moderates and leftists, but we're all in the same realm.

We're trying to fight for the same shit.

It's really a question of how do we deliver the message.

And I think what Luke, what you do resonates because you're just like, fuck it, this is it.

Like, you're just right at it, and we don't do that.

Right.

Just say it.

And maintain contacts the whole time.

It's very uncomfortable, and yet you love it.

I think if we solve our brand problem and also how we deliver it, I think how we deliver it is equally as important.

People want a fighter.

You know, right now, especially with all of this damage that has been done.

I think that

the delivery of said message for middle-class working families, which I think is what the party really needs to be about, and basically telling Donald Trump and Elon Musk and all of those Republican mega donors to go get fucked.

I think that's the path for somebody to run with.

All right, DNC, give me a check for $5 million.

I'll coach your candidate on how to say that.

We just talked about the mega donors.

We can't do that.

If you guys don't ever want us to poison Luke with mega donors, go and subscribe to our sub stack.

Shameless.

Yes.

That is shameless.

Keep going.

Keep going.

Yeah, we're about to.

And don't forget to buy our merch.

Buy several coffee mugs, and Luke will never lose.

Then I don't have to take billionaire money.

They're going to say, we love your message and your rage and your passion and directness, but could you do it without saying the F word?

The answer is no.

So the point that Rich is making about, like, you know, we have to depend on the grassroots to reward positive behavior.

I have been running or working at nonprofits for 20 years, and I am trying to get away from that shit because

time after time after time after time, I've got these big promises from big donors who, you know, maybe give a little taste and then never come through.

And I've been like constantly fucking starving.

That's why Find Out Podcast LLC is an LLC.

Like we can't, we can't do what Media Matters for America did.

Like we can't depend just on big donors and then wait for, you know, an Elon Musk to sue us to into oblivion, right?

Because we've got to put all our 990s out there.

We would not be able to,

you know, keep any business confidential stuff, right?

So Talking about supporting individual creators and brands like Find Out,

we've made a joke out of it, but it's our livelihoods now.

Like this, this is what we're doing.

This is it.

Right.

And

if we are, as individuals, if we aren't rewarded by our audience, that's a signal that what we're doing is not good enough for the Democratic Party.

And it is not good enough for progressivism and for America and for politics.

And we will, as individuals, have to go find something else in the private sector, or I'll still be stuck floundering in the nonprofit world, trying to get the fuck away from it, even though I can't.

Like this shit, this shit matters.

And we can't wait for a billionaire to solve all of our problems.

And

you do get what you pay for.

If you're watching

cable news, whether it's the left or the right or the center, if you're watching cable news, you're getting exactly what you're paying for.

You might not think about it that specifically, but the value that is not delivered is because advertisers are paying.

And I'm not even talking about our podcast.

I mean,

do what you need to do with your own money, as far as listeners are concerned.

But advertisers are paying the cable news networks and they will only pay for cable news that isn't too polarizing or that isn't too charged or that doesn't have naughty words or that doesn't make people feel bad because when you feel bad, you don't buy enough tennis shoes.

There are a million ways that that system is controlled by money, even when it isn't directly controlled by money.

But a lot of times it is just straight up directly controlled by money.

There is no wall between the editorial team and the advertising team like there was 30 and 40 years ago.

There's no respect for that.

The money pays for the content and everybody knows it.

And that's why they're all for, I mean, every major news network, besides like BBC and NPR and PBS, are for-profit companies.

Well, I'm going to disagree with Rich slightly because I do want your money for those of you who are listening.

But no, it's serious.

Like, look, like I, we all have our stories.

Chris kind of mentioned his.

I run a digital marketing agency, which I have decided to spend 20, 25% of my time with that and 75, 80% of my time here.

But we do need to rely on the support of our audience in order to keep going so that we don't, you know, you don't have to go down the road of like being beholden to some donor.

So I, you know, we joke about it, but it is serious.

And we also want to be a place where we're lifting up other creators too.

And with that, you know, it does take resources to do that.

So if you can, here comes the pitch, guys.

If you can, go to findoutpodcast.substack.com and you can subscribe for $6 a month.

So what are we talking?

$72 a year or maybe it's $60 a year if you pay up front,

which helps us tremendously.

And buying merchandise, which the last time we mentioned it, a bunch of people bought merchandise, which is great.

And then that also helps with brand awareness.

And you can get that at findoutpodcast.com.

We're going to be talking about some other ideas and things.

You know, part of the with you with your money is also allowing us to develop other shows or other content that is also relevant.

We've talked about, you know, wouldn't it be great to have a left-leaning financial podcast where people actually get information that's not from corporate media, which only serves corporations, like financial news that matters to people.

Liberals don't have money, Tim.

Liberals are all

poor.

We're all poor.

He says, and if we just stopped drinking coffee, we could buy a house.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you idiots.

On the merch thing,

before we get off it, I do want to ask our listeners, would you buy a shirt that says get fucked and has Luke's face on it?

I'm thinking about it.

I think it's a little star on the

should it be censored.

Would you buy it?

Would you wear it?

Would you buy it and just wear it at home?

Like, I want to know: is the get fucked shirt going to sell?

Because,

because we got to start putting stuff that you like.

And, and I, yeah, I would love that.

I don't think I'd wear it in public, but that's just

my daughter can read.

You'll wear it.

Yeah.

And then you were, I told him he needs a get looped shirt

as well as the

censored version.

Censored version.

And also,

our stuff, our stuff is all made in the USA, talking about loving our country, made in the USA and union printed where it's available.

Are our shirts made from reclaimed cotton from marginalized communities, though?

We can't sell them to them.

You're pushing it.

You're pushing it now.

No.

No, that doesn't.

There is a recycling.

There is an organization that I've worked with that actually does recycle merchandise, though.

That is a real thing.

So that's.

They're right next to every conference center at every corporate event.

They just take the shirts right out of the conference center and just research them, yeah, reclaim them.

Well, on that note, everybody, we have a hard stop at the top of the hour, which none of you know because

nothing absolutely.

I'm just wasting time now.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

As always, please let us know what you thought about this conversation in the comments wherever you get this.

Like I said, you can support us at findoutpodcast.substack.com and purchase our merch at findoutpodcast.com.

We'll be this is Tuesday, so we'll be back with you on Thursday.

And, you know, we haven't talked about the topic yet.

We'll probably be talking about Texas a little bit more and

whatever else crazy shit happens in the next 48 hours.

So thank you all for watching.

Per usual, we'll talk to you soon.