Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman answer the insightful questions submitted by our Patreon subscribers: including what Twitter might look like in 2 years, whether Pelosi screwed up with the impeachment process, and ways to solve the homeless problem in America. SUBSCRIBE to hear the full episode and unlock a ton more features of the Muckrake Community: http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome. | |
| By the way, I just opened this can. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Nick, I got this new basement refrigerator. | |
| Nice. | |
| And I am, by the way, it's the Weekender edition of the Muckrake podcast, everybody. | |
| J.D. | |
| Sexton. | |
| I'm here with Nick Halseman. | |
| This is the Thanksgiving edition. | |
| So we're going through the mailbag, doing a bunch of questions. | |
| So I'm just going to start it real loose. | |
| I got a new basement refrigerator. | |
| And let me tell you something about Jared, Yates, Saxton, Nick. | |
| I like to crank those things up. | |
| I like my stuff cold. | |
| Oh, is up the right word then? | |
| How dare you? | |
| How dare you get linguistic on me, a former professor of rhetoric and linguistics, my friend. | |
| Well, it's not like you write books. | |
| Off to a galloping start. | |
| I like my things cold. | |
| Here's the problem. | |
| Last night, I went to open up a beer. | |
| It exploded like a beer has never exploded before. | |
| It was too cold. | |
| Oh wow. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'm not intuning your character. | |
| I'm just asking questions. | |
| You're doing your research, and that's wonderful. | |
| Everybody, we are very, very excited about this Thanksgiving episode. | |
| I'm going to give my thanks here in just a minute, but Nick, do you want to update people on your situation, on your sitch, if you will? | |
| Well, having gone to Chicago to my best friend's wedding ... You were bragging in the podcast, going around the country. | |
| Yep. | |
| Movin' and shakin'. | |
| And having had COVID three and a half months ago, I figured, eh, maybe there's some less immunity, but apparently not. | |
| So I got COVID. | |
| I just tested positive yesterday. | |
| I am currently looking for anybody else in the city of Los Angeles that wants to have Thanksgiving who has COVID and can verify that. | |
| So, you know, a very COVID Thanksgiving for me. | |
| A proverbial Lonely Hearts Club, if you will. | |
| That's so sad. | |
| I hope you can have a decent Thanksgiving. | |
| It is extremely sad. | |
| But, you know, my kids are in town, my dad's in town, they're all gonna go. | |
| This is a particularly meaningful Thanksgiving for a lot of reasons and I'll have to be, you know, isolated. | |
| I think love will find a way. | |
| So let's go ahead and let's start this thing off the right way before we get to your questions. | |
| And by the way, really good questions. | |
| We have a lot of different things to talk about. | |
| Nick, what are you thankful for this year? | |
| Wow, you know what, I haven't even reflected on that up until this point, but I suppose I'm thankful for the health we've all enjoyed in the immediate family for the most part. | |
| I think that's probably it, even though, and thankful that COVID isn't more than just like, for at least our family, a cold or, you know, a little bit of a flu-y thing, but that's about it. | |
| So, you know, I'll go with that. | |
| Very nice. | |
| How about you? | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Oh no, how about you? | |
| Well, first of all, I just want to go ahead and say, I'm in this place right now, and maybe people have been seeing it in my writing and in my work lately. | |
| I am working very hard on being radically open, radically honest, radically hopeful. | |
| I just want to go ahead and, at the risk of sounding lame, I'm thankful for you, Nick. | |
| I'm thankful for your friendship. | |
| I'm thankful for this partnership. | |
| I'm thankful for this show. | |
| I think we're doing great work right now. | |
| We're only getting better. | |
| I'm thankful for the Muckrate community, for their support. | |
| These have been hard times, and we've gotten each other through it. | |
| And I am thankful for the human race, which, when you're feeling radically hopeful, I don't know if you get in these places. | |
| You walk around, You have great conversations with complete strangers. | |
| You have intimate moments of talking with people, enjoying the world. | |
| It looks beautiful. | |
| The universe winks at you every now and then, says, hey, we're paying attention. | |
| So I am radically thankful. | |
| That is terrific. | |
| Glad that you feel that way, especially because, you know, my wife did not get COVID and I'm trying to find out why I'm so lucky. | |
| Is it wrong to be maybe just a little bit frustrated or angry that she didn't get it? | |
| That's probably wrong, isn't it? | |
| It's a weird thing. | |
| We were talking a little bit about this. | |
| COVID is a strange, strange affliction, and I'm glad your partner's feeling good. | |
| I'll just say that. | |
| I'll be the one to say it. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Alright, so we have, listen, we have a whole host of questions, and I'm so excited to talk about all these. | |
| I'm going to go ahead and start off with Lisa's Lisa says, I've been reading Unchecked, the untold story behind Congress's botched impeachments of Donald Trump, but I feel like I'm in an alternate universe where there was actually a belief on the Democratic side that Republicans would capitulate. | |
| Like what? | |
| I would have bet my house and won both times because there was no way in hell Republicans would ever vote to impeach him. | |
| Question, are they really that oblivious to what's going on? | |
| I refuse to believe that me, out here minding my own business and not in the halls of Congress, can see it accurately and they can't or won't. | |
| It's all a game, isn't it? | |
| Also, Pelosi really effed up with this from a progressive perspective. | |
| I'm sure her many corporate donors are quite pleased. | |
| It's infuriating how everyone pretends that they hold these lofty goals when it comes down to it. | |
| They're all about power and money on both sides. | |
| Nick, how do you feel about all this? | |
| Well first I'd like to just maybe reinterpret Lisa's part of her question because I feel like she wrote the words like and then what with a lot of question marks. | |
| So I think it was really like what? | |
| So let's just get that. | |
| Like I feel like that's what she wanted to say. | |
| And I agree that she effed up on the first one. | |
| I always I think we expressed this on the pod that the first one wasn't going to have any grist to it. | |
| It wasn't going to capture people's imaginations in the way that a what you would think an impeachment like a Nixon would have. | |
| So I hear you on that one. | |
| I think that the second one ended up being a matter of just you know sometimes they'll they'll try and pass a bill knowing it'll never pass just because it's the right thing to do and that certainly was what they did for January 6th and that impeachment. | |
| I'm also, I'm wondering if the power and money thing is directly related to the impeachment process. | |
| If that's the kind of galvanizing thing that's going to, I suppose money, that can raise money off, maybe that's what she means, but I don't know. | |
| Give me your, give me some of your thoughts. | |
| Well, you know, we talked about it basically during both impeachments that nobody at any point whatsoever thought that he was actually going to be removed from office, right? | |
| A lot of it was political theater. | |
| And by the way, for the record, he deserved to be impeached both times and he deserved to be removed from office both times. | |
| I feel like in a little way, a lot of it is professional wrestling. | |
| It's going out. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| They raised a ton of money from that stuff. | |
| You know, they, they went out and they made a ton of money from that. | |
| But also I think what Lisa is talking about and forgive me if I'm wrong here, Lisa, it's the idea that the democratic party is more worried about sort of serving the interest of the wealthy as opposed to sort of doing what's right. | |
| I think it's, I think in terms of what we're talking about here, I think the democratic party, some of them really went into this being like, this is the right thing to do, This is where we should spend our time. | |
| This is the type of thing that we should put our foot down for. | |
| And then like some of them, they absolutely tell themselves that something like this could work. | |
| It's what helps them sleep at night, right? | |
| And we all do that. | |
| I, you know, you and I have talked a little bit. | |
| We haven't talked about it necessarily on the podcast. | |
| We've talked about it a little bit behind the scenes. | |
| About things that we've experienced and things that we've thought about in our histories and how we sort of process them, right? | |
| Like how, like, you do something when you're younger and then you look back on it and, like, it's like a character that you're looking at as opposed to yourself. | |
| And, like, you tell a story about yourself. | |
| You give yourself the benefit of the doubt, right? | |
| You say, oh, this is what I was doing at that moment. | |
| Here were my motivations. | |
| I'm sure many Democrats, when they were being interviewed for this book, they were like, yes, absolutely. | |
| Like, I thought that they were going to come along. | |
| They never thought that. | |
| The vast majority of them. | |
| And if the Democratic Party really wanted to get Donald Trump removed from office, like, they not only would have gone out and, like, tried to talk to Republicans to make sure that they thought it was OK for Trump to be removed, right? | |
| Because they could have gotten rid of him. | |
| They could have brought in Mike Pence, who is a Republican, and then, you know, whatever. | |
| The effort wasn't there. | |
| It never was. | |
| And I feel like a lot of this is just covering your own ass. | |
| It's telling a story that you want people to think about what you have done and why you did it. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Sure. | |
| I agree. | |
| And by the way, just to go on the record, I certainly thought he should have been impeached for the first one as well. | |
| I mean, you can't shake down another country for political purposes. | |
| Turns out you can. | |
| Turns out you can. | |
| Damn, you're right. | |
| I wonder if they thought that, you know, we're going to present some really good evidence and that actually would sway people, but they didn't quite get to the part where Mitch McConnell was going to forbid that from happening and actually have any kind of semblance of a trial like you're supposed to. | |
| So that might have been the calculation. | |
| And again, would it be surprising that Mitch McConnell was a couple steps ahead of the Democrats? | |
| Like, no, that happens as well. | |
| So, you know, but either way, there is this notion that it was the right thing to do, certainly in the second one. | |
| And you know what? | |
| If that's what we have to do and get the sand kicked in our faces or in their faces, great. | |
| Now, the Pelosi thing is interesting. | |
| She was the one who I think shepherded the first one right after the call came out she was the one who says and I don't know if there was a big uprising until she came out and decided that needed to be done and that's an interesting calculation knowing that it would fail and she you know no one's gonna of all people Nancy Pelosi knew it was gonna fail you know and she did it anyway so uh interesting this guy interesting look at that because normally she has everything in a row before she does anything And I want to say something very quickly before I get to the next question. | |
| Those books are always fascinating. | |
| And I read them too. | |
| And I read them not because I find them to be factual, but because when these books come out, particularly when they're not deep politics, you know what I mean? | |
| When they're not like getting into like historical, psychological, sociological, economic sort of issues. | |
| What they're actually doing is this is the first or second draft of history, right? | |
| It's a bunch of journalists who hang out with a bunch of politicians and they're having conversations. | |
| It's almost like a couple of war buddies sitting around and being like, remember that battle you charged in and I charged in and this is what we did. | |
| And those recollections are so like sort of like not they're not only not accurate, right? | |
| I find them more interesting because of what they can reveal at moments. | |
| Like, well, how do people see themselves? | |
| How do they sort of like imagine themselves in the arena? | |
| And you can actually learn a lot about the psychological motivations based on how they talk about themselves. | |
| But when you do read these things, take them with a grain of salt, right? | |
| They are interesting to learn that sort of like self-reference. | |
| But otherwise, like it's not always like actual reporting, quote unquote. | |
| And that whole method of the war buddies talking about the war, it's basically how the Bible was written. | |
| Same kind of way. | |
| They were just hanging out. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And equally illuminative of, illuminative? | |
| Whatever the word is, of their mental states and what was happening sociopolitically then as well back in the day when they were, I guess, hammering these things into stone or whatever they were writing it down. | |
| I think they were using papyrus. | |
| Oh, that's right. | |
| Could be wrong. | |
| It might have been a papyrus situation. | |
| Yeah, I hope they weren't using the papyrus font. | |
| Oh, I'm with you. | |
| OK, this is actually I'm glad Ronald brought this up because this is something I wanted to talk about. | |
| But, you know, it's like when we do go ahead and pull back the curtain a little bit. | |
| Like, when we're doing a show, we usually break these things up into, like, segments. | |
| Like, three or four segments every episode. | |
| And, like, we find things that we can sort of bring in under things. | |
| There are so many things that I would like to talk about, that Nick would like to talk about, that sort of, like, fall to the wayside. | |
| Ronald has this question, and Ronald says, could you talk about FTX and its connections to the Dems? | |
| You wanna go ahead and start on this one? | |
| You know, I mean, I'll just talk about what Marjorie Taylor Greene is talking about, because she's trying to connect it where they're basically saying that, you know, they poured all this money into Ukraine to help, you know, fight Russia. | |
| Wait, Nick, hold on. | |
| Let's be very clear, my friend. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Who is they poured a bunch of money into Ukraine? | |
| I think she means, you know, the government, Biden, right? | |
| Oh, it's the government. | |
| It's not the certain group behind the scenes pulling strings. | |
| Well, that's another question we have to get to. | |
| But that's right. | |
| Right. | |
| OK, let's let's throw the lasers in there, the space lasers and everything in there, too. | |
| So the money is being. | |
| Oh, you know what? | |
| Maybe that is the thing because it comes. | |
| Anyway, the point being, it goes to Ukraine. | |
| They're investing in FTX. | |
| Hey, like because hey, we're not going to spend it all today. | |
| So let's make a little extra cash on this while we have in the middle of a war against the superpower. | |
| Sure. | |
| Let's do that. | |
| And then they and then as a result all that FDX money gets raised through that way indirectly because somehow the owner is just siphoning out is stealing all the money from FDX. | |
| And then, you know, donating to all these Democratic, you know, campaigns. | |
| So that's how all the money is being funneled that way. | |
| I think she wanted to say it was taxpayer money. | |
| So I'd go with the Biden source. | |
| But either way, you know, that's sort of where they're trying to go with this whole thing. | |
| But at the very least, what we're learning is that a lot of this shit is a scam and was never on any kind of solid foundation of any kind of regulatory, you know, oversight or anything. | |
| So here's the amazing thing. | |
| And it's just like all these right wing conspiracy theories. | |
| Nick, it gets so close to what is actually happening. | |
| It just almost gets there, and then whenever it takes a Marjorie Taylor Greene to say, wait a second, is this capitalism? | |
| Then all of a sudden they're like, no, it's the Jews, it's got to be the Jews. | |
| Which, by the way, we're going to talk about in a second, because there's a really good question about this. | |
| The whole point is this. | |
| Is the military spending that America does, and basically freelancing and arms dealing around the world, is it a grift and a scam? | |
| Absolutely it's a grift and a scam! | |
| It's all a grift and a scam! | |
| It is the American scam! | |
| Which is taking public tax money and putting it into all this and circulating it and making money and also gaining hegemonic power through those activities. | |
| So is what's happening in Ukraine both in defense of a sovereign nation and also a scam? | |
| Absolutely! | |
| It's both things at exactly the same time. | |
| It's the American way. | |
| On top of that, FTX? | |
| Was that a scam? | |
| Absolutely it was a scam because we have reached the point in capitalism where we have to have new things. | |
| We have to make new scams. | |
| We have to make new profits. | |
| We have to further consolidate power. | |
| Did you see, real fast Nick, did you see this article that was in the New York Times about a bunch of sports betting companies like getting onto college campuses and that's the new thing? | |
| Have you seen this? | |
| I have not, but of course. | |
| All of a sudden these sports betting companies, and by the way, like sports betting, you know this because you have like a background in sports, nobody talks about betting for forever. | |
| It was like persona non grata, you don't bring it up. | |
| Then all of a sudden the hell gate opened up and it's like you can bet on literally everything all the time, it's all anybody ever talks about. | |
| Well, it's fantasy sports. | |
| It's not betting. | |
| It's not gambling, Jared. | |
| By the way, I'm required to tell you that because one of my sponsors is one of these people. | |
| There you go, right? | |
| It's just for fun and entertainment. | |
| No, you have a bunch of college campuses who have just made just absolute tons of money that all of a sudden need new ways to make money. | |
| So all of a sudden sports betting are going to get their students hooked on betting and probably take all their money and take advantage of their lack of responsibility or vulnerability. | |
| So, on top of that, like, this FTX thing, the crypto thing, the NFT thing, it's just a layer on top of a layer on top of a layer on top of a layer. | |
| And of course the Democratic Party is in on this. | |
| And you wanna hear something that you're not gonna hear from most other podcasts? | |
| The Democratic Party absolutely had ties to people like Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| Bill Clinton absolutely had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| All of these people that we're talking about, the most powerful people, they're all dirty because they're engaged in the same grift! | |
| They're in the same scam constantly, which is why we need reform. | |
| It's why we need to have a grassroots movement that will actually absolutely take this stuff on. | |
| So yeah, of course the Democrats had ties to this. | |
| Everybody who goes down, everybody who gets involved in a scam, everybody who has a meltdown, everybody who is crooked, of course they've bought government! | |
| That's how this works. | |
| It's just a massive cog of scams that just goes round and round and round. | |
| I would be remiss if I, because what struck me when you mentioned this is how military operations work forever. | |
| Funding money, Iran-Contra is a good example of this where they can put money here and then refund it there and sell different stuff and then all under the books or off the books. | |
| Let's not forget, you know, in 87, I think it's 87. | |
| Can I say a quick thing before you talk about Iran-Contra? | |
| Iran-Contra wasn't even just the sole instance of this. | |
| The entire late 1970s into the 1980s was spent finding all of this dark money so that they could pay a bunch of right-wing neo-fascists to kill leftists, which is why there's no such thing as a left anymore. | |
| They all engaged in that grift, but yeah. | |
| Yeah, and the point being that Congress was in the midst of a 40-year Democratic rule in the House. | |
| They had 55 Senators, Democratic Senators in the Senate. | |
| So it would have been not quite a slam dunk, but I'm sure they probably would have been able to get two or three other Senators. | |
| Wait, what do you need to get for impeachment? | |
| 60? | |
| You gotta get 60, right? | |
| So they probably could have gotten five more, maybe, or it would have been close. | |
| So imagine they didn't even bother even talk about it with Tip O'Neill as the head there in the old boy network. | |
| It's disgusting. | |
| By the way, they loved Reagan. | |
| They loved him. | |
| They loved him. | |
| They didn't agree with him on everything, but he was great for business. | |
| They were great with neoliberalism. | |
| They were like, oh my god, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened. | |
| Let's do it. | |
| Like, they didn't want to get rid of the old man. | |
| And for what it's worth from the college stuff that you're talking about, in 1950 there was a CSANY basketball scandal and the point I wrote a screenplay about this is that people were going to college to play basketball so they could make money. | |
| So they could bet because that was how rampant it had been for decades before that. | |
| And that is exactly how everything has been run. | |
| So it's not like they didn't think it was illegal because everybody had been doing it out in the open for so long. | |
| This is the interesting thing about if we want to pull back a lot of these curtains and we realize that everything is manipulated like you know I gotta I hate to tell you this Jared but like the global oil market is No, what? | |
| Oh my god, you're shitting me. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| Nick, it's almost like, until the Fed raised interest rates to make people go back to work and be terrified of joining labor movements, that literally everybody has a system of free money, and that's one of the reasons why all these people just look like geniuses all the time. | |
| They could just go to the bank and take out whatever they wanted. | |
| It's all a scam, and I hate to tell you that. | |
| It doesn't mean that there's no hope, it doesn't mean we can't make it better, it means we have Right. | |
| Meanwhile, six states are suing the, or trying to block the government from helping people get relief on their college loan debts. | |
| Like, of all the things that nobody wants to care about, all the money in the waste, whatever, a couple thousand bucks for a few people that are under the weight of decades of debt is this triggering event that they have to escalate all the way to the Supreme Court. | |
| So I'm a child of the 1980s and 1990s. | |
| And so you probably remember this a little bit better than I do. | |
| I remember being a kid and like the the Indiana Hoosier lottery came out and they would have like a Saturday night primetime show. | |
| And I remember being a kid and I was like I don't think it's great that the state runs a lottery. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I think it's weird. | |
| That's an odd thing. | |
| And you want to talk about that, like student debt. | |
| A real neoliberal solution to student debt is, why don't you just take a bunch of money and put it on black? | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Just spin the wheel! | |
| Maybe you're going to take care of it, maybe you won't. | |
| Put some cameras in there and let's broadcast it. | |
| We've got from Daniel here. | |
| Speaking of scams, given the current trajectory of Twitter, what place in the discourse do you see it occupying in two to three years, assuming it's still functional and or wholly owned by Elon? | |
| I'll go ahead and start, and then I want to go to you. | |
| You know what I was thinking about? | |
| I think that what Twitter does and how it works, because... I'll go ahead and lay my cards on the table. | |
| I have a book coming out in January. | |
| If you have a pre-order of The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power Paranoia, and The Coming Crisis, why don't you go ahead and pre-order that? | |
| That'd be great. | |
| I had a thought about it, Nick. | |
| How are people going to know that my book's coming out if there's not a Twitter in January? | |
| That's going to be a tall order. | |
| How do you know what anything is? | |
| How do you know where anything is? | |
| I know there are other social media places. | |
| We'll talk about them in just a second. | |
| But, like, Twitter holds a very special function in the public discourse, right? | |
| I feel like after Elon destroys it, it's going to be a lot like the Twinkie. | |
| Do you remember a couple of years ago when all of a sudden you couldn't go anywhere without hearing that the Twinkie was being discontinued and you weren't going to get Twinkies and then everybody wanted the Twinkie? | |
| And next thing you know, you go to the store and not only are there Twinkies, there are frozen Twinkies. | |
| There are Twinkie variants. | |
| You know, I saw this last night shopping for Thanksgiving food. | |
| There's a Twinkie drink. | |
| It's like a bottled Listen, I have COVID. | |
| I'm already a little under the weather, Jared, please. | |
| This is a podcast, by the way, so no one can see that Nick just recoiled in horror at that. | |
| A Twinkie drink? | |
| Yikes. | |
| A Twinkie drink. | |
| But I feel like probably in two to three years, we'll look back. | |
| I don't think Elon Musk will own Twitter. | |
| I think somebody else will have it. | |
| I think it will probably be So MySpace, do you remember that when MySpace fell apart, Rupert Murdoch ended up buying it, and it just sort of existed for music for a minute? | |
| I think it'll be more successful than that, but I don't think, I think we've probably seen peak Twitter. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Maybe something else comes along and takes its place. | |
| Well, Elon is crowing over the more users are signing up and more interaction they've ever had on this. | |
| Because I think people are coming to rubberneck an accident, right? | |
| Or a fiery crash. | |
| I would suspect that it will ultimately be so far removed from the experience that people liked about it and made it as big as it was. | |
| So you will see, and it might not be quick, it might not be overnight, but I would suspect that as your timelines become a morass of things that you don't want, And Musk and his all-knowingness thinks that you won. | |
| You were going to use it less and less, get off of it slowly. | |
| It'll take a little while. | |
| And you're right. | |
| It definitely destroys a lot of the brands that people have built up individually to reach their fans or the people who like them, who want to follow them. | |
| That's a real problem. | |
| But it's kind of been happening that way for a little while anyway, where timelines have been getting messed up a little bit. | |
| Like, you follow people, you never see their tweets. | |
| But I can tell you right now, if this $8 thing really takes hold, And the only way to get amplification of any kind of tweet is through that method, then really people are going to run away in a hurry and it'll be insignificant. | |
| And again, it's neoliberalism and it's tears. | |
| You pay nothing, you get it for free, it's terrible. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| It's borderline, just absolutely inoperable if you don't pay anything extra. | |
| And by the way, that $8 will undoubtedly grow. | |
| You'll have an $8 level, you'll have a $10 level, and then you'll have a super premium $25 level. | |
| And I'll tell you what, I don't want to give – God, I do not want to give Elon Musk any ideas. | |
| But I'll tell you this. | |
| So Tesla, isn't there like a thing that you press? | |
| Is it psycho mode? | |
| Is that what it's called or something like that in a Tesla? | |
| I'm unaware of a thing called psycho mode, but go on. | |
| I want to say there's like a psycho mode where you hit it and it like goes zero to – I don't know. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean the speed – Maybe it's called Psycho Mode. | |
| I don't have that on mine, but yes, there is one. | |
| It runs over a pedestrian, you know, like whatever it is. | |
| And then, like, does a cartwheel and falls into an orphanage and catches fire. | |
| You can make it, instead of honk, you can make a fart noise instead of a honk. | |
| That's for free. | |
| And God damn it, have we had fun with that. | |
| Wait, hold on. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I mean this. | |
| This isn't a bit. | |
| Is that real? | |
| You can make it fart on the inside of the car if you like, in the different seats, or on the outside. | |
| This is how whimsical Elon Musk is. | |
| How did no one see this coming? | |
| How did no one see this terrible, shitty situation coming? | |
| It's incredible! | |
| You know what I was thinking about, Nick? | |
| Actually, speaking of Elon, very, very quickly. | |
| Do you remember? | |
| And Barack Obama was guilty of this. | |
| The Democratic Party was especially guilty of this. | |
| They brought Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, the whole Motley crew. | |
| They would bring them out in public and just be like, oh, you geniuses. | |
| Oh, this world that you are creating is just so wondrous. | |
| Nobody could ever understand it. | |
| Please, we're not even going to ask you questions. | |
| We're just going to sit here and bask in your genius. | |
| You remember that? | |
| That was like a whole time period. | |
| And you've been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show. | |
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| We're even going to do some of these live, so you can come and watch how the sausage is made. | |
| All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| On top of that, you get to hang out with the muckrake community, which are a really good group of people. | |
| So you should do that. | |
| That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. |