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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman went through the painful Twitter Spaces announcement that Meatball Ron will be running for President, as it was endless display of technical incompetence and shameful disinformation. Plus. Congress thinks it's okay to go on vacation on the eve of a potential debt ceiling crisis that could sink the economy.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Book Rake Podcast.
I'm Jared Dean Sexton, roving correspondent out and about in the world doing research for a project.
My audio probably sounds absolutely terrible.
I'm not opening a beer because I haven't purchased beer yet.
Instead, I am drinking a bottle of water.
I need hydration, Nick.
I am on the road.
How are you, my good friend, Nick Ausman?
It's good.
You know what?
It's always great to hear your voice, no matter the quality of microphone.
And what's going to come out of the voice is really the most important thing.
So let's focus on that.
You know what?
On a podcast where I didn't figure out the right way for my mic to face for a very, very long time, I think that those sentiments are exactly what we need.
Speaking of sentiments, before we get to the larger show in which we're going to be breaking down the disastrous Ron DeSantis campaign announcement on Twitter's faces with Elon Musk, as well as the state of play with the debt ceiling, first of all, happy travels to Tina Turner!
One of the best to ever do it!
What an absolute tragedy!
One might say she was simply the best.
I gotta tell you, when I was a kid, Nick, and I heard Simply the Best, like, it filled me with so much inspiration.
It made me want to be a better basketball player, a better kid, a better person.
Tina Turner, what a talent!
Yeah, no, she was terrific.
Really, a singular talent, and it's really, it's too bad.
And an incredible person, too, on top of the talent.
I gotta tell you, as somebody who grew up in, like, a dysfunctional home, like, an abusive environment, Tina Turner was one of the first people to, like, really speak out openly and very, very specifically about domestic abuse and violence.
Really inspirational figure.
I think she gets lost, sort of, in this modern time.
You don't get Beyonce, you don't get Lady Gaga, you don't get any of these people if you don't have Tina Turner.
Like, what an incredible artist.
Yeah, actually really good, really good call that her legacy is long and and it's a movie about her life, too, is really, really good.
I mean, it was brutal to watch, but certainly another piece of art that was made out of her life that that really was is worth watching.
Yeah, what's love got to do with it?
And by the way, speaking of happy trails, the exact opposite of Tina Turner, Stuart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers, going to Sing Sing for the next 18 years, it seems like.
Hope he enjoys going through the entire process of becoming an adult in prison.
Congratulations, you tried to overthrow the United States government.
It didn't work, my friend.
Yeah, well, I suppose it'll hopefully, you know, dissuade anybody else from doing that in the future.
We shall see.
But don't let's, we can't forget, we gotta tell everybody about the fact that this is a Patreon episode.
This is also a Patreon episode, so if you want to hear this entire episode, in which, by the way, we're going to do this deep dive on the Ron DeSantis announcement, all you gotta do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
It supports the show.
It keeps us independent.
We need your help.
That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
All right, Nick, before we get into what actually happened in this damned Ron DeSantis Elon Musk Twitter space in which the authoritarian governor of Florida announced his bid for the presidency.
I have my thoughts on why this was done, what it means, why it necessarily went this way, what it sort of means for the larger part of the race, but also society at large.
What were your first thoughts, Nick, when you heard that DeSantis was going to announce on Twitter spaces?
You know, I'm all up for, you know, new things, trying some stuff out, trying to, you know, push the boundaries of content and see how that works.
The only problem is, is that something specifically like this doesn't really lend itself to just an audio-only platform that's not ready for more than a few people to listen to at one time.
But, so I wasn't, I was, I thought, okay, this is, you know, a little young and hip and let's, you know, I almost wanted to give it a little, you know, pat on the back for it.
Yeah, it was an experiment.
It didn't go well.
It didn't work out.
It was an absolute disaster.
But I think in a sort of a frame of how this stuff works, if this wasn't run by Elon Musk, if Twitter as a website wasn't absolutely corroding and falling apart, you could make the argument that this is akin to, you know, like a Bill Clinton going on Arsenio Hall.
Like, this is like one of those sort of changing moments that sort of says something about something else.
But it also, I think, is really important that DeSantis chose to go with Elon Musk, who, by the way, did this in part not just because he wants to get ingratiated in right-wing politics, but also he has a lot of business in Florida.
A lot of business in Florida that Ron DeSantis looks at.
So to go ahead and give him this forum, of course, ingratiates himself with DeSantis.
Musk and others like him, including David Sachs, who is on this call, they are really interested in finding a post-Trump Republican.
Ron DeSantis is really, really attractive to those people, as well as the online right wing.
They're really interested in finding their own candidate.
Ron DeSantis looks like that.
The thing about it, though, Nick, is by going around Fox News, DeSantis might have poked Fox News a little bit.
He actually ended up on Fox later on in the evening after his announcement.
Fox, first of all, Like, make jokes about it, about how bad this entire thing went, how bad the technology performed.
But also, within Rupert Murdoch's entire ecosystem, they took one shot after another at this failed attempt to launch the campaign.
So, in a weird way, by DeSantis, and like you were saying, sort of trying to disrupt the old, like, sort of normalcy, he went ahead and sort of pissed off one of the groups that actually is one of his strengths.
The fact is that Fox News doesn't want Donald Trump.
They want to move on beyond him, and Ron DeSantis has been a favorite there.
I don't think it's going to necessarily poison their relationship with DeSantis, but this is a really interesting decision in terms of how to launch a campaign in this mediascape.
Well, you know, Jared, you're familiar with these things.
Is it safe to say that Ron DeSantis did not decide to do this like 10 minutes before they went live?
Right?
It's probably, they probably had a week, right?
I gotta tell you, I have done TV spots, local TV spots, that felt more coordinated and practiced than this.
I've been in a studio Hours before doing a TV hit.
You know, funny story, Nick.
I don't know if I've ever said this on the podcast.
On the day of the solar eclipse, I went on Ari Melder on MSNBC.
No one was watching TV on the day of the solar eclipse.
You know what I mean?
Like it was my mom and maybe a neighbor back in my hometown.
But they had me in the studio prior to it to make sure that the satellite link was going to work.
This felt, in true Elon Musk fashion, this felt very slapped together.
Well, let's have a little taste because, you know, my app kept crashing because they tried to do it with Elon Musk's account at the Spaces first.
And the explanation and I have a little experience with streaming and all these different kind of things and audio.
The explanation was that he had so many followers that they crashed the system and that's I suppose it's possible.
That's not what happened.
There have been larger Twitter spaces than this.
Okay, good.
Well, here's what we had to deal with.
I just want to give a little taste in case no one tuned in.
So, when you first tried to get there, right, it was a shit show because it would crash your app every 30 seconds.
You and I were messaging.
I was on the road trying to listen to this thing.
And we were going back and forth.
I was like, it has crashed for me.
Is it okay with you?
What is happening here?
Like, and this was supposed to start, I believe, at 6 p.m.
Eastern.
And, like, I tuned in at 6 and, like, nothing got going till, what, like 6.23, give or take?
I mean, it was a debacle.
So here's what we got to hear a little bit of in the beginning.
So, hey, they came up with a little bit of, uh, you know... Some techno-utopian music.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Um, but, by the way, oh, but then... There's 32,000 people in the room.
All right, great.
So, let's see.
Just a massive number of people online.
So it's a service restraining somewhat.
How embarrassing is that?
Right?
Like now they have a hot mic.
They don't know that they're being listened to.
Thank God they didn't say anything, you know, worse than that, I suppose.
But you kept hearing those little bits, right?
Where you hear them sort of just muttering to each other.
Well, so there's multiple things that are happening here.
So first of all, I don't know how this got to you.
Like, all I could imagine, Ron DeSantis, one of the most shitty, snippy people in the world, I wish that there was a camera in the room showing him reacting to this in real time.
This is one of the biggest moments of his life.
He's been building to this since he had any notion of ambition.
And by the way, he doesn't handle stuff like this very well.
He doesn't like feeling uncomfortable.
Second of all, Elon Musk here is trying to launch a media empire on top of this half-assed situation he's got going.
He's trying to bring over Tucker Carlson, Nick.
Who, by the way, like on Fox News, had upwards of 3 million people watching a broadcast every single night.
You can't get 500,000 people, supposedly, in a Twitter space and make it work.
Meanwhile, The Daily Wire is supposed to be coming over.
Elon Musk is personally at the helm here.
Like, you can't make something better than this.
Like, what an absolute mess.
I know, but it's not like they were making a huge announcement or anything or like a monumentous thing that you want to kick off with energy and excitement.
Like, that's the other thing.
I think as soon as it started, even before they realized it was going to take 23 minutes to get going, I think at some point someone's like, um, there's no, there's no video, you know, no one's going to see him.
We're just going to have to be sitting here listening like it's 1933 on the radio before World War II?
That was hard to believe, even though I was kudos for the notion.
When you think about the actual event they're trying to do and announcement they're trying to make, this doesn't lend itself at all.
This is kind of silly.
No, it's absolutely ridiculous.
You know what I kept thinking about?
We've never talked about this.
You grew up in Wisconsin.
You had Dairy Queens, right?
I'm familiar with Dairy Queen, yeah.
Okay, maybe I've got food on the brain.
Maybe I want a hot dog and a blizzard right now, but I don't know if you remember this, but Dairy Queen used to have, like, wallpaper on the wall that was, like, all these historical moments where it was, like, 1912, the first Dairy Queen opens.
I guarantee it's not that old.
You know, 1925, the first blizzard.
1964, Buzz Aldrin.
You know what I mean?
Like, it had all these numbers.
If you were going to take Twitter and put a wall full of like the dates that were important in the history of Twitter, this was supposed to be one of them.
You know what I mean?
Like a person announced their presidential candidacy.
And by the way, it's not just a person.
Elon Musk and the people at Twitter here are kind of making a gamble that Ron DeSantis is going to be the 47th president of the United States of America.
This is supposed to be a landmark moment in the history of Twitter.
And I think the fact that this wasn't put together well, it wasn't rehearsed, there wasn't like, and even if it wasn't a video stream, Nick, they couldn't have released something with it.
Do you know what I mean?
Something instead of just like a bullshit like Twitter space?
The fact that all of this was so haphazard is like such a testimony to who Elon Musk is and what his businesses are like.
I was shocked.
I was literally shocked that it was this bad.
Oh yeah, there was no question, especially because again, they didn't have the levels balanced properly at all, and obviously DeSantis calls in from somewhere else, so when you do hear more of the clips that we're going to share, they might be a little bit hot, and that's because that's how they were broadcast out that way, without any contesting it beforehand, it was mind-boggling.
They were so bad, and I want to point out, We're going to hear from Musk.
We're going to hear from Sax.
We're going to hear from a couple of guests.
And I know you noticed this, and we're not going to play all of them.
They had people come in and ask questions.
They were softball questions, people who supported DeSantis.
They had people who couldn't get in.
They had people who couldn't figure out how to unmute their mics.
On top of that, Elon Musk, like one of the richest people in the world, the head of this place on a momentous day in the history of his company.
I don't know if you noticed this, Nick, completely unprepared.
He had no, he didn't know anything about anything.
He seemed disengaged.
On top of that, it seemed like he was probably doing other things, which is not shocking.
This is a person who's just microdosing constantly and is running like five different companies.
None of them work.
Like there was no preparation in this technologically wise and or quote unquote journalistic wise, and this was not journalism whatsoever.
Oh, but also the thought process.
To listen to Musk speak, it must be a little bit frustrating because it's a weird speech pattern, the way he has.
And you're almost like, come on, just say it already.
Like, it seems like he has a hard time getting thoughts out.
And then he gets caught into the weeds in the minute where at some points during this thing where you're like, what are you doing?
Why are you talking about that?
Like, we're talking about DeSantis and that's why he's the host.
And you're just kind of going off into little tangents here.
It was very strange.
And DeSantis must be so upset about that part as well.
Well, and one of the themes, as we start playing some of these clips, this was a Ron DeSantis announcement.
But let me tell you what the actual product being advertised in this was, and that is Twitter and Elon Musk.
Like, Ron DeSantis basically was brought on to announce his candidacy, but he became product B in a one-product show.
It was absolutely incredible.
Absolutely.
Well, should we, should we hear a little bit?
Let's, let's, let's, let's hear Ronald D on DeSantis himself.
Are you there?
Can you hear us?
I think you're good.
I'm here.
I know.
I think there, we had over half a million people in one Twitter space and it was growing by like 50,000 a minute.
So, uh, congrats on, uh, on breaking the internet there.
Well, yeah, yeah.
I mean, try some new things.
You're going to, uh, it's adventurous.
So, yes.
Um, So I think the value here is actually really high for people to hear directly from presidential candidates.
Okay.
Yeah, pause it right there.
We're already not really brought up Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis comes in, and again, now that he has announced his candidacy, Nick, One of the things that sticks out to me is how uncomfortable this person is, just in general, just with himself, with other people, all of that.
The only thing, the only thing you hear is, are you here?
Yeah, I'm here.
And that's all.
Like then that guy gets completely lost because Sax and, uh, and Musk spend the entire time bragging about how popular their event is.
After keeping people for 20, 23 minutes.
So we started to play the clip like within like another 15 or 20 seconds DeSantis is going to come on.
But think about that.
The thing that we're listening to just before he comes on to announce his candidacy is them talking about how like the internet is broken or they're not prepared basically and they couldn't handle a relatively minor influx compared to like there are Twitch streams that get like 5 million people at once watching these things.
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