Jared Polin (2:30)

What.

Sam Stein (2:30)

What's going on? And the white has been a little bit cagey about it. I think that's fair to say. You watch all these briefings. They've been pretty cagey, right?

Jared Polin (2:37)

Yeah. For the most part, Caroline has kind of just beat around the bush on the question. Like, she'll get asked about Trump's hand, and she pretty much always blames it on the handshakes on his aspirin intake.

Sam Stein (2:51)

Yeah. Okay. So the other day, she was pretty explicit. She's like, look, he's shaking hands all the time, and he's on aspirin, and it's just causing incredible bruising. And I had this idea in my head, well, that seems testable. Like, we can. We can actually figure out, not maybe scientifically, but we can try to approximate to a degree what it's like to shake a lot of hands and take aspirin, and we can decide based on the results if she's telling the truth or not. And so the question was, how do you go about shaking a lot of hands? And so I said to Jared, I said, jared, why don't you go. Where did you go? To the front of the White House and just shake hands for. I initially said, like, five hours, maybe eight. And I think you looked at me a little bit in horror. And then I said, well, okay, how about three hours? And then we tried to figure out, how can we do this? And so Jared agreed to do it. But talk a little bit about how you agreed, how you figured out you could get the most amount of handshakes, then we'll play the video, and then we'll talk about the experience on the other side.

Jared Polin (3:58)

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time street canvassing, asking people for money. I was fundraising for the ACLU back in the day, and.

Sam Stein (4:07)

Oh, you were one of those people.

Jared Polin (4:08)

I was one of those people, yeah. Right out of college. That's what I was doing.

Sam Stein (4:13)

It's like, hey, sir, do you have a minute to spare? I want to talk to you about the. You know, the endangered animals or something. Yeah, okay.

Jared Polin (4:20)

But I. I realized with the handshakes, it'd probably be a little bit easier than money. So what I did is I came into the office, I made a sign that said, please shake my hand. I have three hours to shake as many hands as possible. And I set that up beside me. And then as people walked by, I was like, please give me a handshake. I need to get as many as possible.

Sam Stein (4:39)

Did people look at you weirdly?

Jared Polin (4:41)

Some did. A lot of people thought it was like a fantasy football punishment if they asked. I explained to them the experiment we were doing. There's also a Christmas party going on at the White House at the time. So I was getting a lot of people coming out of the White House as I was out there, which was interesting.

Sam Stein (4:57)

So maybe they had already. They just shaken Donald Trump's hand, and now they got yours. Okay. So it was actually much more scientific than we thought. The same type of handshakes. He was endearing. What was the most hilarious interaction you got?

Jared Polin (5:11)

There was these two guys that were going, I think, to the John Cena's final match, and they asked if I could take multiple handshakes. And so basically they just kept shaking my hand over and over again. So like 15 of the 315 we.

Sam Stein (5:26)

Did were just these one.

Jared Polin (5:27)

Just these same guys. And they came back like, 20 minutes later and were like, one for the road. And were they drunk? Maybe. I mean, they were having a good day. They were maybe college age.

Sam Stein (5:38)

Okay.

Jared Polin (5:39)

So they were fun. There was a lot of kids who would just be asking me a lot of questions about it. There was a Boy Scout troop that came through, shook all their hands. It was a good time.

Sam Stein (5:50)

Was it?

Jared Polin (5:51)

I mean, it was cold. It was like 40 degrees out. I think at one point I was like, I can't feel my toes, Sam Stein. I cannot feel my toes, Sam Stein. Because it got cold. I was out there in the afternoon. It was 40, dropped down into the 30s, so it got cold. So that wasn't fun.

Sam Stein (6:10)

But, like, there's some hazard pay here.

Jared Polin (6:12)

Getting to meet people out in the street, just, like, having a conversation with them. It's not bad. Like, I enjoyed it.

Sam Stein (6:18)

Did you bring Purell?

Jared Polin (6:20)

Yes. I had a thing of hand sanitizer to the side. Gotta have the hand sanitizer. And people once they saw that were like, okay, I'll shake your hand. And they're like, can I use it? I'm like, yeah, that's why it's there.

Sam Stein (6:30)

Did you apply it after every single.

Jared Polin (6:32)

Oh, I applied. Yeah. Not after every single one, but, like, every five, 10 minutes, I just reach down, do a quick apply. But, yeah, I went to CVS beforehand and grabbed that just so I'd be prepared.

Sam Stein (6:44)

Okay, fair enough. Well, I appreciate you doing this. I think we've teased it enough. Let's play the results. A compressed version of Jared's handshake experience. I know you say it in the video, but how many handshakes did you ultimately shake?

Jared Polin (7:00)

315 on camera. There was a couple I got off camera where I was like setting stuff up, but the sign was still out, so I didn't get a number count on those, but 315 on camera? Yeah. Okay.

Sam Stein (7:10)

All right, let's watch the experience.

Jared Polin (7:12)

You may have noticed over the past couple of weeks that Donald Trump has this strange bruising on the back of his hand. During press conferences or meetings in the Oval Office, he's constantly covering it up. He's been spotted with bandages and various things on top of it. Caroline Levitt was asked about this during a press briefing, to which he said this.

Commercial Narrator (7:27)

The President is literally constantly shaking hands. The Oval Office is like Grand Central Terminal. He is meeting with more people than any of you even know about on a daily basis. He's also on a daily aspirin regimen, which is something his physical examinations has said in the past as well, which can contribute to that bruising that you see.

Jared Polin (7:45)

I bought some bare aspirin. I'm gonna take one, shake a bunch of hands, and we're gonna do a before and after and see if my hand gets bruised the same way his does. Excuse me. I love your costumes. Could I get a handshake? I'm testing to see if I shake a bunch of hands, if I get a lot of bruising. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All the hands count. I don't need that. There you go. So we're like an hour and a half in shaking a lot of hands. I'm going to keep going. Hands still not bruise though, so we'll see. In total, I shook 315 hands outside of the White House. And I will admit the next morning my hand was very sore. It didn't bruise. But I think it's worth considering that Donald Trump is a lot older than me and he does shake a lot of hands, so maybe there's something to it.

Sam Stein (8:42)

All right, so there you have it. Now your hand hurt, I think that's fair to say.

Jared Polin (8:48)

Yeah, in the hours after it started to hurt. But the next morning it was genuinely sore.

Sam Stein (8:54)

Genuinely. So okay, no bruising. But this was just a one time experience. So you're not doing this day in, day out. And I don't know if Trump shaking 315 hands in a three hour period either. So there's like that. But I think you could probably, I don't know, you tell me. Could you imagine your hand kind of getting scuffed in a little bit, you know, bruised up if you were doing a version of that, you know, every day.

Jared Polin (9:21)

Yeah, I think it is. I used to watch Mythbusters a lot growing up, and they would say it was plausible.

Sam Stein (9:26)

Plausible.

Jared Polin (9:27)

Yeah, plausible. Like, it's not proven that it's going to bruise my hand, but I think that if someone gives you a couple really hard handshakes, it could leave some bruising. Like, I do think that is a legitimate.

Sam Stein (9:38)

Well, let's think here. How many hands do we think Trump is shaking a day? It's obvious. Not 315. There's no way. I mean, maybe during the holidays when he's got the procession line and all that stuff, but he's a bit of a germaphobe. We know that he doesn't like shaking hands. What would you put a guess at for how many hands the guy shakes in the course of a day?

Jared Polin (9:56)

I mean, at a holiday party, I think, like, 315 is, like, a top number. Like, that's close to the max of what he's gonna shake. And I doubt.

Sam Stein (10:03)

I don't know. There's hundreds of people at that holiday party. No, no, no.

Jared Polin (10:07)

Yeah, but are they all getting a handshake? With Trump, he. Normally. There's, like, a hundred. Photo line.

Sam Stein (10:12)

There's. Oh, maybe he doesn't do the photo line.

Jared Polin (10:14)

The.

Sam Stein (10:14)

When I. When I went to these holiday parties, when they actually invited the press to the parties, you all went in a photo line, and it was hundreds and hundreds of people. I haven't brought a relative, so it was a lot of handshakes. But that's just, like, seasonal. I think during the course of a year, I would guess he probably shakes, I don't know, 50 to 100 a day somewhere in that. If that's a good day. That seems like a lot, too. No, that even. No, no, that seems like a lot. It's got to be less than 50 and just a normal day, not a rally. He's not maybe 50.

Jared Polin (10:46)

I imagine a normal day, it could be even less. Like, if he's not meeting people, like, new people, he's probably not shaking hands because he is a germaphobe. Like, he. He's not.

Sam Stein (10:54)

He's not like, when.

Jared Polin (10:55)

When.

Sam Stein (10:55)

Like, you know, when Kennedy comes in to brief from her best, and he's not like, hey, buddy, what's up? You know, he's just like, sit down. Let's talk. All right. So plausible. Plausible. Are you glad you did this? I mean, this was an act of journalism, maybe heroism. I don't know.

Jared Polin (11:12)

I would say, yeah, I'm Glad I did it. This is a great way to spend my Saturday. I was going to do it during the work day, but it was a busy day. So I was like, I'm going to take the Saturday afternoon, go out, shake some hands. And I had fun doing it, just getting to meet people, talk to them. It was a fun experiment. People laughed about it. So it's a good time.

Sam Stein (11:29)

It's good to know because I, I don't know if you know this about me. I think you might have discovered this. I like gimmick journalism like this. So back in the day, I'm not going to name names, but I was working on a publication and a book came out. I think it might have been Sean Spicer or someone else, maybe Corey Lewandowski, where they revealed Trump's diet. And it was like a lot of McDonald's and eggs and bacon and steak and Diet Cokes and shitty snacks and, you know, those, like, horrific amount of calories that would be horrible for your cholesterol. And I went to one of my reporters, I said, look, I want you to live like Trump for a week, okay? Just eat on his diet for a week and just see how that feels. And this reporter was like into it. And then he looked into it a little bit more and then he actually emailed a nutritionist at the University of Columbia, or Columbia University, I should say. And the nutritionist wrote back, do you have a history of heart disease in your family? And it spooked the reporter out so much that he begged to not do it. And we never did the piece. But I like stories like that. And since you are game to do them, I'm coming back for you, okay?

Jared Polin (12:36)

Feel free. I'm down to try the crazy ideas.

Sam Stein (12:40)

All right, so, dear, dear viewers, if you have a good gimmick story idea for Jared to tackle, nothing crazy, we're not, we don't want to risk physical harm, maybe a little bit, but drop it in the comments, we'll take a look, we'll decide if it's worthwhile to do it. As of now, reward the man for doing all these handshakes by sharing this video and liking it. Pass it around and subscribe to the feed. Jared, buddy, thank you so much, man.

Jared Polin (13:05)

Thank you.

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