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- [00:00]
A
I'm Brian Reed. When I created S Town, I looked at how secrets lies and the stories we tell shape a small rural town. Now on my podcast, question everything, I'm going bigger. Hi. This message is for Senator Lindsey Graham. I'm hoping I head to Washington to take on a law that gives tech companies sweeping immunity is how these companies have gotten rich. Join me as I go after big tech on Question everything from placement theory and KCRW out Thursdays, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:30]
B
2025 was the best year. No, it wasn't. I'm Akilah Hughes, and this is. How is this better? And today we wanted to break format. At the end of what can only be described as a year, we're gonna talk with Ryan Broderick, the creator and writer of the Garbage Day newsletter and host of Courier's Panic World podcast about everything that happened online in the real world with policy and politics and pop culture and really just sort of getting to the bottom of it. Was it a better year? Do we have anything to look forward to in 2026? Well, Ryan Broderick, hello. Thank you so much for being here.
- [01:09]
A
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
- [01:12]
B
Awesome. Well, you were alive in the year 2025.
- [01:15]
A
Yeah.
- [01:16]
B
So I wanted to talk to you because you several times a week cover what's happening on the Internet and on Earth, and. And so it's a great time to review what's happened because the year is ending. I guess I'll start with how you would rate the year on a scale of 1 to 10.
- [01:32]
A
I'd give it like, an 8.
- [01:34]
B
In, like, a good way.
- [01:35]
A
Yeah, like, I had a good time, I think, personally. Yeah, personally, but also, like, obviously, you know, there is the dismantling of American democracy. But I do feel like, in a lot of ways, this was the first year since 2019 that felt like a year.
- [01:51]
B
Ooh, explain. Explain.
- [01:53]
A
We've basically been in, like, a holding pattern culturally since 2020, and it feels like this is the first year where it. It feels like all kinds of different parts of culture are interested in doing things and making things. And obviously, the Trump administration is this weird part of that where. Say what you will, like, people in America are talking about politics in a way that, like, we. Well, if we had been talking about politics this way, Trump wouldn't have been elected last year. So, like, in a lot of ways, you can view it as, okay, Trump is destroying democracy, and we might not be able to vote again legally if he gets his way. If Project 2026 happens, all the rest. Right. But then you can look at it the other way, which is we've kind of been sleepwalking through the last four years, and it feels like finally there's things going on, there's stuff to talk about. It's not good, it's not bad, but from a journalist perspective, I'm saying I was busy this year is what I'll say.
- [02:44]
B
Totally. And I do think that, like, if nothing else, everyone feels very tired because of how much has happened, and it does seem like it's happening in sort of every different sector. So let's just sort of, like, walk through what's happened. We'll start in January.
- [03:00]
A
Okay.
- [03:00]
B
We have Trump's inauguration before that. I'm not really sure what happened. There were the fires in la, but besides that.
- [03:06]
A
Right.
- [03:06]
B
It was kind of nothing. Inauguration hits. We get the official inaugural address, followed by the mask off address to his fans and friends that was also on TV. He's cozying up to tech CEOs. Then Elon does his Nazi salute. You know, there's the day one executive orders, which is end birthright citizenship, declare there are only two sexes. Ndei, restore the death penalty, Establish Doge among millions of others. It seems.
- [03:35]
A
Right. So I guess all good things is.
- [03:40]
B
Yeah, totally. I think that what I always come back to is the ending dei the day before or a couple of days before that plane crashed, and they're like, it's the fault. And everyone was like, how could it be? We ended it.
- [03:51]
A
I forgot about all the plane crashes. That's true.
- [03:53]
B
Yeah.
- [03:53]
A
That's. That's all.
- [03:55]
B
That was a big January, Maybe I'll.
- [03:56]
A
Say 7 out of 10 for the year then.
- [03:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, take it down a notch. All right, so what was your feeling going into Trump Admin 2.0 and, like, how did it change or how is it confirmed in those first days? Like, was it worse than what you expected? Did you feel like, yeah, this is pretty much what we signed up for.
- [04:14]
A
I would say the major problem with Trump 1 and Trump 2 is not overstating what he's doing while also taking it appropriately seriously, because he is a big dumb idiot who says a bunch of bullshit and then doesn't follow through on it to the point where, like, even Democrats smartened up and, like, made that whole, like, taco thing. Right? Like, Trump always chickens. So you and, and, and the smart political operators around him, the Russell Vox, the Stephen Millers of the world, they have learned that that's very effective cover. So they know that he's going to go on Truth Social now Twitter before and blow V8 and say, I'm getting rid of DEI, whatever the hell that means doing all this stuff. And then they can, in the background, you know, work on their projects, their political projects. So going into all of this, I was a little skeptical of Project 2025 and what they'd be able to accomplish. Trump Won is thought of as this extremely chaotic time in American politics. But we were able to snap back to semi normaly in the Biden years. Say what you will about sort of the state of the country, but, like, the political processes were fairly stable. Then the Doge stuff started.
- [05:26]
B
Right?
- [05:27]
A
The Doge era is the moment where I was like, okay, we are dealing with a very different beast. And so a lot of my work in the beginning of the year was trying to identify, like, exactly what was different this time. And I. I think the. The major difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2, particularly in its first year, is the role of Project 2025, which I think, as of right now, the Project 2025 tracker, which your audience should definitely check out, puts us at around like, 50%. 50% of what Project 2025 wanted to accomplish has been accomplished in some form in the first year. That's really scary. That's really dangerous. They have fizzled, though, as the year has progressed. In a way, it's. I don't want to be overly optimistic, but it does. I do wonder if maybe we've hit a ceiling with some of it. They're already talking about, like, a refresh or probably 2026, what, whatever. So I don't know. But they definitely came into the White House with way more of a plan. Trump may have not had a plan, but the people around him were prepared this time.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, as a person who covers news but also watches it, you could see that. I think there was a shift in how seriously the media took Trump following those sorts of things, because I do think that there was just this sort of like, okay, well, we're gonna go back to, like, silly 2017, you know, Muslim ban. Things that, like, couldn't really be achieved ultimately, but were a lot obliviating. And now it's, you know, real legislation and real, just like decrees. Shortly after all of these things are established in January, we get to the weird sort of aggressive geopolitical peacocking. Obviously, we didn't go to war with Greenland.
- [06:59]
A
Oh, I forgot about that one.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Might come back. You know, it might be important for the sequel, but the Canada 51st state rhetoric becomes incredibly important geopolitically and sort of shifts what's happening, I think up north anyway. Denmark's military intelligence recently raised concerned about, concerns about the whole Greenland stuff again. And you know, if you fast forward, we're now talking about what we're going to do to Venezuela.
- [07:25]
A
Right.
- [07:25]
B
I guess, like when you reflect on those sorts of things, are you concerned?
- [07:30]
A
6.5 out of 10. So, yeah, Trump's like, geopolitics are really fascinating to me because he, I think as a human being would be very isolationist. Like, he doesn't seem to have a lot of interest in geopolitics. In fact, I'm going to paraphrase, but there was like a whole little subplot where he basically like was telling Israel to shut up for a while. He was like these, like, literally, I think on record, like, these guys are extremely annoying. Like, he, he sort of treats all of it as this nuisance that he has to put up with and he, and he wants credit for sort of squashing it very quickly. On the other end of that, his movement needs energy. It needs an enemy within antifa in this case and immigrants. And it also needs an enemy without China is not an effective enem me in this situation because they're honestly too big. You like, and, and I would argue, like have already won the Cold War, but, you know, that's a different episode. I think you could look at this as a, as an experiment. And so they're like, okay, maybe we'll do Greenland. And it's like, well, that's really weird. And sure.
- [08:32]
B
And they, nobody there is on board. Like, the problem is everybody's against it.
- [08:36]
A
JD Vance shows up and they like, you know, threw tinned fish at him or whatever the day. So then they try Canada and, and then you, you, you think of the tariffs sort of working within all of this as well. I think the most charitable interpretation of the tariffs is that Trump, like fundamentally does not understand what a tariff is because there's like footage of him like 30 years ago talking about this and like just not getting it right.
- [08:58]
B
Loose handle on economics and history.
- [09:01]
A
It's like very possible that like, he just doesn't know. But they were experimenting all year with like, what is our foreign adversary? What is our foreign campaign going to look like? And they've settled on Venezuela for now and it. Weren't they even like teasing Nigeria or Ethiopia?
- [09:16]
B
Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. No big into like we're going to do a ground war against Nigeria, which I think that also kind of flopped. It seemed like a thing that they kept saying and maybe they'll go with it, you know, would love to do the follow up episode at the end of next year with you. But it did seem like that was just sort of like a few mentions from Trump and then suddenly nothing.
- [09:35]
A
The Venezuela stuff is probably the most real in terms of like it is happening and we've, you know, probably permanently ruined our relationship with Canada. But a lot of it I think is, is him sort of trying to figure out in real time, like what his base wants. Because like Trumpism, there's no heart to it, there's no center to it. It's just whatever he thinks will keep people distracted and engaged with him, which is extremely confusing to the point where you just forget like little things he does.
- [10:01]
B
You know, just to continue on, I think chronologically, another big part of February was the binders that said the Epstein files and the right wing influe saying we've got them. And now all of this time later, they're still, I guess, blacking out pages of epsteed files that they will ultimately have to release. Among these MAGA creators and influencers, Rogan o', Hanley, Chaya Raichik. Is that how you say her name?
- [10:27]
A
I think it's Raichik, but she doesn't deserve to be pronounced correctly. It doesn't really.
- [10:31]
B
Right, yeah, exactly. I don't respect.
- [10:32]
A
I don't think of her as part of like the same human race that we are in. In a perfect world, she like live in the sewer, you know, I guess.
- [10:39]
B
Like, you know, in hindsight, how embarrassing is that moment, you know, for the admin and the influencers, given how tightly the administration is holding on to the Epstein info for reasons that, you know, even the Chief of staff recently said or which are pretty apparent. I'm not going to say them, but yeah. How embarrassing do you say that? Do you think that is? How impactful do you think that will be?
- [11:00]
A
My researcher, Adam Bumis has this idea that he's been writing about all year that we don't have a good name for. We have a terrible name for it, actually. We've been calling it logislation. Horrible mouth sounds. We have to come up with a better word for it. Yeah, but I think it's a really sharp way of viewing a lot of this stuff. And I think we, we started to come around to it during the binders incident, which is that Trump 2, way more than Trump 1 is defined by this loop where someone in the Trump administration sees something online they react to it via policy or some sort of stunt. They then post that policy or stunt online to see how people react to it. They wait for their followers to sort of pick up the baton and, and, and move it again and, and the loop just continues. So this, this is explains why like the Department of Homeland Security is posting like AI videos and why ICE's X account has like Pokemon cards for immigrants that they're like gotta catch em all kind of stuff. It's all based on this loop because as I said, there's no real center to Trumpism as an ideology. So what they're doing is they're kind of like treating it like an improv game. And so.
- [12:10]
B
Right. Trying to make anything stick to his ideology since there's nothing there. Like it can be very amorphous and change with the trends of I guess what like the posters are up to. Because like serious people who don't care about that don't know about that. It's just like about keeping the, I think the energy online and then taking it to the media.
- [12:30]
A
I think also a lot of the big change in this is thanks to Barron Trump, who reportedly was very, very involved with the podcaster influencer outreach of the Trump campaign in 2024. My theory has always been that like Trump, I think you could argue that Trump has never used the Internet. There's a world where like, he doesn't know how to read. Like, he straight up, like is does know how to read, has never used the Internet because he like, he's such a creature of tv and we know this for a fact that like during Trump won, he, he would turn on Fox and Friends and he would sort of just like run the day based on what Fox and Friends would tell him to do via like their opening sort of morning show. I think he's probably still doing that, which actually in a way puts him at the end of this loop. Like if you think of it like a clock, like he's at like 9 or 10 o'. Clock.
- [13:15]
B
Yeah. He finds out later.
- [13:17]
A
Right. But his team is, has adapted this, this content loop to, to sort of bring in the network of people that Barron Trump, I think pointed out for them, connected them with Dana White from UFC is very important in this, where he was very early in sort of connecting Team Trump to the Andrew Tates and the Nelk boys of the world. So all of this is to say that like, if you went like incident by incident, you're like, that didn't work. That was stupid. This doesn't make any sense. But the end result is like, Matt Gaetz is in the White House press corps, you know, Benny Johnson's in the White House press corps. All these conservative influencers, they've sort of created a state media isolating the White House. And so that is successful. And so the binders thing is embarrassing and stupid and everyone involved is an idiot. But as taken as like a broader narrative, like it is successful.
- [14:08]
B
Just sticking with the idea that some things are embarrassing. Let's move into March with Pete Hegseth and Signalgate, which I'm not sure has like actually led to anything. I mean, separately, you know, Pete Hegseth is being investigated for war crimes, but the signal gate of it all kind of like came and went. Can you sort of just like, I don't know, talk through your week when that happened?
- [14:31]
A
I, maybe it's because of like movies, but we tend to, especially in America, think of authoritarian projects and dictatorships as these terrifying, well oiled, machines, you know, Star wars shit like that. But they're not like, they're inherently stupid. There's like a really big brain drain that happens when you consolidate power, like the way Trump has, especially as quickly as Trump has. I spent the beginning of my year reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and like, there's whole sections about how stupid the Nazi party was at the very beginning. These are comparisons that I would have felt a little hyperbolic to make in the first Trump administration. But that's clearly like the trajectory that we're on right now is you consolidate power, you fill it with people who are sycophantic to you and then, and, and you, you rule by decree or in this case, truth, social post. So you're going to have like total, total idiots doing dumb stuff all the time. Like it happens in every dictatorship. Happened in Chile, happened in Brazil, happened in Italy, happened in Germany. Wherever you want to point to, there's always a guy like Pete Hegseth who's just a total idiot that got the job because, like, he sucked up to the right person.
- [15:35]
B
He looks good on television, right?
- [15:37]
A
Yeah. I mean, hell, it's like the same stuff you see in the Sopranos. Like the, the, the whenever you sort of circle the wagons like that and you fill it with like good old boys, like some idiot's gonna do something stupid, right?
- [15:50]
B
Absolutely. And, you know, I, you know, much to be seen with that. I'll move into April. We're really blowing through the year, but April, I think gave us a little bit of like, reprieve from the, the sort of hysterical nature of American politics. We get some pop culture moments like, you know, Katy Perry going to space, which some may argue is a political story.
- [16:11]
A
I mean, it's sad that she. I think it's sad because she came back.
- [16:15]
B
It's pretty rough. Bezos is really proud of it for some reason. He only. I get that they were like, the optics of, like, women in space, but ultimately, had it exploded, it would have just been women exploding. How does that jive with your worldview, you know?
- [16:28]
A
Yeah, I mean, as a feminist, I think women should be able to go to space.
- [16:34]
B
It shouldn't just be for guys.
- [16:36]
A
I mean, if you want to sort of connect it to the Trump stuff, it was a very shrewd move to sort of have a private space flight scheduled during the Doge takeover and. And Trump, too, coming to power. That's part of the larger goal. I mean, you've talked about it on your show a bunch. Like, you want to privatize everything that was public. You want to sort of take away what we used to be able to do as a country and give it to oligarchs. And I look at private space travel, and I feel nothing. Like, I am someone who has watched Apple's for All Mankind and cried with American pride at the idea of taxpayers funding a space flight. I think it's beautiful. And the idea that, like, I have no involvement with Katy Perry going to space. I have no. I don't give a crap about that, you know, but if we as taxpayers got together and funded a space flight for Katy Perry and left her on the moon, I would feel very, very proud of that.
- [17:29]
B
Yeah, exactly. If she had gone somewhere. All right, so may we get a little bit more pop culture news, which I think is. Is, you know, welcome. Obviously, this whole time, Doge is ransacking the government, you know, making the world a place generally by defunding humanitarian aid worldwide. But we get a real life conclave after JD Vance murders the Pope. We get Chicago Pope, Pope Leo's inaugurated. People are obviously very excited about this new progressive pope. You know, he takes swipes at J.D. vance, even though, you know, like I just said, J.D. is already. He has a body count when it comes to popes. You know, have you kept up with the new Pope and how you feeling about him?
- [18:08]
A
I never thought I'd say this in my entire life, but I love reading the Pope's thoughts about AI he's extremely vocal about it. He's written extensively about sort of like. Like, retaining the human soul in, like, creative endeavors and and sort of the dignity of the worker. And I don't know, as someone who was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic all boys school, like for high school, I just never thought I would be in this position. If you're culturally Catholic, you just sort of ignore them, like, whoever's the whatever. After Vatican too, you didn't have to learn Latin anymore. So it's like, okay, like we're kind of on our own, especially over here in America. And I'm not going to attempt to sort of like, read the tea leaves of the Vatican conclave process. There are some great Vatican reporters that, you know, if your listeners are interested, they can go find and read that can also Pope crave. The pop crave knockoff is very useful here. That's a whole other world, a whole other politics that I do not know anything about. But I will say, no matter what caused them to pick an American Pope, and specifically this American Pope at this moment, it has created a fascinating, fascinating sort of moral dilemma for American Catholics. He, as you said, he's very anti Trumpist, he's very pro immigrant, he's very anti AI These are all just sort of wild things to just have going on in the background radiation of world events this year. It's. It's exciting. I think it's like, it's exciting and interesting.
- [19:38]
B
Do you remember that Donald Trump, noted not Catholic, started his own campaign to become the Pope with his AI memes of him with the Pope. What's the Pope hat called? Does it have a name?
- [19:50]
A
I should know this.
- [19:53]
B
With the Pope hat.
- [19:54]
A
Ah, of course. From the same people that brought you the Pope mobile. There is the Palpal tiara.
- [20:01]
B
Yeah, the papal tiara. You know, we're getting.
- [20:04]
A
Well, there's several. Hold on. There's. Okay, this is interesting.
- [20:06]
B
It was less of a tiara. It was more of a.
- [20:08]
A
So his little hat is the Zucchetto and his big hat is the Capello Romano. And then he also has a Palpal tiara, which I guess they retired, which is more of sort of like a crown pretty well.
- [20:23]
B
Yeah, we got a lot of the. The second one from Trump. I guess, like, this is just sort of an aside, but, like, why do you think Trump wants so many awards? Like, what is that about? Does he think that they matter? Is this all because he didn't win the Emmy for the Apprentice?
- [20:39]
A
I just think he's a fundamentally broken human being. I think there's something wrong in him. I think there's something seriously, deeply wrong inside of him. Also. I feel bad because like, you and I both won awards this year, and they were real awards. Trump didn't win real awards this year. So sad.
- [20:56]
B
The FIFA Peace Peace Prize.
- [20:59]
A
This is sort of, I think, celebrity and influencer logic at play too, which is like, you always sort of have to have something going on. You always have to be doing the next deal, winning the next award. And it's very useful for Trumpism, which, you know, as I said, doesn't have an ideological center. But there are, like, things that it, it represents, and one of them is, is aspiration. He's got to be the best in the whole world at everything so that he can bestow that greatness upon you if you align with him. Even just now, like this week that we're recording, he made some comment about how he's going to say hi to this person at a press conference because they donated $250 million to his campaign and, like, that's the least he could do. And so, like, everything to him is this transaction in, in. You and I have actually talked about this, the sort of Trump era view of, like, fame and notoriety being transferable. Like, if you appear in a tick tock with Charlie xcx, you're famous too. And it's like, that's a Trump thing. Like, that's a thing that won't make any sense in a year. Like, it's very like Versailles Royal Court coded, you know, and so everyone in America is acting like this right now. And so awards fit into that perfectly.
- [22:06]
B
Absolutely. I mean, just one more quick thing from May. How is this better launched?
- [22:11]
A
Change the world.
- [22:13]
B
Great show. You're appearing on it now. And you won. You actually won the award for a person who's been on it twice. So we'll be right back. Over the same old news cycle, tune.
- [22:37]
A
Into Hysteria, your weekly group chat with.
- [22:39]
B
Me, Erin Ryan, and my co host, Alyssa Mastromonico. Where no topic is off limits from.
- [22:44]
A
Politics to pop culture. We're bringing you brutally honest takes on.
- [22:46]
B
The stories shaping our lives, from powerhouse women like Alisa Slotkin to wellness trends in education. No sugarcoating, no doom scrolling, just real talk, strong women and hope to keep moving forward. Catch Hysteria wherever you get your podcasts and tune into our YouTube channel for free full episodes and our special series.
- [23:04]
A
Deck your home with bl.com. Diy or let us install. Free design consultation plus free samples and free shipping. Head to blinds.com now for up to 45% off site wide plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply.
- [23:34]
B
Let's skip to June Trump had to cry on his birthday because his military parade was a major flop. It was floppington. It was, you know, what are the boys calling it? The Las Culturalistas call it Jester Flop in the Clown Square. And we like to think that maybe he lashed out by bombing Iran, Iranian nuclear facilities. Shortly after there were also the huge no Kings protests same day this is happening alongside, you know, the National Guard being deployed in la, these huge ICE protests. And Jeff Bezos, his wedding, which we learned on the never post final episode.
- [24:11]
A
Of the year, had bad carpet.
- [24:13]
B
Bad carpet and Sydney Sweeney. So you know, do you remember June? How would you, you know, how are you? Were you there?
- [24:23]
A
I mean the big thing in that long list that you, you sort of rattled off there that I, I have sort of, I think changed the trajectory of my year for me was no Kings Day and how I did not know about it. Here's a fun fact, if you get something wrong, you can write about it. Which then means it's like good for a slow news day. So oftentimes as a Catholic, I like to sort of run through my various failures on a slow news day. And one of them this year was that I did not know about no Kings Day until literally like a couple hours the night before it was about to start. Wow. I had no, I had seen nothing online and now my job at this point, full time job for many, many years has just been to look at the Internet and tell people what's on the entire Internet. I saw nothing about it. I spent weeks trying to figure out why I did not see anything about no Kings Day and. And what? And I learned some really interesting things. One, it was very Facebook based. I'm not on Facebook.
- [25:20]
B
And Instagram.
- [25:23]
A
Instagram to a degree. But like I, I was talking to people involved with it and like their largest driver of activity were. I think I'm describing this right, email listservs that had been dormant for like a decade.
- [25:38]
B
Wow.
- [25:39]
A
It was like old. Like I feel like I heard from someone that a massive driver of no Kings Day were these huge liberal listservs that like kind of had gone dark since before COVID that they reactivated. So that is really interesting to me. Even more so that like after the first nookings day, not the subsequent, but the first ones, there was also not a lot of Internet chatter about it afterwards. It's just sort of it happened and then that was it. And so that I think really fundamentally changed my opinion of, of I think how the Internet has factored into the story of the Year. And sort of where we are culturally, which is to say, I think it's actually less important than we think it is. Is. And. And. And that has had a dovetailing effect of me thinking that what Trump says and does online kind of doesn't matter. I'm. I'm not willing to totally throw the baby out with the bathwater there and say, like, we can just ignore him, but it means that, like, his AI videos and stuff. I just, like, don't. I'm like, okay, like, no normal person's gonna look at that and be like, epic, epic Le Bacon, sir. You know?
- [26:35]
B
Yeah. Like, it seems like it is for Elon Musk to, I don't know, dunk on while he talks to his Grok.
- [26:41]
A
I have a question for you.
- [26:43]
B
Okay.
- [26:43]
A
So, like, no Kingsday protests are, right now, in terms of human beings attending them, the largest protests in American history. And from what I can tell, they accomplished absolutely nothing.
- [26:56]
B
I don't know. What's the question?
- [26:59]
A
What do you make of that? Because if there are these massive, massive, massive, historic protests that kind of didn't have much of an Internet footprint until later, right?
- [27:08]
B
Sure, Maybe. Okay.
- [27:10]
A
You could argue on one end. Now this is where I start getting one of my classic sort of like, I'm arguing with myself thing. But, like, you could argue like, the Internet actually matters more than what the most amount of people in. In American history on the street at one time could accomplish. Or it means that the Internet doesn't really matter, and I don't know what to make of it. I. That's that sort of data point I don't know what to make of. So what do you think?
- [27:35]
B
Here are my feelings about it. I did attend the no Kings protest in Los Angeles, and it was also, like, pretty much half heavily focused on ICE's occupation of downtown LA. I guess that, like, in my mind, and like, let's say not every American protest going all the way back to the 1700s, but let's say starting in the 1950s with, like, sort of the civil rights movement. I think that it's hard to tell the impact of a protest immediately. And I think that what we know is that people were willing to go out in the street with the threat of the National Guard having guns in their face. So I think that there is something really poignant about that. And I think that, like, that doesn't necessarily feel like something people will talk about, but I do think it's something that the government has noted. And I also think that, like, judges who've now Been ruling that, like, the National Guard can't be places because I think we all expect some level of escalation. I think that that matters. I also do think that there are more in person whisper networks happening. And, like, obviously I don't have, like, statistics on that, but from what I understand and, like, from the people that I follow who seem to go to these protests, they're also now organizing by giving each other whistles so they can alert people if ICE is on the block. And so, like, I guess my question is, like, what do we expect from protests? I think that, like, Black Lives Matter was this outlier where white people got really shook because white people went to those protests.
- [29:08]
A
I got scared. Yeah.
- [29:09]
B
Yeah. But I think a lot of, like, corporations and stuff were like, oh, like, I didn't expect, you know, goop to put out a statement about, you know, racial equity. And I mean, I think my favorite would be somebody who is black, like Marquez Brownlee, who has his entire career sort of shied away from ever mentioning that he's black and has really benefited from that, putting out a video about. About something like that. I think that, like, that felt like, oh, that's what protest does. That's like, now suddenly we have DEI and we have these other things. I tend to think that, like, there's still a longer tail.
- [29:43]
A
Well, in that model. In that model, you could argue that the beginning, early rumblings of a blue sweep in the midterms that we just saw in the fall could be tied directly to everyone coming outside and being like, oh, there's more of us than there are of them.
- [29:55]
B
I think so.
- [29:56]
A
7 out of 10 then. I'm moving it back up to 7 out of 10.
- [29:59]
B
That's the thing. I think that, like, it is sort of this, like, early on, first real backlash we see to this administration who has loudly proclaimed that there is a mandate for everything that they do. And I think they weren't prepared for that. And at the exact same time, because we have Congress going on break, you see, like, all of these congresspeople going home and doing town halls and getting, like, booed off the stage. Tomato, tomato, tomatoes. Suddenly people are having the conversation like, oh, maybe we didn't really get, like, our teeth kicked in in that last election. Maybe it was a reaction to the last four years. But people probably didn't want this over correction into fascism.
- [30:35]
A
I certainly didn't. I didn't want that hot take. This isn't what I voted for when I voted for Trump.
- [30:45]
B
Jesus. It's. Let's just say I doubt, I doubt that Ryan voted for Trump.
- [30:50]
A
Yeah.
- [30:50]
B
All right, let's go to July.
- [30:52]
A
Okay.
- [30:52]
B
July, we get a little bit more pop culture news and there are some things here that I know you and I disagree about, but here are the main things that happened pop, culturally. We get the Coldplay CEO of it all.
- [31:04]
A
That's the one we disagree about. Yeah.
- [31:05]
B
No, not at all, actually. I don't know. And we get, you know, this, this executive high powered people cheating on their spouses at a Coldplay concert, the sort of backlash that they incurred, and then, you know, the hiring of Gwyneth Paltrow to sort of sort it out on behalf of the company. We get Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle jeans jeans controversy, which is where I think we've disagreed. We get Alligator Alcatraz, which is a huge moment, I think for the Trump administration, which has since been ordered to close. But I, I haven't kept, you know, I should probably look into where they are with that and panic world comes to carrier.
- [31:45]
A
That's what we disagree about is you didn't think that we should have come to courier.
- [31:48]
B
The whole time I was kicking and screaming, I was like, come on guys, please.
- [31:52]
A
Sydney Sweeney's jeans is one that you and I have argued about. I would sort of put that I think it's price giving ahead. But Cracker Barrel and Sydney Sweeney combined. I don't remember either of our sides in the argument. I know that we have.
- [32:06]
B
Yeah, I think your thing was that like you were interviewed in the New York Times actually, and you were saying that the right can now run with anything that a single person on the left or, or perceivedly on the left says online is like an affront and say that is now left culture, even if most people don't really care about Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad.
- [32:26]
A
So what I will say is I, I try personally very hard. I don't do a great job with it, but I try not to read minds. I try not to predict the future and I try not to read minds because I feel like if you do the work that I do, you get in trouble, you get, you, get you, you embarrass yourself. So I, I, and, and sort of downstream of that, I sort of tend to believe, like, if someone is saying something in public all the time, like Elon Musk for instance, I, I assume they believe it because at that level it's actually functionally irrelevant if they don't.
- [33:00]
B
I mean, I guess. But like, think about, like, let's take it back to like George W. Bush weapons of mass destruction. They know for a fact they don't exist. But they're saying this all the time in public. It does matter ultimately.
- [33:13]
A
Oh, I mean, I mean, ideologically so specifically, if we're talking about someone, like, because there's always these arguments, like when we're talking about, like, political horseshoe theory of like, oh, Nick Fuentes, like, actually doesn't believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. He's just saying that to get a rise out of people. It's like, well, it doesn't actually matter. Functionally, it's the same. And with Sweeney, like, okay, if you look at what happened there, American Eagle has Jewish leadership and they've spoken that they, they did not see this as a dog whistle. Sydney Sweeney, we know, has conservative family members.
- [33:54]
B
We also was at Jeff Bezos his wedding, but does not know him personally.
- [33:57]
A
Sure. But then with Jeff Bezos's wedding, like, I'm not even, like, there are a lot of people at that wedding. And like, you know, we can, you and I, if you want to have a real argument, we can go down the whole thing of, like, how liberals are on the right as far as I'm concerned. But I'm willing to sort of give her the benefit of the doubt that she is not a particularly bright or deep thinker, which is honestly is more embarrassing, and that she really decided not to say anything about this until literally like a couple weeks ago. But the point I was trying to make to the New York Times and we just did an episode about this in Panic World. But there, there is this entire right wing concept called like a LOLcow or an LOL cow. This random person you pluck out of the Internet and you harass and you dox and you stalk and you turn into a meme and you hound. And if you look at libs of TikTok, that's her whole deal is sort of plucking random things out of the ether and saying, this person who does like, Goblin videos about being queer on TikTok, that's every liberal. And they want to put you against the wall for voting for Trump or this insane pregnant woman who's eating Tylenol by the fistful because RFK says pregnant women can't have Tylenol. That's what all the liberals want to do because they don't care about babies. Like, that sort of strategy is not dissimilar from how, like, right wing tabloids would operate in the 80s and 90s. Like, the new York Post still does this, but they've upgraded it to the social media age and what they've done that's very powerful is turn our official accounts on X for the White House and the Department of Defense and Homeland Security into one of these social media tabloid libs of TikTok style accounts. And so the Sydney Sweeney thing, thing, we can argue about, like, what she thought, how effective it was, but I would say as a test drive of this new kind of, like, it worked perfectly. When you get to Charlie Kirk, we're gonna do something or something's gonna happen, and then we're gonna find liberals or leftists and we're gonna say, look how crazy they all are. We should kill them or get them fired.
- [35:55]
B
I mean, yes, and I, I think that that is. That is very real. I guess I wonder what the response should be then from the left is to not share any opinions about what comes out for fear of it being weaponized that way. Or can our media ever do that for them?
- [36:12]
A
I mean, if we're talking like leftists, if we're talking like actual people who believe in leftism, there's a long history of operating completely covertly. I mean, I was, I just saw this really funny thing about, like, this group of French Maoists that were so secretive and clandestine, they apparently accomplished nothing.
- [36:29]
B
That sounds familiar.
- [36:30]
A
Yeah, like, I mean, these are very. These are very familiar conversations had in leftist spaces. But yes, there is. I mean, you have this, I think, very astute idea that leftist infighting, especially online, is. Is the equivalent to airing family business. And you brought this up during the Zoran rallies, where it's like these people heckling Kathy Hochul. Very embarrassing. I think there's two ways to look at it. Like, one is that. Which is that if you use social media to sort of work out leftist infighting, it can be weaponized by right wing and far right operatives. And we even saw this in the 2010s with, like, Russian Internet users pretending to be, like, black activists on Tumblr and Facebook and causing division there. So there's a history of that. And then there's the other side of it, which is, okay, well, if we want to put pressure on the Democrats to actually be a leftist party and actually get a leftist party in for the first time in American history, we have to put pressure on them. And maybe we should apply the same ideas that the far right is applying to move MAGA further to the right. And I'd say there are problems with both of those interpretations and both of those strategies. I won't have a take, I think, on, like, what this Means until the midterms. If this works. Well, you're never going to hear me shut up about it. But if it doesn't work, I'm going to pretend like I never said it at all.
- [37:47]
B
Right. I mean, you know, we could argue that it's. It has already not worked, but we could, I suppose.
- [37:53]
A
You got 50 more minutes.
- [37:55]
B
Yeah, baby. Okay, so Coldplay, let's talk about it. I think we need to talk about it for a moment. Yeah. Great band. We love Talk. X and Y is a great album. But this feels like specifically like a very Internet story talking about anonymity, social media. When you talk about LOLCOWs, like this is two people who are, you know, public facing insofar as they are high powered in their jobs but mostly like, you know, their, their biggest social network is LinkedIn. You know, it comes to the forefront. It is now like probably one of the funniest Halloween costumes of the year. But I'm curious, you know, why this story resonated so much. Is it a sort of consequences for high powered people story and the way that people think about Luigi Mangioni, you know, like why is it something that I guess caught fire online?
- [38:43]
A
Well, one, I think it's just funny. It's like it's really funny. I think sometimes you could just be like it's as simple as it's really funny.
- [38:50]
B
Yeah, the looks on their faces, it's like extremely funny.
- [38:54]
A
Like it's like there's no, no way. It's not funny. But if you wanted to sort of attach it to larger themes of the year and larger themes of sort of the socio cultural political climate, I do think right now in America we have like a deep fascination with power and the behavior of powerful people. And you can see this kind of correcting actually in a fascinating way. Like I would say like the most interesting movies of the year are all part of the, I think what people are calling like weird Americana. So like weapons Eddington. One battle after another. Begonia. Like all of those movies are actually kind of about the opposite which is like how normal people are reacting to. Although I guess now they say it out loud. All of them do feature sort of like these mega maniacal like people in positions of power. So yeah, yes, that, that is, I think that is sort of the key theme of, of the, of the era which is like how do we the, the average person deal with people having this much money, this much influence, this much power. So we laugh at it, we sort of explore it, we protest it, we, we're afraid of it.
- [39:58]
B
We wait for the fringe to, like, just kill it.
- [40:01]
A
Yeah, but I think there's. That is sort of the overlapping feeling of the year is like there are people who have too much power and we don't know how to process it. And so, yeah, if we catch them on a kiss cam having an affair, like, that's really funny.
- [40:14]
B
Yeah. We'll be right back. All right. We're. We're going to speed through the rest of the year. August, you know, just following in the same footsteps of National Guard being called into cities where it's a diverse city and the people tend to be progressive. Donald Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C. brought in the National Guard, started bragging about how people started to go out to eat again in the nation's capital. I guess we should just, like, you know, skip ahead to what I think was a major inflection point.
- [40:56]
A
We are. Charles, are we going? Are we doing that right?
- [40:59]
B
So Charlie Kirk is assassinated very publicly. There's HD video, and a lot of people, myself included, unfortunately, saw the video before he was even pronounced dead. And there became this sort of cultural fallout. The bullies, the. The right, who all year had been the, you know, fuck your feelings party, suddenly is being what they've always claimed to hate. They're calling people's employers, they're saying, you can't talk, want to curtail the First Amendment. They declare Charlie Kirk's birthday a national holiday. All of these things happen. I know that this was a major moment for both Panic World and Garbage Day. Can you talk a little bit about, I guess, how that has impacted the year and maybe sort of made 2025 a standout year.
- [41:48]
A
So talking about Charlie Kirk, I think, is going to require breaking your timeline a little bit, because if you had asked me in September where that was going, I was like, okay, this is the Reichstag fire of the Trump movement. This is going to be the moment they completely take over the country. We're in trouble. I have changed my thinking significantly, and I now actually think that that is. It is probably the end. I think it will be historically looked back on as the end. Yeah, I think they played all their chips too fast. And I think most importantly for them now, this doesn't take us out of the danger zone of, like, authoritarianism or far right radicalization. But if we're talking specifically about MAGA as a movement, as a political entity, I think Charlie Kirk is probably the end of it for a couple reasons. My theory has always been that Charlie Kirk was meant to take over for Trump, because they know that they, they need a cult of personality. They can't, it can't be a TV person anymore because TV doesn't exist.
- [42:45]
B
Nobody. Yeah, nobody's watching.
- [42:47]
A
So the idea was, and if you look at his history, Charlie Kirk's history, like he was clearly groomed to be an influencer to then run for president as an influencer, presence president, smart idea. He's gone. They don't have the time to do that again.
- [42:59]
B
Yeah.
- [42:59]
A
The next step here is that MAGA has always been very powerful because it doesn't believe in anything other than resentment and hatred and grievances. But if you were to ever nail a Trump supporter down on, like, you believe this? They're like, no, I don't. It's just, Just trolling you. Right? Charlie Kirk was personal friends with JD Vance, with possibly Trump himself, although he doesn't really seem to even remember that.
- [43:22]
B
Charlie Kirk died or that he met him beforehand.
- [43:25]
A
The whole admin was personally invested in Charlie Kirk and they made it unacceptable to say anything bad about him. And they got people fired and they held a funeral in a sports arena and they overplayed their hand. And so now the Nick Fuentes is of the world. And even just like random Internet users are like, these people are old and embarrassing. MAGA is old. Maga's a decade old at this point. And so I think for the, the average far right Internet user, they're like, this is embarrassing. Like, like we don't believe in anything and Trump now believes in something. And so I think it has sort of poisoned the rest of the MAGA media environment because it all feels very goofy and very silly to the point where I am bombarded with memes every day now of Kirk, slop of Charlie Kirk, AI brain rot garbage that is making fun of him, making fun of Trump, making fun of people who like Trump. It's all falling apart.
- [44:18]
B
Right? And I mean, I think, like, something to just sort of like zoom in on that you mentioned is, you know, the consequence for making a joke. I think the entire facade of MAGA falls apart when everything they do is just jokes and you guys are taking things too seriously and you have this chip on your shoulder. And now it's, we're going to check your Internet history. If you come into this country to see if you've ever said a joke about Charlie Kirk. We're going to remove your visa. If you said something about Charlie Kirk's actual words on your Facebook, you know, we're going to start kicking college students out because they just disagree with Charlie Kirk, which is kind of like Charlie Kirk's entire business model was like, these kids don't agree with me and I'm gonna go yell at them. Do you think that, like, they will change their strategy? I guess it's hard to know, but, like, do you see that as a winning strategy for MAGA to continuously, like, punish, but for things that they would complain about being punished for?
- [45:12]
A
Like the libs of TikTok strategy of like, we find somebody and we demonize them and we attack them, blah, blah.
- [45:17]
B
Right.
- [45:18]
A
Well, the two issues that MAGA as a movement and like, I. And when I say maga, I mean like that specific section of conservatives. So, like, I'm not talking the Nick Fuentes gripers, I'm not talking even the manosphere guys or whatever. I'm talking specifically like QAnon, American eagle, like in their bio, like sunglass guy, MAGA. Right. The two things that that movement is facing that it really cannot seem to. To. To, on a propaganda level, work its way around. First, the over veneration of Charlie Kirk that sort of has made everything look like it's for boomers in a really bad way. It sort of sucked all the danger out of. Out of the movement for young people. And then the other thing is the Epstein stuff, which they have tried and tried and tried to outmaneuver all year. And it has only gotten worse to the point where Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, this is another one of those, like, do they believe it or are they a grifter? I'm inclined to believe that Marjorie Taylor Greene was somewhat of a true believer in QAnon and was like, oh, wait, I'm working for the pedophiles that I thought I was here.
- [46:28]
B
Right. I kind of dedicated my life to, like, finding this pedophile ring. And I'm in it. I'm not surrounded.
- [46:34]
A
I'm in it.
- [46:34]
B
Yeah, I walked into it and I. I got it back out. Yeah.
- [46:38]
A
And there's like, other instances that are equally interesting here that you could file under the same category of like the, The. The Republican politician a few weeks ago that was like, I'm breaking with Trumpism because he keeps using the word and my son is special needs. Or even the Rob Reiner stuff from this month where there's a lot of Republicans are like, whoa, this is like, so tacky and insane. And then for Trump to double and I think triple now down on Rob Reiner deserving to die, like, all of that. It's so hard to hold that coalition together because it's it's more fragile than it's ever been because it's so deeply unpopular. And, and I think I'm going to give. I'm going to say that you're right here. That, like no King's Day, if you were to, you know, like the, the domino meme.
- [47:19]
B
Yeah.
- [47:19]
A
The first or second domino in that would be no Kings Day of sort of letting a lot of people know, like, there are more of us who don't like Trump than do like Trump. And like, that is important. And I think you're right. I think it, it has led to this, this huge sort of shift in consciousness about the Trump administration.
- [47:38]
B
Yeah. I mean, going into that sort of domino effect, I would say another key domino is the backlash to trying to cancel Jimmy Kimmel.
- [47:48]
A
Sure. Yes.
- [47:48]
B
I think that, like, you know, people saw that as sort of a major overstep, especially after the Stephen Colbert stuff. But let's keep pushing with the year. We're now in October and your favorite protest comes back two. No, two kings. It did. The second no Kings protest happened.
- [48:05]
A
I missed it again. I can't believe. No, I'm kidding.
- [48:07]
B
I heard about that one. You did. I think you were in London for that.
- [48:11]
A
Yes. Where they have a king, but they.
- [48:13]
B
Also had their own no Kings Day protests.
- [48:15]
A
Yeah, that's. I lived with a Republican lowercase R for many years and like, that's a whole different. I mean. Yes. Do I think that the UK Government should seize all the property of Royal family and turn it into museums and then throw them out in the street? Absolutely.
- [48:29]
B
Sure.
- [48:30]
A
But it's like a totally different thing over there.
- [48:32]
B
Totally, totally. But I think theirs was like, also in conjunction with hating Trump in ways.
- [48:37]
A
Well, they hate Trump. Yeah, they do.
- [48:39]
B
Sure. And this is also happening at another major inflection point of the year, which is the government shutdown, the longest in American history. Also bumping up against SNAP benefits, being, you know, sort of on the chopping block and for a lot of places were just frankly chopped. How do you factor, I guess that going into what was a huge election day for Democrats in November.
- [49:00]
A
I mean, the wheels are falling off. The whole thing's not working.
- [49:02]
B
The country.
- [49:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, but, but let's say Project 2025. Sure. The whole idea of, of consolidating power and creating this like, libertarian in name only, extremely powerful federal government that also doesn't do anything.
- [49:21]
B
Right.
- [49:22]
A
We're so, you know, we're so steeped in the American context that I, I think it, it is hard sometimes to think about how weird all of this is like, like to say like we can't have a federal government, but also it has to have more power than it's ever had in its history. It's like a very unique situation to find yourself in. And I think it's actually ideologically a hard one to keep going. And the government shutdown is another one of those events right in quick succession along with Charlie Kirk's murder and the, and the Epstein documents find being released, that it does sort of feel like everyone going like, oh, this is like not sustainable. And so, you know, I don't want to over index the success Zorin Mondami's campaign and the wins in I think Virginia on the same night, but they.
- [50:07]
B
Are promising also in Mississippi. I mean basically everywhere there was an election for the. Oh yeah, like J.D. vance's brother in law losing big in Ohio. He's not the mayor of Cincinnati.
- [50:19]
A
You're a big Graham Platner person. I know that you, you love him so like he might do well too in all of this.
- [50:26]
B
Yeah, I think that the Democratic Party needs another Fetterman and I think we're just, just teed it up. We're just tearing it up.
- [50:32]
A
That is an interesting sort of thing we haven't talked about much because you and I have very different opinions about it. What I think is, you know, a very real possibility that the Democratic Party like doesn't survive in its current form or can't or shouldn't. That doesn't deserve to. This new way of thinking about liberal and leftist politics in the US is very interesting to me and I don't know where it's headed and we won't know really until the midterms if it's working. But so far the, the younger candidates that are embracing like sort of Trumpian digital strategy and, and, and embracing the sort of more chaotic leftist discourses on the Internet for now are doing okay, which is interesting and, and, and notable even just the fact that it's doing okay. You know, it seems, I think for years ago, eight years ago, it would have been, you'll never, you'll never win America that way. And that is beginning to change, which is cool.
- [51:28]
B
I think that that's right. And now to December, here we are, it's the last month of the year. We're currently living in it. And these are the sort of main stories. Obviously there's Trump's FIFA Peace Prize, which matters to someone. Donald Trump. Venezuela is potentially going to be a country we are at war with in a real way. I think most recently, Trump said that they're completely surrounded by our navy. We've taken an oil tanker. We. Pete Hegseth has continuously bombed anyone on a boat that he's seen on a satellite. There's also Hegseth strikes on the Caribbean, I guess. Let's just call it. What's the final rating for 2025? We'll both answer.
- [52:07]
A
All right. Six out of ten.
- [52:10]
B
Six out of ten.
- [52:11]
A
Yeah.
- [52:12]
B
And not factoring in any personal stuff, just the world.
- [52:14]
A
I mean, politically, yeah. Stuff's a mess. Sure. But I think in the last few months, America has kind of woken back up. As I said, Woke 2 is coming, which is really exciting. I just think there's a lot to be excited about right now. There's this very post Obama, I think, feeling that a lot of millennials in particular have. That, like, the perfect state of democracy is stasis.
- [52:45]
B
No.
- [52:45]
A
That, like, one day we'll win. And, like, I think if you think about it like, okay, this is a process, and it's always going to be a process. And if you sort of think about the health of a democracy based on democratic action, as messy and annoying and insufferable as that is, and as stupid as the average median voter is. Sure. Right now, as of December 2025, I do think America has kind of remembered itself in a way. And I'm. And it's annoying that it took this long into, like, a second Trump presidency just to do it.
- [53:23]
B
Right.
- [53:24]
A
But there is that really funny. I think not apocryphal Winston Churchill quote. That's like, Americans always do the right thing when they've exhausted every other option.
- [53:31]
B
Yeah.
- [53:33]
A
I think that that's sort of where we're at right now. If we're sort of thinking about the health of the year, it is five years after a global pandemic.
- [53:40]
B
Yeah.
- [53:40]
A
The lights are turning back on. The country is sort of remembering what's going on. There is an interest in being something else. And the Trump era, whether physically because of his old, frail, demented body breaking down ends.
- [53:57]
B
Yeah.
- [53:57]
A
Or they all get kicked out of office in the midterms. And then the general, two years later, this era is over.
- [54:05]
B
Right.
- [54:05]
A
And I. And I think everyone is kind of realizing, including the Republicans, like, this era is over. It's done no matter what. Like, Trump is not. The man is falling apart.
- [54:16]
B
Yeah, he is. He is 80. You know, he is. This is an old man, older than anyone who's ever lived in my family, but, you know, still pretended to be young, sleeping through meetings I think I.
- [54:27]
A
Watched a non video of him genuinely defecating in his pants at a press conference. The woman behind him makes a face like something dark came out of the back of him. So like this is a over.
- [54:37]
B
Sure. Right. It's not going to keep going.
- [54:40]
A
It's very annoying that it took the country this long, maybe basically up until Charlie Kirk to be like, this isn't forever. It's not possible to be forever. It's going to end. And I think we've, we're already kind of thinking about what's next and like that's optimistic. I, that's enough for me to feel optimistic.
- [54:59]
B
All right. My rating for the year is a, a strong four. Oh, I think it was way more bad than good. And even hope notwithstanding, I think that there is just a reality of how much has been lost. And unfortunately, like regardless of what happens with Donald Trump's old age, I think that like the, the prospect of three more years of chaos, of dysfunction, of stalling out on not only civil rights and like equity in the country, but like guns, I think that we're just in for a lot more pain than we needed to have. And you know the big thing that we didn't really talk too much about Taylor Swift. Exactly right.
- [55:45]
A
You're talking about national pain. We haven't even talked about Taylor Swift.
- [55:47]
B
We haven't even talked about Taylor Swift. AI is just sort of like when you talk about like radiating stories in the background. AI is a bubble that may or may not burst, but we are securely in it.
- [56:00]
A
I can't talk about AI My listeners get so enraged when I share my views on AI that like I don't want to bring that back bad energy to your show. Unless you want that. I don't know if you want that, but panic world listeners are threatening to kill me every time I open my.
- [56:13]
B
Mouth about AI because they're divided.
- [56:15]
A
No, I'm not a doomer about it. I'm like very middle of the road about it. Like I think some of it's going to stick around and some of it will wash out and some of it will kill media types that like are kind of on their way out anyways and like the bubble will burst, but the dot com bubble didn't take away dot com. We still have them, you know, so it's computers do math, you just be doing math.
- [56:37]
B
But AI can't do it correctly. But here's what I will say. I my only real thing about AI is that like on top of everything else in an economy that is Absolutely in the shitter. People losing jobs at record rates. We're back to 2021 levels of employment. I just think it's the last thing workers need is to be replaced by a half working sort of computer idea.
- [57:03]
A
Who's a leftist now talking about workers of the world?
- [57:06]
B
I'm not, not a leftist. I just am not accepted.
- [57:10]
A
My brothers and sisters, the only chains on you are the chains you put on yourself. Throw off the shackles of capitalism.
- [57:16]
B
Get out of here. Of AI at least. All right, final question and then I will let you get back to your life. Do you have hopes, goals or resolutions for 2026 for the world and maybe for your yourself?
- [57:27]
A
I haven't been doing as much yoga as I want to be doing.
- [57:30]
B
The whole world hasn't.
- [57:31]
A
Yeah, my living room's a little crowded right now with a Christmas tree in it, so it's kind of hard to do yoga.
- [57:36]
B
Mine too.
- [57:37]
A
In terms of the world, like, I genuinely think that something has clicked. I woke up the other day. I don't know if I dreamt it, but I woke up the other day and I was just like, trump's already not president anymore. Like, I. Something just sort of snapped in me. I feel bad, more confident about that. Going home for Thanksgiving. Every time I talk to people who don't work in the media or stare at the Internet all day, more and more I just think that, like, there's a, there's a large part of the country that's just like, this is not what I signed up for. This is not what I'm interested in. And you're right, like, we didn't talk about this, but like, the single most catastrophic thing that happened this year was the end of USA id. It will result in million, hundreds of millions of deaths around the world. It has already resulted in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is catastrophic. And the brain drain that's happening to our country right now is something that like, will take a generation. And all these things are terrible. And so I want to be very.
- [58:34]
B
Clear, I'm not like, you're like, pretty good though.
- [58:37]
A
I'm not delusional. But what I do think is that like, something very bad happened to America over the last 10 years and not just America. In my work, it's taken me around the world. I've seen this happen in, in almost every major democracy. Something happened in the 2000 and tens. I, I have my theories of what caused it. I won't get into that because you and I don't agree. I just think decades of managerial, post world, post Cold war democracy. Let made everyone go crazy. And so they were like, let's destroy everything. And now we're coming out of that period. And I do think the most optimistic thing I can say about 2026 and beyond is that there is an energy to actually build things and fix things that I have not seen in America in at least a decade. Decade. Truly, really not, you know, like leftist podcasters, like, you know, joking about the end of the world or whatever, but, like, genuinely, like, earnest, embarrassing expressions of, you know, democracy, which makes me feel good. What about you? What are you most optimistic about?
- [59:41]
B
I mean, I. It's sort of like. It's like a trick mirror of what you were saying, which is sort of just that, like, I do think something is breaking and changing. And in the same way that, like, Trump sort of feels like he is like a shadow president at this point, because, like, he's not the main story. He's not doing the things, and people are kind of sick of it anyway. I think that white supremacy is actually not on the rise anymore. I think that the reality is a lot of this backlash was to just the changing demographics of. Of not only this country, but of the world generally. And I think that, like, they tried it. You know, the top of the year was really like, you know, whitey is back. And I think that, like, we have seen that, like, we're back when you cut out all people of color, you cut down women, you undercut everything else, and then you have to stand on your own. It still hasn't shown this excellence that we have been told repeatedly is just inherent in the meritocracy that allegedly just exists. And I think that let, like, they're gonna have to share the world. And I think that people like the general population understands that. There was a poll, and I'll have to find it that was. Came out this week that basically said that, like, people's feelings about immigrants in this country has never been higher than right now. And it's like, I'm sure in January that wasn't the case, but it's like you demonize and you hurt the farmers and you kick people out and you go to daycares and you rip people from their families. It just doesn't really bode well for the idea that you are inherently great because you are the white president, you are the white head of this, you know, organization for the. For the government. Like, none of those things are bearing out. And I think that, like, this country unfortunately, has to make mistakes. They can't just learn from them. And so like, you know, from a distance they have to be up in them. And I do feel like we're going to get a lot more pain next year. But I do think that the learning is taking place. So that's the bit of optimism and hope that I have is that people will just say, you know what, maybe we need each other.
- [61:51]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think we, what we're both saying is, you know, you around and you find out. And now we're finding out. It turns out people don't like that.
- [61:59]
B
Yeah, they hate finding out.
- [62:00]
A
People hate the finding out.
- [62:01]
B
It's, you know, that's in the episode title, 2025, the year we found out. Yeah, I think it's right find out part of the around.
- [62:09]
A
Yeah, we fucked around. Now we gotta find out.
- [62:11]
B
Ryan Broderick, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.
- [62:15]
A
Thank you so much. Akilah Hughes.
- [62:17]
B
Thank you for watching and subscribing to How Is this Better? And I hope that your new year, your 2026, is a lot better than what came before. How Is this Better? Is written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It is produced by Devin Maroney and edited by Shane Berkist. Kevin Dreyfus is the Managing Director and Executive Producer at Courier. RC Demezzo is VP of Brand and Social and Charlotte Robertson is Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Tracy Kaplan is VP of Distribution and Sales. If you want to reach out about sponsoring or advertising, reach out to inforiernewsroom.com Marianne Kuga is director of marketing and the original music is by Used People in artwork by Danielle Depleto.