Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:01]
Home Depot Advertiser
Right now the Home Depot has spring deals under $20. So what are you working on? If you're planning on cooking out this season, head to the Home Depot so you can fire up the grill with deals on charcoal. Right now, get two 16 pound bags of Kingsford charcoal for only $17.88 was $19.98. Don't miss spring deals under $20 now through May 7th at the home Depot. Subject to availability valid on select items only.
- [00:31]
Mike
This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Everyone has a reason to change. Growing old, heartbreak, a fresh start. Whatever it may be, Peloton is here to get you through life's biggest moments with instructors that speak your language and workouts that move to your own rhythm. Peloton's tread and All Access membership help you set your targets, track your progress and get stronger, making your fitness goals a reality. Find your push, Find your power. Peloton visit onepalaton.com hi, it's Mike with a major announcement.
- [01:02]
Mike Pesca
It is not about the gist. It is about something called the Gist List. So let me tell you, every day I construct the show by reading and listening and imbibing a tremendous amount of information. A lot of it doesn't make it onto the show, of course. So what do we do with that? What do we do with the effluvia, the jetsam, the sods, but also the odds. Enter the Gist List Every day on Substack I will be compiling the most interesting, important, maybe unfairly ignored stories that I look at and say there's something there. You know, we must nurture that which is interesting in this world. Some of these stories do end up as segments. They all start off as ideas. We need ideas. The Just List is designed to interest you, definitely. Not to waste your time to make you smarter. To see where I'm heading every day on the gist. So head over to Mike pesca.substack.com today and every day to sign up for the just list. It's Tuesday, April 29, 2020 25. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was taking questions from reporters today at a White House briefing. One asked about a punchbowl news report about Amazon explicitly noting tariff costs and their prices. Here's our question.
- [02:22]
Reporter
Hi Mr. Secretary. So it was reported this morning that Amazon will soon display a little number next to the price of each product. That shows how much the Trump tariffs are adding to the cost of each product. So isn't that a perfect, crystal clear demonstration that it's the American consumer and not China who is going to have to pay for these policies.
- [02:44]
Mike Pesca
Press secretary Carolyn Levitt stepped in, anticipating the question.
- [02:48]
Carolyn Levitt
I will take this since I just got off the phone with the president about Amazon's announcement. This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. Why didn't Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?
- [03:04]
Mike Pesca
Well, because inflation is a post hoc calculation and an estimation that doesn't apply to all goods equally, that's why. And a tariff is literally written down in the federal record and must be paid to the dollar. By who? By the American consumer. As Amazon was reportedly noting. Levitt went on to display a picture of Jeff Bezos and said, as Reuters.
- [03:27]
Carolyn Levitt
Recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm. So this is another reason why Americans should buy American. It's another reason why we are on shoring critical supply chains here at home to shore up our own critical supply chain and boost our own manufacturing here, here.
- [03:45]
Mike Pesca
Now that article is from 2021 and it concerned reviews of a book and some writings and speeches of Xi Jinping that were accruing less than five star reviews on the Chinese version of am and indeed Amazon disabled reviews after the Chinese government weighed in. I have to say it is sad and predictable that a billionaire retailer would save face by kowtowing to the demands of a government that was embarrassed. It's also frankly pathetic for a world leader to demand this. It is good that the Trump administration called it out. Then this morning Trump literally called Jeff Bezos to complain that the displayed tariff prices were embarrassing the Trump administration and Bezos publicly, for the record, said that the prices were never going to be on the main Amazon site. Or maybe he just once again kowtowed save face. Don't tell anyone, including Donald Trump, that kowtow is from the Chinese for knocking ahead, as in bowing against the ground. Or Caroline Levitt might use that against him in a future press conference. Now, speaking of Trump embarrassments, billionaires with business in China on the show today shall spiel about hey, did you know is Trump's first hundred days? I have some thoughts. Massapequa High School shout outs ensue. But first, Fez Siddiqui has written a book about Elon Musk. Mostly focused on driverless cars, but a lot about all the other stuff. And it gets to and I get to Elon Musk's makeup Hubris Maximus, the shattering of Elon Musk. Up next, if Ed is getting you down, don't blame Ed. That guy's not special. Lots of guys have it. You need to get up. Get up with hims. Boost your confidence. Boost other things. Hims helps you last longer. Be more confident if you're feeling stalled in the bedroom, gotta get some gas back in the tank. I'm not going to speak elliptically, but I'm not going to speak specifically about what HIMSS does or what ED is. We all know it can be uncomfortable or I've heard that it can be uncomfortable. HIMSS is changing men's health care by providing affordable sexual health treatments from the comfort of your couch. They have doctor trusted ed treatments like Viagra and Cialis. They have generics and you can save 95% on them. Fill out an intake form with a medical provider will determine the right treatment option. If prescribed, your medication ships directly to you for free. You don't need insurance. One low price covers everything and they have hundreds of thousands of trusted subscribers. Start your free online Visit today@hisss.com the Gist that's him s.com the Gist for your personalized ED treatment options. Hisss.com the Gist the featured products include compounded products which are not approved nor verified for safety, effectiveness or quality by the fda prescription requires. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. Want to talk about financial literacy? Do you have it? How'd you get it for me? My dad would listen to a lot of those AM radio shows where they talked about finances. I think they were very respectable. They weren't ripoffs. And we got smart. We definitely didn't get rich. But you know, April is Financial Literacy Month. That's right. They made a whole month reminding you to finally take control of your money. The good news is you don't need 30 days. And that's really good news because there are 30 days left in April. Acorns makes it easy to start saving and investing for your future in just five minutes. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that matches you and your money goals. You don't need to be rich. Acorns lets you get started with the spare money you've got right now, even if all you've got is spare change. And the great thing is they just help you take that spare change that you didn't even think about and they put it into a proper investment vehicle for you. It's really very clever. One time set up and they're automatically for you. Of nickel two dimes I'm not going to give all the iteration of change, but they'll put it in a retirement account. They'll put it in an investment vehicle. It's so clever. It's so passive. It is a way to invest. Sign up now and join the over 14 million all time customers who have already saved and invested over $25 billion with Acorns. Head to acorns.com the gist or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns Tier 1 compensation provided investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. View important disclosures@acorns.com the Gist if there was a book about the billionaire who thought he'd drive a giant hole through a mountain, you'd read that book. And if there was a book about the billionaire, let's say in this case it was the world's 40th richest man who thought thought he should have about 14 kids and maybe 28 because there was an impending cultural collapse, you'd read that book. And if there was a book about a guy who did more for the environment and yet is hated more by environmentalists than anyone else, and let's say this guy was the world's 12th richest guy, you'd read that book. Of course. This guy we're talking about is Elon Musk. He is the world's richest man. And the book that is the subject of my show today is called Hubris Maximus. It's by Fez Siddiqui of the Washington Post and it mostly talks talks about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and the part of Tesla, a lot of lot of the Tesla experience, but the part where he tried to have self driving cars and along the way there were casualties. Fez, welcome to the Gist.
- [09:49]
Fez Siddiqui
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
- [09:50]
Mike Pesca
So your background's mostly transportation reporting.
- [09:53]
Fez Siddiqui
That's right.
- [09:53]
Mike Pesca
But you were dragooned into covering Musk and the Twitter thing because he was so much on your beat to begin with.
- [10:00]
Fez Siddiqui
That. That sounds right. You know, his purchase of Twitter sort of dovetailed, you know, with my coverage of Tesla and coverage of Musk in general. And he's gotten himself into so many different areas at this point that pickles.
- [10:13]
Mike Pesca
I think we could say Pickles, that.
- [10:15]
Fez Siddiqui
Now I cover the federal government.
- [10:17]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Was Musk's plan or vision of the self driving technology in Tesla different from this will allow driverless taxis? It was more like we're going to give people the option to own their own cars and it's take their hands off the wheel though, that became a thing. Have to actually keep in contact with the wheel and take their hands off the wheel and just have the cars drive themselves. So not as a fleet of taxis, but as passenger vehicles?
- [10:43]
Fez Siddiqui
Well, all of the above. I mean it was just sort of this maximalist approach. If somebody else was promising something, there was no reason that Elon and Tesla didn't think like they could achieve that too. So even if they were going to give you a self driving car as like a consumer vehicle that you can go buy in a showroom, it was also going to be able to operate as a robo taxi.
- [11:04]
Mike Pesca
Was there a difference in the fundamental type of technology that Musk believed in versus what Waymo or some of his more successful to this date rivals believed in?
- [11:15]
Fez Siddiqui
Yeah, Musk has this very, you know, without oversimplifying, he has a very simplistic approach to how to achieve this. He believes, you know, you have two eyes and a brain. A car should operate on the same principles, that it has eyes, it has vision and it has a brain, neural nets. And so that differed from some of these other companies that built in all kinds of backstops. Teslas came equipped with cameras and they came equipped with computers to, you know, to operate, you know, the self driving technology.
- [11:55]
Mike Pesca
So what technology would a rival car use that Musk philosophically, or it might be because of pigheadedness, it might be because of price. But I also, he articulates a philosophy. What were different technologies that the rivals would embrace that he just refused to.
- [12:12]
Fez Siddiqui
So the two are radar and lidar. And you know, safety experts refer to these as a sort of part of a sensor fusion package. It's basically like, all right, so you have a car, it has cameras, cameras see these flat images. So sometimes what they see can be distorted. So the radar helps supplement, you know, this thing that I'm seeing crossing the road is shaped in this particular way. Is it, you know, is it an ant or is it, you know, is it a dog or is it a deer? And you've got to react a different way to probably every one of those things. And so the sensor fusion helps you verify what the camera is seeing.
- [12:56]
Mike Pesca
So is it really a philosophical difference or is it more that? I mean, there are a few possibilities and you get into all of them in the book. But Musk gets an idea, he doesn't like to deviate from the idea. He doesn't like to be told his idea is wrong. And when other people and he has competitors. Blue Origin is a competitor of SpaceX. And I guess he supplanted Prius as a electric, electric vehicle, the main electric vehicle. But is it the fact that when he sees a competitor doing something, he'll always double down? So what this means is if he's right, if his initial inclinations are right, he gains an advantage. But maybe in this case, if he's wrong or he's missing something or he doesn't want to admit that you can't perfectly analogize a car to a self driving car or vision in technology to vision in one's head, he's going to be wrong. And possibly catastrophically wrong.
- [13:55]
Fez Siddiqui
So, so Musk is never going to embrace a particular product, design or philosophy just because the competitors are doing it. He is all about first principles, which suggests like, all right, there's a problem. What is, what are the, you know, physical limitations preventing that problem from being solved? And let's build something, you know, in line with what is physically possible as opposed to what our bottom line will allow for or what the competitors have already ruled out. He is going to go with this ground up approach. And so it's very possible to stumble into the right approach that way. It's also very possible to end up in sort of a rabbit hole where you're diverging from, you know, the established principles in such a way that you like kind of lock yourself in to a particular design. And you know, Musk is not someone who is necessarily willing to acknowledge like maybe we've gone the wrong way here. But that's not to say that they definitively have. It's just to say that like some of the pitfalls that this approach introduced have been demonstrated over the past few years. And not in the same way as like, you know, the Waymos of the world have found their self driving cars acting erratically. Tesla's crashes have been catastrophic.
- [15:23]
Mike Pesca
Tesla. You talk and you detail the stories of at least three people who were involved in Tesla self driving crashes. And did they all die?
- [15:33]
Fez Siddiqui
I mean, yeah, I mean I want to say at least three in the book stories of just these horrific Tesla crashes where people die in cars in.
- [15:44]
Mike Pesca
Autopilot and so have his competitors self driving cars had any deaths.
- [15:49]
Fez Siddiqui
So Uber famously, you know, in 2018 there was a self driving Uber that hit and killed a pedestrian. And it was just for the whole industry, I mean everything sort of ground to a halt. You know, Uber's program was suspended and Uber, you know, we don't even talk about them as a player anymore. I Mean, like that program was, you know, destroyed by this. And you know, Tesla has not faced the same blowback from crashes involving its technology. I mean, that's probably partly owed to the fact that these are consumer vehicles that, you know, there's an implicit agreement with people who are driving them that, you know, they're, they're in control at all times. You know, they agree to that. But yeah, I mean, competitors have had, you know, catastrophic cases, accidents, fatalities, at least that one fatality with Uber, but the reaction has been far different.
- [16:56]
Mike Pesca
Do you want to point out, and this is, you know, credit to your book, because I had this thought from reading it, our fatal flaws, just in terms of Greek myth and how to tell a story, our fatal flaws are usually also the components that make for heroism. So sometimes it's hubris, as you put on the COVID of your book. But the things that make Elon so pigheaded in this one space that you have covered extensively, which is his failure and his trying to escape accountability on self driving cars are exactly the factors that have made him so successful in Tesla overall, just in terms of, just in terms of having those vehicles take so much pollution out of the environment. And the other big one is Space X, which will be saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and is beating its rivals. And as I was reading it, I was saying the story you're telling on self driving cars could be told as a story on SpaceX. Same exact traits. SpaceX is a heroic story. Self driving cars is a tragic story.
- [18:13]
Fez Siddiqui
Yeah, I mean, you could make the argument that self driving cars are a heroic story too. I think this is sort of the undertold story about what they're doing with this technology that has been so hyped that is so central to the valuation of Tesla. So there is a heroic story already baked in and I don't explore it in the book. Perhaps there are other aspects, unglamorous aspects of SpaceX too. Certainly from an environmental standpoint, there are people who live around those launch sites who have a story to tell. But I don't think that negates the progress that SpaceX has made. It's just a matter of, let's look at this holistically on your point about the traits, the flaws that also sort of enable heroism. One theme you'll find in the book is like this skirting of guardrails is baked in, like nobody could achieve what Elon achieves with such efficiency across such a broad range of like major societal ambitions without skirting all those guardrails. It's, it's, it at least, you know, that is my overwhelming.
- [19:40]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And so maybe the idea, if you want to criticize Elon, and he deserves a lot of criticism, is he doesn't think the rules or the laws apply to him or should. And that is true. Yeah.
- [19:49]
Fez Siddiqui
But if you're Elon, if you're Elon, are you, like, maybe those guardrails shouldn't exist?
- [19:52]
Mike Pesca
I was thinking of a specific other story which is often told as a reflection of his ingenuity and his working around ridiculous rules, which is in Fremont, California. He needed essentially a second assembly line and it would have been impossible to build that under the laws of California. Maybe this is one of the reasons he left California. And so he built a huge tent in the parking lot and this allowed him to meet his quota. And if you look at what those laws are, I haven't, I haven't read the code, but I'm sure it's onerous. He was widely celebrated as coming up with a very clever workaround that the industry applauded. That I think society applauded because this was at a time when Tesla had a good reputation. And the more Tesla's on the road, the less pollution on the road. But the point is that it's the same story as the self driving car story, except in that case it's easier to recognize the guardrail as being excessive or unnecessary or the classic example of what he always talks about with Doge, which is excessive government regulation.
- [20:56]
Fez Siddiqui
Yeah, you have to, you have to accept, if you accept, you know, Elon seeing a roadblock in assembly and, you know, this relatively maybe innocuous thing of like, all right, I'll just put a tent in the parking lot. And you know, the book talks about, you know, how I believe it was, you know, the president of the company who was instrumental in overseeing that. But you have to accept that, like that kind of thing, innocuous in your example might be applied to technology that is life or death, like self driving.
- [21:30]
Mike Pesca
Right. But the reason that they had all the rules about assembly lines and code in California was something close to life or death, right?
- [21:38]
Fez Siddiqui
Oh, shit. Yeah. Yes, yes. I think you have to. I don't know if I, if I were a fanboy, I mean, it might, I don't know the fanboy mentality here, but it might be interesting to me to like realize that, like these things that I'm cheering on also might have a downside.
- [22:02]
Mike Pesca
So this takes us to Doge, it could take us to Twitter, it could take us to many Places I don't know if it could take us to at least 14 known documented kids, probably, but it takes us to Doge. And that the story, and the story the fanboys believe is that you're cutting government waste. That's what you're doing. But what is the evidence to you? But there are so many other motivations, Right. He's probably just to some extent thrilled to be tasked with this fundamental portion of Trump's agenda. Right. He's probably happy that he shoved out Vivek Ramaswamy. He probably likes the attention. He probably thinks it's good to some extent for his ego and his brand. He definitely thinks that some of the waste is 100% bonafide waste and he's doing a great thing for society. So add it all up. What do you think the evidence shows that Elon's primary motivation is? Is it, as a lot of his critics allege, to redo the government in a way where someone like him can operate more easily and more remuneratively?
- [23:07]
Fez Siddiqui
Well, I think it's worth examining his motivations all along. So it sort of reminds me of the opening chapter of my book, talks about Elon's view that the government safety investigators are beating up on him. What had they ever built? It asks. And it's just this sort of, there's this feeling that there is, I don't know if it's a conspiracy against the company, but it's certainly people are pointed against the company as a result of entrenched attitudes within government. And so, all right, there's a motivation. There's a feeling that these guys don't know what they're doing. They lack the relevant expertise to oversee me. And then if you look in the Twitter chapters, there is a desire to get into Twitter and people would do, I don't know, if you give people a list of like, what are five things you would do to Twitter? There was a time when it was just like, add an edit button, like that's easy. Or I don't know, like, make tweets longer, make tweets shorter, whatever. Like, there are a lot of Twitter related things. What does Elon do? He deputizes all these people to go, you know, search for people talking bad about him, for example, search for evidence that, you know, the Democrats are like running Twitter. And so I just don't think it's too much of a logical leap to see that same approach applied to the government, which he thinks is full of people who are aligned against him, which he also thinks needs to be Thoroughly searched, vetted, and have these attitudes rooted out.
- [24:52]
Mike Pesca
Okay, this is great. So you're saying that. Let's use Twitter as an analogy. He. There were fixes that people agreed needed to happen, and he probably. I mean, he voiced some of these and he changed some of them. You could now edit Twitter when you couldn't. So it went from worse user experience to better user experience. And he was very happy to have done that. But once he got. Once he got the keys to the kingdom, and in Twitter's case, it cost him, what, $40 billion in Trump's case. Sorry, in the government's case, it was only $200 billion. 200 million donating to Trump. So what a deal. But once he got the keys to the kingdom in Twitter, it wasn't just doing these things that were. We all agreed on. It wasn't even doing the edge cases that some people agreed on. You could definitely make a case that there was some amount of oversight that needed to be done in terms of suppressing dissenting speech. Let's. Let's just cabinet for a second. He showed that he couldn't help himself. He didn't want to help himself. He said to himself, this is mine. I'm going to use it for personal means. And that's exactly what he's doing with Doge. You're saying it's not the only thing he's doing, but he's doing that with Doge.
- [26:04]
Fez Siddiqui
I think some of his grievances are probably motivating at least some of the approach to, like, usaid. I mean, it's. It's just Elon is openly lighting into this agency, and it's not clear how you can separate his personal opinions on USAID from Doge's ransacking of that agency.
- [26:31]
Mike Pesca
Do you have any intuition on the reporting that he's not long for his temporary assignment?
- [26:39]
Fez Siddiqui
So this gets back to rules. I think his term as a special government employee would be up at the end of May. It's 130 days, 130 working days, I believe. But like Elon saying, they're working 120 hours, hours a week. So I don't think he's really taking time off. So that would be the end of May. It also seems like a convenient out. Tesla earnings are coming up. You know, deliveries were down. The company is under all kinds of pressure. There is, you know, if Tesla. Tesla is, I always say, sort of like the economic engine of Elon's empire. It's like, you know, if part of that crumbles, like he's in trouble. You know, back to the Twitter deal. It's like he's not a very liquid financier. And so for him to risk Tesla is probably a bit too much. Although he has said that the future of humanity is more important. If America falls, nothing matters. That's what he says when people ask him about focusing on his businesses. But yes, it feels like a convenient out that, you know, the end of May is the end of that term as a special government employee. So I, you know, no, no special insight beyond, like, it makes sense to me.
- [28:11]
Mike Pesca
Fez Siddique writes for the Washington Post. His book is called Hubris Maximus, the Shattering of Elon Musk. And, you know, it is a truthful account because I believe siddiqui means the trut truthful, does it not?
- [28:24]
Fez Siddiqui
I've heard that only in, like, Internet comment sections. So that sounds right.
- [28:29]
Mike Pesca
That is the trusted one.
- [28:30]
Fez Siddiqui
Sure. I love that.
- [28:32]
Mike Pesca
Thank you, Fez.
- [28:33]
Fez Siddiqui
Hey, thank you, Mike.
- [28:46]
Mike Pesca
You know what I'm bad at maybe or two is meal planning. In fact, I'm so bad at meal planning, I didn't even realize there was this category of activity called meal planning. It would just come time to have a meal or to cook for my family, and I would say, oh, what am I gonna have? And try to figure it out. Didn't really make sense to me that you could go back and plan the meal beforehand, but you can. And just about the best way to do this that I've come across is Marley Spoon. I'm excited that they're sponsoring this episode because with the code, the gist, you can get up to 26 free meals from this excellent service. Marley Spoon. They have over 100 recipes to choose from comfort food like Big Batch Beef Stroganoff a salmon and creamy Mustard Dill Sauce bake, which is a lighter option, something for every mood. I will tell you about a meal or two. The mini chicken, meatballs and escarole, or as my people call them, scarol. And this meal was money. If you understand the Sopranos or Italian, you'll know that scuttle is slang for money. But it's in this brodo broth, which I'm going to get to in a second. And it's with garlic crostini. I could never have made it on my own. But with Marley Spoon, I am planning a meal and wowing my loved ones with the quality of the meal and the great thing. One of the great things about Marley Spoon is sometimes you want to make a meal that has a certain ingredient, but you know, or you probably fool yourself and say sure, I'll use that ingredient over and over again. But it sits in the back of the fridge and you don't with Marley Spoon. If for instance with their Martha Stewart's best one pot paprika lamb stew, you need a little bit of broth. You need a couple of packets of beef broth concentrate. So if you opened it in real life, I would never use it again. But with Marley Spoon, it's the exact right sweet portions this spring. Fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. Head to Marley spoon.com offer/the gist and use the code the gist for up to 26 free meals. That's right. Up to 26 free meals with Marley Spoon one last time. That's marley spoon.com backslash offer backslash the gist for up to 26 free meals. And make sure to use my promo code. Oh, you know it. The gist. So they know I sent you.
- [31:01]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com.
- [31:19]
Mike Pesca
Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com, tom. And now the spiel. We're on the precipice of 100 days. 100 days of the second Trump term. Third if you count his math. How do you like him? People ask, what do you think? How do you think the hundred days are going? Well, the Knicks made the playoffs. I'm liking the rehearsal Nathan Fielder show. But if you mean trump the trump part of it, no, I don't like it. I don't like it at all. First, little easier to list the things that I do like. Did like the vibe shift. How much of that is just in my mind. Well, that's what a vibe is. Do you like the penny ban? Do like the straws? Come back to that in a second. Mostly like taking it to the Houthis, although you never can trust. Or his signal chats and Pete Hegseth's brother in law who I guess gets to determine payloads and telemetry. So on the straws he did say and he's going hard. He has this huge document banning the paper straws. A good thing came of that, even if you're not a fan of plastic straws, to lay out the case against paper straws. The EPA documented that paper straws are often made with pfas, the per and poly fluoro alkalyl substances which are sometimes called forever chemicals. So to make the case as best they could against paper straws, they garnered all the evidence against them. And there's some coating on the paper straws to make them not crumple in water. Doesn't work paper traw people, but they put in this official federal document a pretty good case against pfas. And pfas, which are called forever chemicals, have been a source of contention and are objected to even by some in the Trump firmament. The EPA director, who is a Long island congressman. We'll get to Long island in a second. Lee Zeldin, and he has been against PFAS for a while. And you know, Robert F. Kennedy, for all his eccentricities, is pretty stalwart against chemicals. Now for me, I hear they're bad, but I don't like when they brand them forever chemicals. This is definitely a tangent, but follow me. I just think that we give too much mental capacity over to the branding of things. And once they're called forever chemicals, it makes them seem oh so horrible. And maybe they are horrible, but not because they are forever. For instance, tires last 2000 years. These forever chemicals are said to last up to 1,000 years. Tires aren't good for the environment. No one wants to ban them. Cut to a lot of environmentalists want to ban them. But glass, Glass takes a million years to degrade. No one calls it forever glass, although that could be good branding for the glass council. Forever transparent glass, your million year substance. But I guess the idea is that no one really knows if the forever chemicals are bad or how bad. And the fact that they last a thousand years isn't good. But to go back to pfas, maybe we should ban it to go back to the straws. That is a happy concomitant occurrence with making the case against paper straws. You also got this case against PFAS. Listen, by the way, Xenon 124 is a half life of 18 sextillion years in terms of naturally occurring substance. Trillion times longer than the current age of the universe. But I think that's it. I think that's all the good stuff. And I also have the couple asterisks with the Houthis as far as the bad stuff. I was just doing this mentally off the top of my head. You got the bad kidnappings in the name of deportation. You got, you know, the people who shouldn't have been taken to see COT in El Salvador. You got this or that guy grabbed up off the street, probably shouldn't have been. You've got Kilmar, Abrego, Garcia. That one is pretty terrible. Courts say give him back. Trump says, hey, there's nothing we could do. You could ask, could ask Bukele. Can we have him back if he says no? He could say, all right, we're not going to give you the $6 million. What happened to the art of the deal when it came to a guy that you're literally paying millions of dollars to house your detainees, hey, we want one back. People do this with their vendors all the time, right? You give them a refund. You know, in this case, a guy from Maryland who shouldn't have been deported. So I don't like the kidnappings, you know, no border crossings. That, that's good. But how they're doing it is terrible. I could go through every student, every college student who was grabbed up because they violated Marco Rubio's foreign policy. Some of them, none of them would I have grabbed up if I was the Secretary of State. Wasn't asked, didn't have to turn it down. But there are those who, you know, did a couple of toe touches with Hamas and there's poor or Ramisa Oz Turk, who I talked about, who's, who's the tough student who has grabbed up and has been in a detention center in Louisiana for more than 100 days. And all she did was write, actually co write an op ed to the Tufts Daily newspaper, essentially saying we should pass what the student senate did on the college level. I mean, yes, she alleged that Israel committed genocide, but so does almost every country in the world. I guess we deport them. Yeah, fact check, probably true. So that's not good. And then the fact that he's flouting laws left and right and then there's everything that Doge is doing. I mean, maybe a couple of the things are warranted, but you can't trust those guys. Of course, they're going way too far. And every time they fire, you know, 10,000 provisional employees, they're ordered to take them back. And what were we doing with the 10,000 provisional employees? We were paying them. You and I were. So this is not want tax savings. I don't like the wrecking of the economy. So I went through this list mentally saying to myself, that's bad. That's all bad. And then I remembered that I had forgotten the worst one. He let all of the January six insurrectionists off. That's the worst one. He made me forget the worst one. That is quite a skill. And then you got Hegseth, then you got Kristi Nomer all going to hell in a cash stuffed handbag. Sean Duffy's not been good. I'm not going to go through all the cabinet secretaries. Mostly been bad or quiet. Putting the fear of God and the Ivies may be okay. Taking away their funding for cancer research. Idiotic. Dumb. I'm against it. So much of it is dumb. Do you know what he spends his time on? Trump. Talk about Trump the 100 day guy. He spends his time truthing, going back and forth on the tariffs, but also promising us that we're going to get Columbus Day back. I'm Italian. I don't want Columbus Day back. You don't have to call it Indigenous Peoples Day. You could call it Columbus Day if you want. I just don't necessarily need it back. I'm fine without it back. What am I, Silvio Dante taking a bat to Ironize Cody outside the demonstration? I am Italian and I am Jewish, which brings me to Massapequa, Long Island. This town is nicknamed Matzah Pizza because they've got a lot of Italians and a lot of Jews. I think more Italians than from when I left. So Donald Trump, who is, you know, titularly the leader of the free world, has taken a bunch of his time to weigh in on the mascot of Massapequa High School. Now, when my high school, the Sailors, and I was the sailor, when we would face the chiefs of Massapequa High School, let me tell you, throw the records out the window. This was a blood feud of two of the biggest high schools on the South Shore. And when we would face them in a game of football and our, our NFL bound quarterback would lose by 40 because we had no one who could block for him or catch the ball. Those were, those were slugfests. And I will forever remember Sailors v. Chiefs. But now they want to take away the Chief nickname. And Donald Trump, the President of the United States is truthing about it, has made this a cause. Listen, this, these are, these aren't even Trump's people. These are my people. This is my line of the Long Island Railroad, Rockville Center, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Belmore wants Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copaig, Lindenhurst and Babylon. Transfer at Jamaica, Fort. No, not going to do the whole rest of that. But I know all the nicknames, right? Rockville Center, Southside Cyclones, Baldwin Bruins, Freeport, Red Devils, America. You got two of them. You got the Colts and you got the Cougars. Belmore. That'd be. Yeah, let's say Mepham Pirates. Want all Warriors. Seaford. Huge, huge whiff on Seaford. Could have gone nautical. They went Seaford Vikings. I guess a little nautical. Then you got Massapequa Chiefs, Amityville. Now we're getting into Suffolk. But they're the warriors, and on and on. Just be the Chiefs, don't be the Chiefs. Don't get the president involved. He has more important things to do, like arresting tough students and wrecking the economy. See, this is the thing about Trump. I'm going to quote Musa Al Gharbi. He wrote a book, we have Never Been Woke, and he had a description of a class of people, symbolically symbolic capitalists, people who write or don't build things with their hands. And though Trump says he's a builder, he's really a symbolic capitalist. What he does is he slaps. That's a little derogatory. He affixes the Trump brand to buildings. He built some stuff, too. But it's the symbolism. It's the symbolism of Trump that has given him most of his money. So as a symbolic capitalist, he is always going to lean towards the symbolism of everything. To quote another writer and economist, Noah Smith says that Trump people will criticize Trump as not redistributing any funds to his people, as not maybe promising, but not delivering any sort of redistribution of money. But what Noah Smith says he's done is he promised to redistribute respect. So this all fits in. The only thing Trump really does and that he really has a mind on, even with tariffs, is symbolism. He's quite good at symbolism. And we, as a society besotted by social media and also just as a bunch of symbolic capitalists, we're driven by symbolism. So even his kind of successful immigration policies, not the kidnapping part, the dissuading people from crossing the border part, relies heavily on the symbolism. The symbolism of Kristi Noem in front of the jailed at seacot, the symbolism of his Homeland Security director going out there talking tough at all hours of the day, the symbolism of Defiantly not returning or asking for the return of Abrego Garcia. And so this symbolic capitalist, this symbolic president, is doing 100 days, in fact, a thousand things that are symbolic. And it's not as if symbolism doesn't have power. It really does. Most of the reason we're driven crazy is the horrible symbolism. Then again, some of it is the actual misdeeds, the wrecking of the economy and the possibility which was there in the first Trump administration and is still there now. We just don't know how this one ends, the possibility that this will continue and add up to a fairly wrecked democracy. So, 100 days, thousand calamities, how's it going? I would say it's characterized by gigantic cell phones driving up of prices, putting us on the precipice of economic ruin. Pretty much as bad as I thought it would be because I remember the first time, lots of chaos, lots of threats, lots of worry about democratic backsliding. I wasn't unworried about that. Just because we got through it the first time. We don't know how this one ends. We do know how it's going. To quote a guy working the deli in Massapequa. Not good, chief. Not good. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. And I have to say, I just listened to the spiel. It sounded like I might have said gigantic cell phones. I said gigantic self owns, but I kept it in. What did you think I said? Oh. Michelle Pesca is the CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Astra Green runs our social media. Kathleen Sykes is our edit tricks for the gist list. And Leo Baums been doing a lot of interning improve gpru, do proo. And thanks for listening.