← The Next Level
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- [00:02]
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Sarah Longwell
9.
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Lowe's Advertiser
Selection varies by location while supplies last. See Lowe's.com for more details. Excludes Alaska and Hawaii.
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JVL
Elon Musk made a big announcement saying that we have improved Grok significantly. You should notice a different when you ask Grok questions. Grok is his proprietary AI and people have noticed a huge difference. Grok is now a neo Nazi. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with one of my best friends, Sarah Longwell, and a guy sitting in for my other best friend, Sam Stein.
- [01:03]
Sam Stein
Who am I listening to?
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Sarah Longwell
Brutal intro.
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JVL
A very close friend, a dear friend. Somebody who I have grown to love like a brother.
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Sam Stein
There we go.
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JVL
And like. Like one of the good brothers. Really, really like, not like Joe, Sarah.
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Sarah Longwell
I'm sorry, you're usually sitting in for me. We're never on together.
- [01:24]
JVL
All right, guys, so we're recording this Tuesday night when all sorts of things are happening. This is going to be a fun show because this has been a day with fun horrible things for the most part, rather than terrifying horrible things. The president had a cabinet meeting and it was something. Do you want to start with Jeffrey Epstein or do you want to start with tariffs? I feel like we should start with the tariffs clown show because it was pretty amazing. I really wanted Epstein make people take their spinach first. So Donald Trump gave a little history lesson. The country had a great Depression and then after the Depression, long after it started, they brought back tariffs to see if they could save it. But it took them really 25 years to get out of the Great Depression. A lot of people don't understand that that's true. A lot of people don't understand that the Great Depression lasted 25 years because it didn't and it wasn't tariffs that unimportant. I guess the. The. There were some other bits of news there. Trump said he's immediately imposing 50% tariffs on copper imports, which I guess is going to be really good for housing construction because nobody uses copper at any point in the wiring or piping of houses. So that's great. Is addressing real world kitchen table issues for voters. And then he said that he is doing his reciprocal tariffs on August 1st. There will be no extensions. And he said that this was Always going to be August 1st. And he has never changed that deadline. He did, however, sign on Monday an executive order that moved the deadline from July 9th to August 1st. I don't know. I just have a lot of questions. Sam, do you want to go first?
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Sam Stein
Well, is one of your questions. How sincere is August one? Right? Like, isn't that the fundamental question?
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JVL
What? One of them? Yeah.
- [03:27]
Sam Stein
Yeah. I don't know. I guess I kind of. It's not that I lost interest in the tariff thing because obviously it's. It's critical and it's important. It's going to affect a lot of people's lives. But I'm so tired of being, you know, rope a dope by this guy on the tariff thing that my basic primary assumption is that he will, in fact, push the deadline. No matter what he says, no matter how firm he is on it, he will, in fact, push the deadline. Because I think fundamentally, I've come to the conclusion that he'd rather be in a constant posture of negotiation and leverage pulling than actually cutting deals. And he likes the idea of just going in and out and making countries think that they have to, you know, bow down to him. So I'm not. I'm done panicking about it. I'm done freaking out about it. I've kind of gotten to the place where it's like, I'm going to judge him by the actions he takes, not by the words he says, especially around this stuff.
- [04:17]
Sarah Longwell
Sarah, this is where it's nice to be a pundit and not a small business owner, because a pundit, we can just be like, oh, I'm. I'm bored of having to guess this, but a small business owner might be like, hey, this is a real problem. I mean, you know, you want to talk about kitchen table issues, there's a lot of people who'd like a kitchen table, Right. They'd like to have a house with a kitchen in it, and they're not going to be able to build them. And so, I mean, I think it. It obviously has an enormous impact. I do agree with Sam, though, that he likes watching the markets move with his decisions. He likes the amount of control that hanging tariffs over people has. And I will, you know, I look to see if August 1st was a Tuesday, because I thought we could expect it to be a Taco Tuesday. It's a Friday. It's a Friday, so we won't get that. I do think, though, the chances of him. Yeah. Just playing with this. Did you happen to read the letters he sent to the Other countries, though, nonsensical.
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JVL
It was like beautiful.
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Sarah Longwell
No, they were like bleats. They were like the bleats he writes on. Truth Social. It was very like, because of the way that you have been cheating us for so long. All caps, then, you know, weird exclamation points. It was, it was deeply embarrassing. I mean, I. Did he, did he dictate them to somebody? Doesn't somebody else write them?
- [05:37]
Sam Stein
Yeah, but they're on White House stationary this time and not social. That was the difference.
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JVL
Can I, can I throw this out there? This is, and look, I feel a little sheep is even suggesting this because I don't have any evidence. And like Donald Trump is, I mean, he's a good guy, he's a straight shooter. But if you did have the power to move markets by unilaterally turning tariffs on and off, I mean, a less scrupulous person could make an incredibly large amount of money from that power, couldn't they?
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Sam Stein
Not Donald Trump. Trump would never do that. Right.
- [06:15]
JVL
I mean, the Trump family, obviously. What I'm saying is if there are some vipers in and around this great man who are less scrupulous, who are only in it for themselves, people who maybe worked for Jeffrey Epstein or something, I don't know, I'm just, I'm just spitballing here. If they know that he's going to the taco and I think they could do trades and take positions that would give them insider information. I. Sarah, this is crazy, right? No. Nobody else in America is going to think, oh, our great president might be doing this to make himself and his buddies rich.
- [06:46]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, nobody would think that. Of course, that's what he's doing. It's worse. Do you know how much money people made last time? Although I wonder how much people made on the last go around because remember what he did? He came out and he said, put your money back in the stock market, you will make a lot of money. Right before he announced the 90 day pause. And so like, yeah, the idea that he didn't give a considerable heads up to people, I mean, we're so far beyond. Sometimes I see people saying like, you know, members of Congress should divest from their stocks. And I'm like, that's so cute. Oh, oh, do we have ethics? Do we have law? These things? I, I don't know why this just popped into my head, but it's, it's because they're not related, actually, other than it's like Donald Trump. It's just another tax thing where they suddenly exempted Churches from political speech. Like. So if you are a nonprofit church, which all churches that are incorporated are. They're registered under something called 501-C-3 laws. You're not allowed to election year. You're not allowed to endorse candidates. If you're a 501c3 nonprofit because you're essentially a charity, it allows you then to not be taxed. But they just did a weird carve out where churches are now allowed to make polit. Direct political statements from the pulpit. And so I guess my only point is the through line.
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Sam Stein
Yeah, what's the through line?
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Sarah Longwell
It's also nakedly corrupt. It's also nakedly corrupt to sort of stack things. Everything in our system. It's a kleptocracy on top of a ethno nationalist state on top of crony capitalism.
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Sam Stein
There should be a name for that.
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Sarah Longwell
It's like a corruption.
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Sam Stein
Yeah, corruption turned.
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JVL
It's called Trumpism. It's called Trumpism. It was. I gotta say, as somebody who's been in a lot of Catholic churches, that rule has always been absolutely scrupulously adhered to. And so, I mean, Lord knows what they'll do now that the gloves are off. I mean, who could say?
- [08:47]
Sam Stein
No one could tell where they were leaning.
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JVL
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to homilies come next September. That's going to be great. All right. Before we get on to the Epstein stuff though, which is really amazing. Twilight of the Gods. All I want to talk about Dem we have.
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Sarah Longwell
I can't believe we had to talk about tariffs.
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Sam Stein
We have got to eat your veggies.
- [09:11]
JVL
Zebiotics, Sam. I gotta tell you, Sam, on July 4th, I had a full beer for the first time in I don't even know how long.
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Sarah Longwell
It's a six day hangover for jvm.
- [09:21]
JVL
And I wished that I had had some zebiotics because normally what I found myself doing for the last year or so is I'll crack open a beer and I'll get a good two or three pulls out of it and I'll be like, man, that was great. That was exactly what I needed and I just tossed the rest. But I did a whole one and needed my Zbiotics.
- [09:42]
Sam Stein
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- [11:32]
JVL
Also at this Cabinet meeting, Donald Trump was asked who ordered the pause on the munitions shipments to Ukraine that got paused last week that he then unpaused. And Trump said the President of the United States, the commander in Chief, said he doesn't know. Is that okay? Is that the kind of thing that Fox might if. I mean, I'm just spitballing here. If Joe Biden had done that, do you think Fox would have spent any time on it?
- [12:02]
Sam Stein
Nah. Yes.
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Sarah Longwell
Did you guys watch this press conference?
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Sam Stein
The one at the Cabinet meeting? Yeah.
- [12:08]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I'm sorry, the Cabinet meeting. That just looks like a press conference, Right? Because they all just sit there and everything about it was off the rails. Like before we even get to the Epstein stuff, which was absurd. There was, as you noted, him lying about the tariffs and just the spitballing around it. We're doing this and this and this. Okay. And then there was. Yeah, the Pentagon, obviously, were the ones who stopped the munitions to Ukraine. This was previously approved. He didn't know about it. There was also this part where somebody was asking him a question about. I can't remember what it was, but he leans over to Hegseth and he's like, do you know about this? Oh, it was like Putin using chemical weapons. He leans over to Pete Hegseth, he's like, pete, do you know about this? And he's like, maybe John knows. I mean, this is. These people are a bunch of morons who are publicly showing everybody what morons they were in front of the entire world.
- [13:13]
Sam Stein
Well, yeah, can I. I just think the. The. The point that Jonathan hit on, I mean, it's. It's ridiculous and. And kind of outrageous that Trump had no idea, but, like, it really does underscore what a. What a JV operation this is. Or maybe not even jv, but it just kind of like this unorganized, disorganized, unstrategic operation. You cannot have just a random Defense Department official cutting off weaponry to Ukraine and then reverse it three days later because you had a good call with Zelensky. It's horrible. And the fact that Trump didn't know about it, you know, and under normal circumstances, that'd be a huge scandal. I would. I would imagine that a president would probably fire someone for going above his head and doing this, but for Trump, it's just sort of. I don't know.
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JVL
I mean, part of the day, Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, told him that Iran was not actually pursuing nuclear weapons. And he claims that she was wrong about this and she was not fired.
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Sam Stein
Right. I mean, so many was chatting in signal about war plans, and he was not fired. I mean, like, so many things happen that in the course of a normal administration, you would say, how could this be? And we just take it as the next day.
- [14:21]
JVL
So, I. I got. I have a question for Sarah about the people. But before I do that, I. I will posit to you that it isn't as junior varsity as it looks. It's only the. The junior varsity stuff is happening around the things that we traditionally have thought about as the most important issues, like, for instance, Ukraine and fiscal policy with tariffs and stuff. When it comes to pushing through a bill that will create a massive secret police force that is the largest law enforcement organization in America and which has the budgetary constraints of the Israeli military, they're quite sophisticated, and they know exactly what they're doing. They know exactly why they're doing it, and they make these things happen. It's just concerned with things that we're not. They're concerned with authoritarianism.
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Sam Stein
Yeah, the stuff they care about. The stuff they care about. They really do. Yeah. The immigration stuff, for sure, I feel like, has been at a level of sophistication. Horrifying. Sophistication that is, I don't want to say impressive. It's. It's horrifying, but it's very professionalized. But, like, you know, the Doge stuff was a disaster. A lot of it was reversed. A lot of the reductions in forces stuff was a disaster. I mean, the VA just announced that they're not going to Riff86,000 people because it's idiotic to do it. They're gonna, you know, use, you know, 30,000, which is still a lot, but it's 56,000. Left, right. Less.
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Sarah Longwell
So.
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Sam Stein
So, I mean, I concede your point. I think on the stuff that they really do care about, which, as far as I can tell, is profiteering. The Trump family, profiteering from this stuff and immigration, they're really good and they've got their shit together. But on the other stuff that Trump seems to have fleeting interest in less. So.
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Sarah Longwell
Wait, I'm sorry, can I just. Actually, I disagree with this from both of you, which is what they have been good at and successful at is getting a ton of money jammed through for ice. But there's nothing professional about it. These guys are wearing masks. They're yanking people off the street. They sent the Marines in for no reason. Like, it's. It's. It. There's nothing competent about it. In fact, it's all maximal. Sort of like, shows up. They sent the wrong people to seekat they. Like, Trump is just telling other countries, like, yeah, maybe we'll send Americans there, too. No, everything about it is actually insane. Nothing about it. It's just that it is. They do prioritize it. They do fund it. Like, they managed to pack in all that money and then browbeat. Like, the one thing they know how to do is Rick Roll. Republicans is, did I use Rick Roll? Right?
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Sam Stein
I don't think so, but we'll go with it.
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Sarah Longwell
Steamroll Republicans, right? They know how to bully their way into money, but, like, they haven't actually deployed that money in any way that we've seen. And so I guess I just. I actually think it's all. JV is not. Not even the right term. I think it's all disorganized. I think it's all idiotic. I just think they have a set of priorities and so like, they just don't even care enough about foreign policy to bother to understand any of it. I mean, one of the things that was insane about this meeting is Donald Trump being like, you know, Putin's killing a lot of people and yeah, I was talking to him and he's really being kind of a jerk. Who knew? Like, so, like everything about. I find myself in a constant state of. I still am flummoxed. I mean, we've been here a long time, but they don't seem like they care to know to much about all of this stuff. Like even this, this, the shipment to Ukraine. It sounds like Heth didn't inform the White House before he authorized the pause. Yes, right. And. But what are the chances Trump actually told him to do the pause and then either forgot about it or it was just like communicated poorly?
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JVL
50. 50.
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Sarah Longwell
Right. Hexet's not like freelancing without Trump being bought in.
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Sam Stein
Are you sure?
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Sarah Longwell
I don't know.
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JVL
Doesn't care about these things. Sarah, who. The people don't care about these things so far as I can tell. Precisely. Nobody who exists in America has changed their mind on Donald Trump after seeing any of this.
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Sarah Longwell
Oh, really? Have you talked to anybody in America? No. Jbl? No, JBL is not true.
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JVL
Are his numbers down in meaningful ways over the last two weeks?
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Sarah Longwell
Yeah, well, his individual numbers on all of these things are in the toilet. He has been. He is. Actually we haven't done. It's been a couple weeks and I think because of the holiday, we don't have like fresh polling on things. But like, everything's been unpopular. His immigration stuff is unpopular. Other than border security, it's not popular. The bill that they just jammed through was unpopular.
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Sam Stein
Yeah, well, I've always thought about, and I thought it kind of interesting because you can make the case maybe in the abstract that like, things aren't going all that bad from his perspective. Right. Like the market crash that we all anticipated off after Liberation Day. It didn't happen. Now, we're not like gangbusters, but we're about where we were. Like, it's not materially worth job. Growth has been steady. I think there's real warning signs, but it's been steady. He got his major legislative initiative through Congress. The, you know, the, the mission in Iran was by all accounts, as of now, successful. Right. I mean, there's things that he can say. I've. I've.
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JVL
Ish.
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Sam Stein
Ish.
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JVL
Yeah.
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Sam Stein
My point is, from his perspective, it could have gone a lot worse.
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JVL
Sure.
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Sam Stein
And he's. And he's. And he's put some victories from his perspective again on the board. And yet I've seen nothing meaningfully in the polling data. And again, Sarah's right. We haven't really had anything that recent, but nothing, nothing as of a week ago or anything like that that suggests he's getting any sort of bounce from any of this stuff. And in fact, his numbers with key constituen that fled to him in the 2024 elections have really suffered. Yeah.
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JVL
Young people, Hispanics are way down. Right.
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Sarah Longwell
Young people and Hispanics. And so like this idea that nobody's changing their mind or that everybody likes what they're doing. Now, I think that the separate question is given the choice, again, do they choose Democrats when given that option, I think is an open question. But in terms of people, like, being all bought in and excited about what Trump is doing. And you know what? It's stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. But his MAGA base is very mad about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff. And so I actually think, and I think this stuff does matter, and I think it does. I think he is having actually between Texas and the fact that, like, the Iran stuff was not heralded in as, like a universal win and the fact that, yes, he jammed through the bill, but I think they're pretty nervous about the political implications of it. Like, I'm not sure he's in a perfect place. I think that's why he spent a lot of time talking about the decorating of the cabinet. Like he went on this whole thing about the interior design. No, he doesn't seem that.
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JVL
Well, it would be amazing to me if the thing that actually wrecked Trump's presidency was the Jeffrey Epstein. So there is a lot to talk about here. Will Sommer, our Will Sommer, wrote a fantastic piece for us about it. You should go and read it and sign up and subscribe to his newsletter, because it's dope. We have lots of manga influencers very upset. We have Roger Stone going against Steve Bannon on this, which I don't fully understand. Like, wait, which side is Roger on? It's like a war of all against all. And Trump looks bad because it's the kind of thing where he can't say anything about it because nothing he says can make anybody happy. So he's got to just sort of be quiet, I think, and let Pam Bondi take the hits for him and hope it goes away. I don't know. I mean, somebody dug up a April 2021 tweet from JD Vance. Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring, and then that guy died mysteriously in jail and now we just don't talk about it? Yeah, J.D. i remember that. Remember when Pam Bondi had in her hand the files on her desk with the list of clients? Sarah, I just want to hear everything you have on this. We talked a little bit about the other day. I actually think we undersold how, how important this thing was.
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Sarah Longwell
I do think we undersold it in part because we had not yet seen the MAGA meltdown that was coming. And I do think that we have developed kind of a thick skin over time for Trump's ability to just kind of, you know, dance through the rain of a scandal and never get wet. I gotta tell you, I'm gonna take. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna do a strong zag from everybody else who thinks this doesn't matter. This is a stupid thing to pay attention to because I think this is the asymmetry of our politics right now. The Epstein stuff mattered a great deal to Republicans when they were running and trying to con court the conspiracy vote. And the conspiracy vote runs deep in the Republican Party, right? And so if you go back. So my team was just like unearthing all the clips, all the clips, all the clips from the last three years. And I was tweeting them out and I was having the best time because it is all of these. It is Vivek Ramaswamy. When I am president, I pledge I will release The Epstein files. 77,000 likes, you know, Lauren Bobert, where are the Epstein files? Crazy Luna, whatever her name is, you know, ever. I mean, there's just all of them. Have them. The release the Epstein files. JD Vance tweeted about the Epstein files, and in this, his sort of effete way, like, what possible reason could the global elites have to keep this a secret? You know, get it out there. We will. Trump is asked, will you pledge to release? Of course I will. It is everybody. And, and then the thing is, is that you have to be pretty deep. And this is why Will's piece is so good, is because he lives in the fever swamps of the right. The problem is the left doesn't and they think all this stuff is nuts, and so they ignore it. And I am telling you, you are ignoring it at your peril. This is the kind of stuff that bonds together the insane MAGA base and it is the kind of thing that could tear them apart in a way where I mostly think about our edge cases in terms of sort of normies or people who don't pay a ton of attention to politics, who can get peeled away by things like the real impacts of the tariffs or like NIH cuts or all of the negative things that come along with Trump's policies, the vicissitudes, the markets, small business owners, that kind of stuff. This goes right at his base into something that they like. When Pam Bondi first came into office, she did this thing where she had a stunt at the White House. She handed everybody a binder full of. It was like, had Epstein files on the front and in the. And I remember this in the like, opening page. It's about how Trump administration is going to be the most transparent administration history. So they put Cash Patel and Dan Bongino in those roles at the FBI almost specifically to be the people who were stewarding out the answers to the conspiracies that everybody is demanding answers to. The fact that they can't produce the fact that Pam, Bonnie. So like the influencers, the right wing influencers, the Jack Prosbiak, the Chernovich, like, people aren't. The mainstream media doesn't pay attention to these people. They have massive Twitter followings. They, they set the culture on the maga. Right. They engage with Elon. They have like. This stuff does come together as the kind of toxic soup that is Trumpism for a lot of people that they swim in. And for it to go south for them is hugely embarrassing.
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Sam Stein
Yeah. Let me add two points. Two points to this. One is one of those clips that was resurfaced to your points there. One of the clips of JD Vance that's been making the rounds is. Is him on Theo Von's podcast. I say that because that's the crowd that was, you know, pushing this stuff. It wasn't just the political folks, not even the Cernoviches, although they were. It was the Theo Vons of the world who were like, hey, like, what. What are you gonna do with these Epstent fouls? And it was on the podcast that Vance was like, I'm going to, you know, get to the bottom of this two is I. When Trump was at the cabinet meeting today and someone asked him about it, I thought that the real tell in the way he answers, I don't know if you guys saw it. He's like, you're still talking about that stupid. Like, get off of it. It's so. It's Such an incredibly defensive response. And I was sort of curious when he said. I was like, well, you know, to Sarah's point, like, usually people take their marching orders for Trump. Will they just drop it? And the answer was no. Like, the response was enthusiastically no. Like, Cernovich was like, we're not just going to drop it. Benny Johnson was saying something like, that's about the worst answer Trump's ever given to anything, which was shocking to hear from him. Which leads me to the question for you guys. So everyone assumes Pam Bondi is going to get axed, right? Like, she can't survive this. I'm not so sure. What do you got? I. I can. I can't. I don't know how he can get rid of her. Because whoever gets appointed next, let's say he does. I mean, this is. This will be the litmus test for them, right? Like, will you release whatever files?
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JVL
Well, this.
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Sam Stein
I don't really know.
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JVL
I mean, if she had any shred of independence, which she didn't, but now she's so compromised by him keeping her on now that she's wounded and hated by the base.
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Sam Stein
Right.
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JVL
He has to do whatever he wants.
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Sam Stein
Of course, but the. The perception, the conventionalism is now that she's. She's just a goner. Like, she can't hold on to her.
- [28:53]
JVL
Yeah, I don't.
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Sam Stein
I'm not so sure that's right.
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JVL
I think she hangs in Sarah. What do you think?
- [28:56]
Sarah Longwell
I do, too. Well, so if you watch the cabinet meeting, and this part was extremely telling, but what happens is she gets asked the question, like the reporter is asking her, right, to clarify something about the Epstein files. Because if you recall, like, here's the breakdown of this story. She says publicly, multiple times, I have Epstein's client list on my desk. I am going through it at the directive of President Trump, okay? She goes on Fox News, makes it very clear there are a lot of people interested. The entire Internet is sitting on tenderhooks who are waiting. So she says she's got it, and then she does that weird stunt where she hands out the binders with no new information in them. Influencers are mad. It goes away for a little bit. And then all of a sudden, Elon Musk, when he gets mad at Trump, tweets out, here's a bomb for you guys. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. And everybody's like, wait a minute. Like, what is. Like, this is a. This is a neutron bomb. Is this real? And to me, actually, the fact that the mainstream media has not pursued Zealously, this question of either Elon Musk is lying or he's not lying. Like, either the President's a pedophile or the richest man in the world and Donald Trump's closest adviser for the first, you know, five months of his presidency is a liar. Like, why are we seeing a lot.
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JVL
Of New York Times stories on that?
- [30:33]
Sarah Longwell
This. And this is, this is what I mean. It's like people think it's sewer politics, but it is the sewer politics that is driving our culture. And so, so, okay, so Pam Bondi says client list is on her desk. Elon Musk calls Trump a pedophile. Pam Bondi then says, nothing to see here. There's no list. Donald Trump at the meeting, when she gets asked about it by a reporter, says, no more questions, Nothing. No, stop asking about it. And does it, in a way to try to shame the reporter for asking such a stupid question. As though it's been the mainstream media who's been all over the Epstein files and not the rabid MAGA base which they all use to their electoral advantage in order to get all of these, you know, cabinet members through, get all these, you know, conspiracy theorists, you know, Theo von Bros. And so, like, that's the state of play, and it's super, super weird. And I don't think any of us should wave it away. I think we should make them. I think we should start demanding that they.
- [31:37]
JVL
I'm with you. Show us the Elon Musk is. You know, Elon Musk is. Is. I've got a strange new respect for Elon Musk. I mean, the guy may be a neo Nazi, but he's asking some interesting questions. And, you know, I just get. Facts are facts.
- [31:49]
Sarah Longwell
You do not have to respect him in order to, in order to wield it.
- [31:53]
Sam Stein
Yes.
- [31:53]
Sarah Longwell
And ask the questions.
- [31:54]
JVL
So I have a couple very base political questions, but what I was trying to express earlier is that I am willing to. I am willing to entertain the possibility that actually this is all on the level and there was no client list and he did kill himself. Like, I, you know, I, I am not a dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist. But, you know, like, if you, if you told me, you know, the voice of God came down and said, actually, yes, there was nothing there, I'd be like, yeah, okay, I can believe that. It would be unbelievably funny to me if Trump wound up getting done in by stupid voters of his own who don't care that he's taking away their Medicaid, but are convinced that he wasn't telling them the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. That would be the most purple America thing ever. Like that is. That is, that is America and American politics. So I guess here's my question is I think it is hard for Democrats to push this. Like, I think if you're like Hakeem Jeffries or somebody, you're the wrong messenger on this stuff. You know who's a really good messenger? Kark Mubin.
- [33:08]
Sarah Longwell
He means Mark Cuban, Sam. I don't know if you can crack his code, but that's how he talks about.
- [33:12]
Sam Stein
But why, why would, but why would Mark Cuban be a good messenger on this?
- [33:15]
JVL
Because he's sort of outside of the system. He's already engaged with the Theo Vaughn's of the world. He, he can do a little gutter politics. He can dabble with conspiracies. He doesn't have the taint of being a normal politician. He's not obviously running for anything yet. He, he just started playing footsie with Elon over the America Party thing. I feel like Mark Cuban becoming the ringleader of resistance Epstein truthers would be really powerful. Tell me. I'm fine.
- [33:51]
Sarah Longwell
It's fine. That's fine. He's a person. The fact, like I, But I just disagree that, that Hakeem came to it. Like, you don't have to, you don't have to like go deep on the Epstein stuff to be like, hey, guys, have you noticed that either Pam Bondi was lying then or she's lying now? Like, you do not have to play super gutter politics to call them out for being liars and people who you.
- [34:20]
Sam Stein
Don'T even have to. Yeah, you don't even have to be that aggressive about it.
- [34:22]
Sarah Longwell
It's not even.
- [34:23]
Sam Stein
Have the House Judiciary Committee sent a couple letters to Pam Bonnie saying, hey, you need to give us some clarity about what the hell's going on here. You know, have one good digital web ad that's like Donald Trump's top advisor and biggest donor says he's on a list of pedophiles. And now Trump refuses to put out that list. I mean, it's like little pokes here and there. You don't have to go crazy. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist. And these don't make. Asking these questions now actually do not make you a conspiracy theorist. It doesn't because they've injected this. Elon Musk was the one who said he's on the list. It wasn't like, you know, some Internet rumor. This is his top advisor. So I don't think you need to, like, you know, overthink this one. I think this one presents itself fairly easily. Someone's lying, and it's incumbent upon them to actually show the receipts. And Pam, Bonnie said the receipts, they're on her desk. I don't really know. Give us something, guys.
- [35:12]
Sarah Longwell
His voters care about so little, but they care about this. Are you telling me that we don't. I don't want little pokes. I want them. Listen, Don Jr. Don Jr's out there saying, show us all the Epstein client list. Now, why would anyone protect those scumbags? Ask yourself this question daily, and the answer becomes Very apparent. One year ago. One year ago today, July 8, 2023. As with John Jr. So. Come on, dad. Come on, Daddy. Daddy. Trump, show us the files. This is. I don't. This is, to me, actually, where Democrats. I understand. And look, I would advise people to focus on prices. Like, I do think this is a walking and chew gum thing. Like, if you cannot make hash out of this, if you cannot just clown them all for this, like, embarrassing them, ridiculing them, showing people how stupid they are on something, that the problem is that because Democrats don't care about it, Republicans are going to be able to sort of weave their own narrative. Like, they're already trying to put together a new narrative that's like, well, the elite pedophile cabal is just so powerful that even Donald Trump can't stop.
- [36:23]
Sam Stein
Yeah, that was my favorite.
- [36:24]
Sarah Longwell
I'm like, come on, guys, like, just get in the game.
- [36:27]
JVL
But you don't want to. You don't want to embarrass them. You want to wedge them, right? You want to. You want to. You actually.
- [36:34]
Sarah Longwell
Do you want to embarrass them?
- [36:38]
JVL
Well, I think. Embarrass.
- [36:39]
Sarah Longwell
You want to diminish credibility with these.
- [36:42]
JVL
You want to tell Trump's voters, you want to say, hey, guys, you think this Epstein thing is bad? I mean, maybe he's in on it, right? I mean, that is. That is the. The important thing to do.
- [36:54]
Sarah Longwell
No, I'm just saying why isn't he doing this? Why isn't he keeping his promises? These were important promises to his voters, to his base. We want answers.
- [37:02]
Sam Stein
There's. I will just say I'm checking right now, the dnc, God bless them, whatever the hell, but they have actually jumped on this. They've had about half a dozen tweets just this afternoon on Epstein. So it's not like they're shying away from it.
- [37:12]
Sarah Longwell
Oh, do they have tweets? No, not.
- [37:14]
Sam Stein
You Want more. I know you want more. I know you more. My point is that this is at least an indication that they're not, you know, dancing around it and being like, oh, we have to be high minded and just focus on Medicaid and prices. They're engaged. But I, you know, I think you keep it in the, I think you keep it in the, in the conversation routinely. I, I, my point, all that matters.
- [37:36]
JVL
Bill Clinton go consigliere.
- [37:40]
Sarah Longwell
I mean, listen, here's the thing. If Hakeem Jeffries has time to Photoshop or, like, use AI to post a picture of him, like, standing coolly by a bench in Athleisure, he's got time to call a press conference with the media and say, hey, guys, we've got some very clear facts in front of us. Pam Bondi said this at this date. Now they're saying this, and we'd like some answers. And then every newspaper will report on that and it will give more ammunition to the MAGA base who is demanding these. And I would ask, I would be sending letters to Cash Patel. They would, this is what they would do. I'd be saying, hey, Cash Patel, can you show us the evidence that there's no client list? And if, if, if that's the case, why did you say this, this, this, this, this, and this on all of these podcasts? Because he's on all of them. The current FBI director. It's not, this is the problem. It's not gutter politics when it is the reality that we're living in. It is not our fault. Donald Trump created a politics that lives in the gutter. And so what we have to adjust to is the idea that we got to play the ball as it lies, okay? And this is the kind of thing where you have a chance not just to wedge, but to erase the credibility of half the cabinet and Donald Trump himself from people who were desperate to believe that he was the God who was going to give them all the information about the deep state cabal. This is, this is essential stuff. This is not frivolous. It's not stuff on the sides. This is everything about Trump from Obama is a Kenyan Muslim, that this is what Trumpism is built on. Go tear it down.
- [39:24]
JVL
So this is, I, I agree wholeheartedly, actually. And like I said that, actually, nothing.
- [39:33]
Sarah Longwell
It's not that we have, whenever I tell Davey Alles a good idea, I'm like, that's a good one, actually. And he gets so mad at me.
- [39:41]
JVL
But here's the thing. So you, you and I have had this conversation a bunch of times where I have said to you that the future for the Democratic Party may involve doing some things that we don't like. And like, if the answer is, you've gotta win over the people who listen to Joe Rogan, that means they may have to, like, I don't know, dabble in some conspiracy theory bullshit and do some things that we don't. Here's an opportunity to do that. And so they should.
- [40:08]
Sarah Longwell
You're not dabbling in the conspiracy theory conspiracy theorist.
- [40:10]
Sam Stein
This is not dabbling in saying. This is just reading their quotes back to them.
- [40:14]
JVL
What. Whatever you want to call it. This is a moment to say, hey, we're just asking questions. It seems to us that the Attorney General, United States said that she had the list and now the list she says is gone. Where is it? Is the President on it? And they should do that in front of a backdrop that is like a 10 foot by 12 foot blow up of the picture of Trump and Epstein. Like the famous picture of the two of them.
- [40:37]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [40:37]
JVL
Like, I mean, they should be as grotesque as possible, I think. And in a weird way, I think by being more tawdry and more grotesque, they can make it a bigger deal. I really would do the. I would go full Roger Stone on this if it were.
- [40:53]
Sam Stein
Yeah. One way to think about it is let's say the roles are reversed. What would Trump do in this situation? What would he do?
- [40:58]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, he'd be tweeting about it. He'd be going nuts.
- [41:01]
Sam Stein
Yeah. All caps, you know, press conferences involving, you know, tawdry figures who were tangentially related to Epstein. You know, he was going nuts.
- [41:11]
Sarah Longwell
Guys, five, like, world defining things happened at this press conference just today. There's so many things to jump on. We didn't know. The President says, didn't know that we had paused our support of a Democratic ally who is invaded by his buddy who he has latently realized this is number two insane thing, blatantly realized might be a bad guy. Okay. And then his Attorney General gets asked about a totally. A thing that she put out there that they ginned up that they made into an issue, and he says, no, get. No there, there. After the entire base has been ginned up on. I mean, like all of these things just happened today. People should be all over all of them instead of letting the fact that it is so much stuff just paralyze you and move on to the next thing. Well, I just wanted, because we haven't said it yet explicitly, like the tragedy in Texas is an enormous tragedy. It is awful what has happened down there. And Trump's sort of way of saying we should be talking about this as a, as, as though all of like there is this enormous tragedy. And like he's not down in Texas, right? Like he, his, his idea that he's holding a fake weird cabinet meeting for all of the prestice. And the only time he's really talking about Texas is as a dodge from being asked about some of these other things. I don't know. I just, it is every single like it's. You think about Katrina and how defining that was for, for President Bush at the time. Like Donald Trump doesn't. Donald Trump isn't giving speeches about this tragedy or talking about it. Anyway, that was my end. Another thing. Now I'm done.
- [43:15]
JVL
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- [45:40]
Sarah Longwell
I also really love Boulder Branch. I'm not that isn't my ad but I just want to say like if our bow and branch sheets we had two pairs and like we don't have like I we make. We will do the laundry to make sure we always have those sheets.
- [45:51]
JVL
They're the Might as well get rid of everything you had before Bow and Branch. You're never going to sleep on it again.
- [45:55]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [45:57]
JVL
All right. So I wrote a news thing today. I hope you guys read it.
- [46:02]
Sarah Longwell
It was good.
- [46:03]
Sam Stein
It was good.
- [46:03]
JVL
Oh, did you like it?
- [46:04]
Sarah Longwell
It was great. I loved it.
- [46:06]
JVL
So I, what I did was I and I just wanted to kick around with you guys a little bit. We very briefly last week I just sort of tossed out a thought that it occurred to me which is that we may look back on the big beautiful bill and decide that actually the most important thing about it had nothing to do with Medicaid cuts or the deficit. But the most important thing was the transformation of ICE into a personal law enforcement agency that answers to Trump. And I really started thinking about it more in light of fantastic piece by our buddies at Lawfare the other day. Did you guys see this?
- [46:46]
Sam Stein
No.
- [46:46]
Sarah Longwell
Which piece? The one with the guy who resigned or got fired.
- [46:50]
Sam Stein
That one.
- [46:50]
JVL
Mike Feinberg. Mike Feinberg, who wrote about how he was. He was. He was basically pulled aside by his sac, his agent who'd been there for forever. Counterterrorism specialist, super smart guy, actually pretty conservative and told, you know, we hear that you have a personal friendship with Peter Strzok who is undesirable. You are never getting promoted again. We're probably going to demote you. You should leave. And if you don't leave, we're going to start submitting you to polygraphs and you're going to have to like beg for your job. And it just. I was thinking about this a lot and about why the FBI is actually hard to corrupt and because it's your, your average FBI agent today is like a middle aged man or woman who has an advanced degree. They're probably an Accountant or a lawyer or a PhD with a language specialty. And they joined up after 911 because they want to prevent 9 11s from ever happening again. ICE is about to double the size of its agent force. They're going to hire 10,000 new agents. They're going to be way, way bigger than the FBI. They have no educational requirements. In fact, I don't think you even need to have a high school degree. You can, you can have a three year work experience to stand in for that. And the, the person who's going to apply for that are going to be people who have watched the last five months of like lawnscapers getting beat on outside of IHOPs and abuelas getting hustled out, you know, by guys in full gear like they're invading Fallujah and who.
- [48:34]
Sarah Longwell
Are not showing their faces.
- [48:36]
JVL
Right? Not showing versus it's going to be guys who look at that and say, yeah, I want to get me some of that. That looks like a good time. And this is going to be bad. The FBI has a non political leader who serves a 10 year term who is essentially independent from both the Attorney General and the President. ICE is led by a political appointee who is essentially an Assistant secretary to the secretary. So Trump is going to have. ICE will be the largest law enforcement organization in America. It will have its own system of prisons, its own system of prisons that it runs and administers. $45 billion worth. And it's answerable to nobody except the personal directives of the President. I don't know, like, am I a crazy person for thinking this is a really big deal? American Stasi, It's a huge deal.
- [49:29]
Sam Stein
Doesn't it seem to you like it's just designed to overwhelm our court system? Just absolutely overwhelm it? I mean they're not, they're not adding an equivalent amount of immigration judges to adjudicate the cases. They just want to arrest people, put them into detention centers, overwhelm the system and make it so that they cannot be stopped by any legal challenges. And I think, you know, I say I took the point right away that I wanted to make was I think the, the, the, the masks are more than just sort of, you know, an operational part that's very scary. It's symbolic of everything. It's like no accountability, just no accountability. And you see these videos that are surfacing already and this is before this and you know, the communities are just, people are just descending on unsuspecting people, chasing them down. They're not even identified. No one knows who they are. They're not letting people make calls, they're throwing them to the back of cars and that's it. You don't know when you're going to hear from these people again. And if you imagine that tenfold, 20 fold happening all the time, I think the system will be overwhelmed very quickly. I think bad things are going to happen. I think we're going to see some really horrifying video footage and not too, not too long time. And I am curious what if there will be any backlash to it because it's going to be really quick and it's going to be really scary.
- [50:49]
Sarah Longwell
You know, jbl, sometimes we've been at this so long, you and I, and we have first of such an entrenched dynamic over things. But you know, I often, part of the reason we often argue is because you will take these like positions that are just like so negative. Like the darkness of the things that you imagine that are gonna happen are just like, I'm like, bro, you are too far out there. And it is not like this. And, and even when I think it's really bad, I'm just like, you're so far out there that I, I, I, I get put in what a position that I hate. Which is like, I'm trying to just pull you back to some place that I feel like is, is, is sane. And then everyone's yelling at me because they're like, Sarah thinks everything's fine. And I'm like, that's not what I think. But in this, but this is one of those instances. But then you will write stuff and this happens not infrequently, it does happen quite a bit. But you will write something that I'm like, literally no one else is talking about this. And this is so right, this is so completely. And it is right there for us to look like. Because I've sort of been saying it, we've all been saying it. Like we were talking about this last week, the amount of ICE's budget and I said this a bunch last week. So I think I've still got the numbers right. But, but the budget for ICE was like 3.6 billion before and it has.
- [52:08]
JVL
Been so that's a little wrong. It's been closer to 8 billion.
- [52:12]
Sarah Longwell
8, 8 billion now, but now it's 45 billion, I believe is what was just approved.
- [52:17]
JVL
It's, it's going so 11 plus 30 that are going to be supplemental and then another 45 that are just for detention center construction.
- [52:31]
Sarah Longwell
I mean that the scale of that Investment. You are right that while we have been. I think we're aware of this, but I don't think we're aware of what that money will allow them to do over the next few years. And it will depend on how quickly they deploy it. But it is, it is a total remaking and scaling, like a blitz scaling.
- [52:55]
JVL
Yeah.
- [52:56]
Sarah Longwell
Of what ICE is and does. And the fact that they will be, as an enforcement mechanism, larger than the militaries of some countries feels like not a small thing. Feels like a thing that we should be.
- [53:10]
JVL
That they wear masks, deeply aware of.
- [53:13]
Sarah Longwell
That they don't show their faces, that they are not ice. Before Trump, I think that some. I was like a little resistant to the early days of abolish ice, because anybody who's in sort of immigration spaces will tell you they work with ice. That ICE was like, it is a professional organization. I think you're right that it's not as professionalized as someplace like the FBI, but it's not, you know, a vigilante group of people. It was like, you know, they're part of the Department of Homeland Security now under Trump and under this regime and with the mandate that they've been given and the latitude that they're being given and then the money that they're being given, I think we're now in like a completely different space. And it's important to understand on that.
- [54:00]
Sam Stein
Well, here's the thing about money is you have to, you're going to spend it, right? Like, it's not like ICE is going to be like, oh, well, you know, we got $45 million. If we don't need it, we're just going to give it back. No, you spend every cent. And it's, it's almost hard to imagine how you can do that. I mean, what is it, 11,000 people, 11,000 new agents they want to hire in a year, a couple years, three years. I find that hard to imagine that I can even get to that place. But they're going to spend the money. They're gonna, they're gonna do something and.
- [54:28]
Sarah Longwell
They'Re gonna fill the prisons. Right.
- [54:30]
Sam Stein
Well, that's probably what they spend the money on, is they build prisons and detention.
- [54:34]
JVL
Prisons are going to get built and then they're gonna get.
- [54:36]
Sam Stein
And you have to film a second prison, Right, Exactly. Agencies always have a way of rationalizing the top budget line that they, that they need and they will get to it. And that's. And that's what scares. That is once they can get to that place, then it becomes harder to claw back and you know, we have to be in for.
- [54:57]
JVL
If there's ever another Democratic president. All of ICE has to be burned to the ground. And those functions, like the legitimate functions of the agency, need to be reapportioned to other agencies where you start from the ground up. I mean, it is essentially a rogue secret police department. You can't perform it like that. I. I just think that that's, that's a fool's errand. Garrett Graff had a very, very good piece yesterday about where he went through his work covering the Customs and Border Patrol in the wake of 9 11. And the CPB underwent a huge expansion when. So the Department of Homeland Security is created. And after this happens, there's a whole bunch of reorganization of federal law enforcement functions. And ICE stood up in 2003. CPB is relocated under this new department. And CPB did a similar type of blitzscaling. And Garrett went and in the years following this, went back and interviewed all of the executives who had overseen that. And every single one of them said, in law enforcement, it is a tremendous mistake to hire quickly because when you do that, the only way to do it are to lower your standards. You then also have to cut your training time and your training evolutions. You then don't have adequate mentors for new agents in the field. And that what you wind up with is at best corruption and at worst, like real evil. Like, you know, the CPB was so hard up, they wound up bringing a guy who is a fucking serial killer because they were just trying to like meet their headcount. Like, you know, gotta. We have to hire 10,000 agents. You know, we gotta get them in through the door and it's. Man, but it's great. We've all learned from those lessons. That's. That's outstanding. I do. Real quick, before we move on, what do you guys think the odds are that in 2026 there's a great deal of concern over illegal immigrants voting. And so ICE is deployed to monitor ballot dropboxes and polling places.
- [57:15]
Sam Stein
100% maybe.
- [57:17]
Sarah Longwell
I'm not sure. We have to go to every dark crevice of everything that's going to happen.
- [57:20]
JVL
Well, I'm just asking questions, Sarah.
- [57:22]
Sarah Longwell
I know, I know. I think it is really fair to try to grapple with the scale of what they're doing and how that could. Even if it was, even if it was run relatively well, how much like it's so big that it will have an impact on our culture one way or another. I don't necessarily want to, like, give them all the ideas. I mean, obviously they will figure this out for themselves. But I. I hate to sit around and just speculate all the terrible things they could do. But we should be thinking about how we challenge some of this, because to your point, it's not. They're going to hire all of these people into a culture that is set not by the standards of American institutions over the last, you know, several decades, but by Stephen Miller and Donald Trump right now.
- [58:14]
JVL
Yep. Yep. It's going to be great, guys. We are also brought to you by packagen. I think I've discussed this with you all before that we have a cat in our house. A rescue who showed up. Really. If you think about it, he rescued us.
- [58:33]
Sam Stein
Oh God.
- [58:36]
JVL
K Pop. Not his real name. He came over on the rare occasions when we have other people in our house. Very rare. I don't want him to be a driver of people's allergy flare ups. Did you know that over 100 million Americans suffer from allergies every year? And 48% of allergy sufferers have avoided social gatherings due to their allergies. I don't have allergies. I just avoid them because why wouldn't I? That's why. This podcast is sponsored by packaging. Owning a cat doesn't have to mean endless itching and sneezing. Yet almost 20% of people suffer from cat allergies and three in four people aren't happy with their current allergy solutions. Packagen's Cat Allergen Neutralizing Spray targets the allergens around your home that trigger your cat allergies and breaks them down so you and your family can live and breathe in peace. Cats groom themselves a lot, but did you know that their saliva is the main source of the allergens that trigger your cat allergies? So grooming means your clean cat is now covered in allergens to shed around your home. Packagen's Cat Allergen Neutralizing Spray uses their patent pending whisker block protein to bind to and neutralize allergens in your home. No harsh chemicals, no side effects, just spray every few days to keep the allergens at bay. That's why 97% of Packagen customers feel relief and breathe easier around their cats. That's a big deal. We have used packaging in our house where we have at least half the human beings who live here do have cat allergies. It's been enormously helpful. Real deal, enormously helpful. Big difference maker. When K Pop's allergens are neutralized, it makes life a little bit more harmonious for everyone who walked through our door, which again, is a very, very small group of people. Because I don't like having people over in my house. I go to my house to keep people away from me. I love that we can just target these allergens instead of constantly pre reminding our guests to take their allergy medication. We don't have to tell the four people who come to my house, oh, make sure you take your Claritin before you come over because we've got a cat. Wah.
- [60:44]
Sarah Longwell
Wah.
- [60:46]
JVL
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- [63:31]
Sam Stein
They're my people. This is about my people. Let's just be real.
- [63:39]
JVL
Yeah, Jewish executives. This is. I mean, this is amazing. He was asked by one user whether a particular group is to blame for the Hollywood's DEI stuff. And he says, yes. Jewish executives have historically founded and still dominate leadership in major studios like Warner Brothers, Paramount and Disney. So, you know, that's cool.
- [64:05]
Sarah Longwell
But.
- [64:05]
JVL
But here's. So before we get the discussion, I want to set the table here. Charlie Wartzel and his buddy Matteo Wong have a great piece in the Atlantic that they put up Tuesday evening where they went through what happened. And what happened is that Elon gave Grok a couple of very specific prompts in what is essentially the source code. Okay. And the first is that Grok should give responses that don't shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect as long as they are well substantiated. And then that it should conduct a deep analysis, finding diverse sources representing all parties, and assume that subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. This literally is the free press. This is like, you know, they have told Grok to behave like the free press and it's like the entire heterodox racket. Right? Which is. This is. I just love this because Grok is heterodoxy in the modern American context. Just, you know, you gotta. Gotta pull you. Those media people are really biased and there's so much deis, and you gotta ask hard questions and don't care about people's feelings. And, you know, noticing isn't hating. And when you do all of those things, the end result is you're talking about the Jews who control Hollywood.
- [65:29]
Sam Stein
Let me go first.
- [65:30]
JVL
That's all I've got. What do you guys have?
- [65:32]
Sarah Longwell
A little something.
- [65:33]
Sam Stein
I'll go first because I'm not. I. Well, I'll get into it and I'll let Sarah bring us back out. I'm torn between two things. One, which of which I'm trying to figure out is more troubling. I think I have an idea. One is that, you know, this was. This is the result of Elon's deliberate, deliberate tweaking. Which, I mean, that's fucked up because then Elon wants his AI bot to spew out this nonsense. The other is that it's just algorithmic and that our AI basically knows that instinctively we're drawn towards this type of heterox, anti Semitic content. And I think that's more troubling, honestly.
- [66:06]
Sarah Longwell
And by we're, you mean terrible people on Twitter.
- [66:09]
Sam Stein
Terrible people on Twitter, but people people, yes, people who do. We, as the collective people who congregate to a social media platform, in this case X, which is not insignificant, obviously. I mean, I think that's way more troubling to me than if Elon's just working these things, which is troubling in its own right. The second thing is, and I gawk at this stuff too, because it's, you know, you have to laugh at the absurdity, and that's the only way to honestly get through this. And a lot of what's happening now. But, like, I don't know. My family is involved very deeply with the Holocaust Memorial. We are.
- [66:39]
JVL
We. We.
- [66:39]
Sam Stein
We contribute, we participate, we go there. We go to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. somewhat regularly. You know, at least a couple times a year. There's always a sort of subterranean debate. Not really subterranean. It's a real debate. Like, what does never again mean? Like, and how real do you have to be around about the idea of never again? Like, is it really a threat? And, like, how do we keep these. This. This legacy, this horrible legacy fresh in people's minds as the generation of Holocaust survivors dies off and there are very few left? And, you know, there's always this level of, like, sort of, well, you know, would we ever actually get back to a place like that and to watch it happen so fast? I mean, we're talking about, like, half a day, like, maybe a little bit more, but whatever. Half a day like that, and it just catch on and have this machine respond in real time to thousands, if not, you know, tens of thousands of tweets with spewing nasty, pro Hitler rhetoric. And to recognize how quickly that switch can be turned on and off is, to me, not just, like, outrageous. It's, like, actually quite frightening to think where that could go. And I choose to gawk at it and laugh at it because that's a therapeutic thing for me to do. But deep down, I am, like, I'm shaken to see this happen. I'm deeply shaken to see what. What happened this afternoon. And I can't fathom the idea that one person has to go back in and make a few twists of the knobs to, like, ensure that doesn't happen again. That is. That's startling to me.
- [68:17]
JVL
Well, I feel like a jerk for laughing about it. Sorry.
- [68:20]
Sam Stein
No, no, I preface it by saying I laugh too. Like, I was watching it in real time and I was looking at these responses like, I cannot believe, like, how horrible this. This stuff is. It's horrible. It's horrible.
- [68:33]
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- [69:02]
Sarah Longwell
So let me try to slightly disaggregate maybe why there's both the pernicious. It is. It is sexist. It is racist. It is. It is anti Semitic. But also because it was trained on Twitter. Okay? So all three of us, we are creatures on. Of Twitter. This is an extremely online conversation.
- [69:25]
Sam Stein
JV is now on Twitter.
- [69:27]
Sarah Longwell
Oh, so you're right. You used to be, though. You used to be like, you were driven off of it because Twitter has a specific way in which it inflames people in conversation. But you even got off back when it was just like regular political sickos that took it all too seriously. What Elon did. Elon said he's gonna get rid of the bots. He did not do that. What he did was he took away.
- [69:50]
JVL
Elon didn't do anything he said he was gonna do.
- [69:53]
Sarah Longwell
No, he did not do it. And more importantly, he also re platformed a bunch of people who had been deplatformed for being explicitly racist, anti Semitic, you know, rape things, sexual content. And so if you were somebody who used Twitter a lot, as I did, and you go back five or six years and you look at it now, it is a completely. We're all trying to, like, pretend like we can still use it in the same way. But when I. If you go into the algorithmically driven stuff, it used to be that what it would do is it take what you would normally follow, and it would, like, kind of pepper it with some other stuff you might like based on the other thing. So I was served a lot of political content. The kind of garbage I'm seeing now, like the amount of sex, the amount of racist stuff. There's this thing that. That I've seen. It's like a genre somebody where they'll just have, like, a woman dancing or something around a lot of black men. And it'll just be like, what do you think happens next? But here's the thing, is that it's all somewhere between rage bait and bots and foreign influencers and then real sick people, and you can't tell what's happening. So it's just become this sewer where, like, you're kind of still looking for the people that you follow and trying to have, but, like, it's become useless. For breaking news, which is what it used to be, they've throttled, like, real articles, real news.
- [71:28]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [71:29]
Sarah Longwell
Elon Musk is doing. He, he thinks, he thinks he's doing something noble. We're freeing information or whatever, but they are. What he does with the algorithm is intentional. And so I think it is. It is he that should be looked at in this moment for this. And now we should note that they've kind of, like, taken it down. Like, everybody was messing with it, and it was spitting back so much bile, like, it was sort of like, yeah, Hitler had some great ideas. Stuff all, all over the place. And so it wasn't sort of. It was, yes, yeah, Hitler had some great ideas. Exactly. And so they, they pulled it down. But, like, what Elon is and these other tech guys, it is such a good example of how they control information and what it is doing to our brains and to the information we're consuming. And this is where jvo, when you're like, the people are, you know, terrible. I, I'm, I think about what somebody like Elon is shoving down their throats.
- [72:36]
JVL
In terms of content, they can walk away from it. I walked away from it. Am I so special?
- [72:42]
Sam Stein
Yeah, I, I, I understand why you say that, but I think at the same time, this is designed. You are special. Yes, jbl, you're very special. At the same time, this is designed literally to hook you. I mean, this is what the. It's not like.
- [72:55]
JVL
Sorry. I believe in individual responsibility, of course, but this is even pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and walking away.
- [73:02]
Sarah Longwell
You know what you did? You took your ball and went over to Blue Sky. And Blue sky has its own version of toxicity.
- [73:08]
JVL
I mean, only if they don't have AI. There is no algorithm.
- [73:10]
Sarah Longwell
Hitler.
- [73:11]
JVL
No, but there's no algorithm. On Blue Sky. On Blue sky, you only get what you choose to follow. Blue sky is not throwing things at you.
- [73:19]
Sam Stein
I would just recommend people on Twitter don't go to the, to the for you feed. It's that, that is where but you.
- [73:25]
Sarah Longwell
Know, it does it.
- [73:26]
Sam Stein
Like I automatically does it for you.
- [73:28]
Sarah Longwell
It doesn't for you. Like, I'll be like in the following. And then suddenly I'll be seeing all this garbage and I'm like, why am I seeing this?
- [73:33]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [73:34]
Sarah Longwell
And it used to be that algorithms were at least sometimes it was sort of like, I'm not on Tick Tock. But you would. You were sort of trading it by showing it what you liked, right? Like you would click on basketball things, whatever, so it'd give you more basketball things. This is like, I don't look at this stuff. I'm not interested in this stuff. But some of it, what it is, is I think it's made so incendiary. So sometimes you pause to be like, am I really seeing what I think I'm seeing? And then it takes that and it's like, throws more of that at you.
- [74:05]
Sam Stein
I spent a lot of time looking at Grok throwing pro Hitler propaganda at me. Today, I'm sure it registered that and said, oh, wow, this guy's into the hot.
- [74:14]
JVL
He's super Sam Stein, pretty into this stuff. That's weird.
- [74:18]
Sam Stein
Yeah. That's ironic, isn't it?
- [74:21]
JVL
It's all great. It's all great that we're gonna have to hold hands on the Epstein truth erism with the guy who created a neo Nazi AI.
- [74:31]
Sarah Longwell
We do not have to hold hands with him. We do not.
- [74:33]
JVL
I mean, I'm just. I'm just saying the way it looks to me, that's all. Guys, great show. Long show. Sam, thanks for being here for Tim.
- [74:42]
Sam Stein
Thanks for having me, guys.
- [74:43]
JVL
You're my man. Love having you here. All tan and handsome the way you are.
- [74:48]
Sam Stein
I do look a little tan.
- [74:49]
JVL
Sarah, you got some stuff you gotta go do? Everybody. We'll catch you next week with Tim back in the house. Good luck, America.
- [75:01]
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