Speaker 1: This episode of the Chuck Todcast is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first bake from
Speaker 1: frozen subscription box for sour dough breads, artisonal pastries, and
Speaker 1: fresh pastas, plus all the items conveniently baked in twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes or less. Unlike many store brought options, Wild
Speaker 1: Grain uses some simple ingredients you can pronounce and a
Speaker 1: slow fermentation process that can be a lot easier on
Speaker 1: your belly, little gut health there right, and richer in
Speaker 1: nutrients antioxidants. There's also no preservatives and no shortcuts. The
Speaker 1: Wild Grain boxes are fully customizable. In addition to their
Speaker 1: variety box, they have a gluten free box, a vegan box,
Speaker 1: and a new protein box. I will tell you I
Speaker 1: have done the gluten free box. I have done it
Speaker 1: a second time. I have also used the code the
Speaker 1: todcast code. You use the promo code toodcast at checkout
Speaker 1: you get thirty dollars off. I've already used it as
Speaker 1: a gift to somebody else who loves this bread. It
Speaker 1: is hard to find good gluten free bread. It is fantastic.
Speaker 1: They give you step by step instructions. I really dig this.
Speaker 1: There is nothing like having an artesion bakery in your
Speaker 1: freezer to chase away the winter chill. Now is the
Speaker 1: best time to stay in and enjoy some comforting homemade
Speaker 1: meals with Wildgrain. I obviously highly recommend it. It is
Speaker 1: worth giving Wild Grain to try. Right now, Wildgrain is
Speaker 1: offering my listeners thirty dollars off your first box plus
Speaker 1: free croissants for life. Come on when you go to
Speaker 1: wildgrain dot com slash podcast to start your subscription today.
Speaker 1: That's thirty dollars off your first box and free croissants
Speaker 1: for life when you visit wildgrain dot com slash podcast,
Speaker 1: or simply use the promo code podcast at checkout. This
Speaker 1: is a sponsor I absolutely embrace, so use that code. Well.
Speaker 1: Hello there, Happy Monday, and welcome to another episode of
Speaker 1: the check podcast. If you are waking up in the
Speaker 1: Assella Corridor, I hope you don't have a foot of
Speaker 1: snow outside those of us on the southern end of
Speaker 1: the Slate Corridor or breathing a sigh of relief those
Speaker 1: of you in New York that might be another story,
Speaker 1: But for those of us that make content, it means
Speaker 1: you have more time bundled up in your house or
Speaker 1: you have to get out put the AirPods in. So
Speaker 1: I hope I can be a useful distraction while you're shoveling, sweeping,
Speaker 1: whatever you may be doing this morning. Look, it's a
Speaker 1: packed episode. As you know. I did a quick sort
Speaker 1: of emergency response as we got the big tariff ruling,
Speaker 1: and this is just such a monumental moment in the
Speaker 1: Trump presidency. It's very well, we look back, this is
Speaker 1: the beginning of the end. We may look back and
Speaker 1: say Liberation Day was sort of when it all actually
Speaker 1: was starting to come to an end. I'll get to
Speaker 1: that point in a minute, but let me give you
Speaker 1: a rundown of everything we're going to do. I'm going
Speaker 1: to unpacked all things tariff, because look, an important moment,
Speaker 1: the democracy, the guard rails, separations, like all of the
Speaker 1: features of this republic blossomed a bit. So that's that.
Speaker 1: And then you have a president responding as if he
Speaker 1: is now his goal is to destroy his own party
Speaker 1: in the midterms and do whatever it takes to help
Speaker 1: the Democrats, because his initial response on this is politically catastrophic.
Speaker 1: But hey, by the time you're listening to this, we
Speaker 1: also could be launching a new over the ron because
Speaker 1: oh guess what, before the tariff ruling, we still have
Speaker 1: the largest build up in the Middle East of military
Speaker 1: assets since the start of the Iraq War. What's going on?
Speaker 1: What are we up to? Congress still is not being told.
Speaker 1: Is this about the nuclear program? Is this about negotiation?
Speaker 1: Is this about regiem change? The president who loves not
Speaker 1: to explain his rationales, is I think underestimating how precarious
Speaker 1: of a position he might be in here. But we'll see,
Speaker 1: and who knows. Maybe he's going to I mean, my goodness,
Speaker 1: the State of the Union on Tuesday? Is he going
Speaker 1: to announce that the missiles are dropping as he begins
Speaker 1: to State of the Union? Does he want to step
Speaker 1: on his own State of the Union? Is that his goal?
Speaker 1: Does he want to announce something? Does he want does
Speaker 1: he not want the specific does he have not maybe
Speaker 1: he doesn't have much to say beyond or does he
Speaker 1: rant and rave about the tariffs and complain about that?
Speaker 1: Does he ask Congress for some help on this? So
Speaker 1: we are in an incredibly precarious moment of his presidency,
Speaker 1: though to say it's the most precarious is sort of
Speaker 1: how do you pick right? We kind of live in
Speaker 1: a constant state of turmoil and instability ever since he
Speaker 1: came down that escalator. So we are in one of
Speaker 1: those moments, massive economic instability. Small business is still trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what comes now. But we got some
Speaker 1: important institutional pushback on Trump's attempts to usurp power from Congress.
Speaker 1: So again, I'm gonna get to all that. Let me
Speaker 1: give you, like I said, a quick rundown, I'm going
Speaker 1: to break down. We got seven of the nine Supreme
Speaker 1: Court justices felt like they had to express their own
Speaker 1: view as to why they came to the decision. They
Speaker 1: came seven of the nine. The only two justices not
Speaker 1: to write their own separate either concurrence or dissent, Samuel
Speaker 1: Alito and Sonya Soda mayor everybody else had something to say,
Speaker 1: with the Neil Gorsuch concurring opinion being the most fascinating
Speaker 1: of all of them. But we're going to get into that.
Speaker 1: There's a brand new and ABC News poll out that
Speaker 1: shows incredibly bad news for the President and Republicans. But
Speaker 1: guess what doesn't show much good news for the Democrats.
Speaker 1: I will get to that in a moment. I spent
Speaker 1: part of my weekend at the Principal's First Conference at
Speaker 1: the Gaylord Hotel in suburban Maryland outside of DC. They've built.
Speaker 1: This is their six six year gathering. It was an
Speaker 1: impressive event it gave. I had a ton of in
Speaker 1: moderator panel with Pat McCrory, Bill Crystal, and another member
Speaker 1: of the Principal's First organization. And because it really is
Speaker 1: a gathering of center rights, sort of ex Republicans lost
Speaker 1: in dependence, a lot of military veterans and even a
Speaker 1: few active duty people I met there who feel politically
Speaker 1: lost but are alarmed by what's happened in this current
Speaker 1: moment inside the Republican Party. So it was an interesting
Speaker 1: conversation and I've I was moderating some interesting tension. Let's
Speaker 1: just say Pat McCrory and Bill Crystal, well they both
Speaker 1: have an agreement about Trump. They weren't unnecessarily on the
Speaker 1: same page of what comes next and how to do this?
Speaker 1: And I think that this is this is the debate
Speaker 1: that many non you know, sort of independence and anti
Speaker 1: Trump Republicans are having is do you try to save
Speaker 1: the Republican Party? Do you try to start something new?
Speaker 1: Do you try to get behind an independent or do
Speaker 1: you make common cause with the Democrats temporarily? That debate
Speaker 1: is a very lively discussion inside this group. I found
Speaker 1: it to be shall we say, intellectual nourishing might be
Speaker 1: a way to put it. Meanwhile, Team USA, right, how
Speaker 1: do I I want to get to that? That's very exciting,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to over I'm going to overanalyze the
Speaker 1: period of time. We haven't won the Olympic hockey goal
Speaker 1: since nineteen eighty. What's interesting is that in many ways
Speaker 1: America in nineteen eighty, that in that February, January, February
Speaker 1: and March period, that first quarter of the year nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: we were in a meles We were isolated, We felt
Speaker 1: isolated from the world. We aroan had our hostages, we
Speaker 1: were a divided politically in a sort of beginning of
Speaker 1: a political depression. Sounds familiar, doesn't right, By the way,
Speaker 1: we had an unpopular president, and we have an unpopular president.
Speaker 1: We have all of this, so and that Olympic gold
Speaker 1: sort of was the beginning of you know, and we
Speaker 1: ended up on a good sort of twenty year run,
Speaker 1: you know, with a few ups and downs, but a
Speaker 1: nice twenty year run. Arguably starting with that Olympic gold
Speaker 1: all the way until nine to eleven. When you think
Speaker 1: about america role in the world, all of those things,
Speaker 1: end of the Cold War, et cetera, et cetera. So
Speaker 1: you know, maybe this is a good omen. I choose
Speaker 1: to believe it is a good open on that front. So,
Speaker 1: and my conversation today is with filmmaker Gita Ganderbeer. She
Speaker 1: is the director and producer behind an incredible documentary that
Speaker 1: is on Netflix at the moment called The Perfect Neighbor.
Speaker 1: It is unbelievable. It is unique technically only uses bodycam.
Speaker 1: Basically it's majority bodycam footage. But I think it it.
Speaker 2: Is the.
Speaker 1: In this day and age where we have so much
Speaker 1: distrust of the you know, if this is just raw footage,
Speaker 1: and it allows you, as the consumer of this documentary
Speaker 1: to see for yourself what's happening in real time, to
Speaker 1: see what appears to be a racist neighbor sort of viewing,
Speaker 1: you know, and somebody who's broken, who's mentally having a breakdown,
Speaker 1: somehow raised or has a core racism in her, is
Speaker 1: whipped up by fear and grievance and then ends up
Speaker 1: killing somebody through through her own front door. She just
Speaker 1: a fellow neighbor. It's not an easy watch, but it's
Speaker 1: important watch and I think you'll enjoy this conversation with Gita.
Speaker 1: So with that, let's unpack what the Supreme Court just did,
Speaker 1: because after you know, our guardrails are battered, they're bruised,
Speaker 1: but as we found out Friday, they still exist in
Speaker 1: this constitutional republic, and frankly, the results not surprising. You know,
Speaker 1: I got started with this relaunch of the check podcast.
Speaker 1: It was in April, about a week before so called
Speaker 1: liberation debt. And if you want to go back to
Speaker 1: those earlier episodes to fact check me on this, I
Speaker 1: can tell you I said, Look, these are not going
Speaker 1: to be seen as constitutional. These will not survive a
Speaker 1: court challenge. The only question is whether this ends up
Speaker 1: costing all of us more money. Right, it's already cost
Speaker 1: consumers money. Now there's going to be people looking for
Speaker 1: their refund. And the irony is that the president is
Speaker 1: now going to accelerate our debt and deficit in ways
Speaker 1: that we already knew. He didn't really care about the
Speaker 1: national debt or the deficit. Again, this is a guy
Speaker 1: who's always borrowed other people's money, used it for himself,
Speaker 1: declared bankruptcy, and walked away. Right, He's done it many,
Speaker 1: many times, so of course he's going to do it
Speaker 1: with the US government. He doesn't care about those things.
Speaker 1: He just doesn't sort of see it. And he certainly has.
Speaker 1: If he took basic macro and microeconomics in college, he
Speaker 1: clearly didn't absorb anything with what he learned. I mean,
Speaker 1: this has been an economic disaster for the country. It
Speaker 1: has been a terrible for global leadership. And again, we
Speaker 1: I think may look back that this is in sort
Speaker 1: of you know, I'm reminded of George W. Bush right
Speaker 1: after he wins his second term and he pursues an
Speaker 1: unpopular policy of privatizing social security just you know, blew
Speaker 1: up in a faith, wanted to do immigration that wasn't
Speaker 1: popular inside his own party, and eventually he had approval
Speaker 1: rating somewhere in the mid ti thirties, and you had
Speaker 1: a Democratic streep in that midterm of his second term,
Speaker 1: and then the biggest Democratic essentially the biggest Democratic victory
Speaker 1: in a presidential race, with the Democratic cannon getting over
Speaker 1: fifty percent for the first time since Jimmy Carter. And
Speaker 1: then before that LBJ. So that's what this sort of
Speaker 1: and you know in the moment, you didn't quite know
Speaker 1: when Bush was just never was had hit unrecoverable status
Speaker 1: really until the election itself. So you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to declare Trump dead. He's going to be president
Speaker 1: for another two and a half years. He can make
Speaker 1: a lot of trouble. How he responds to this moment
Speaker 1: will tell us whether his political demise will get accelerated
Speaker 1: or not. And I would say the first seventy two
Speaker 1: hours his response tells me he wants you know, he
Speaker 1: plans on going down with the ship here, and he
Speaker 1: may burn his party down with it. So look, there
Speaker 1: was a reason why I was pretty confident that these
Speaker 1: tariffs were never going to be seen as legal, because
Speaker 1: tariffs are taxes, and taxes live in Article one. Simple
Speaker 1: as that. I mean, it was basically what Robert said,
Speaker 1: this is this is sort of high school constitutional law. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is not even law school constitutional law. So when
Speaker 1: you try to run a sweeping global tariff regime through
Speaker 1: a nineteen seventy seven emergency statute that never mentions the
Speaker 1: word tariff, you're taking a pretty big legal risk. Pretty
Speaker 1: much open and shut case rightly. The only surprise to
Speaker 1: me was that the ruling was six to three in
Speaker 1: the court, not seven to two. It should have been
Speaker 1: at nine zero. But I expected Alito and Thomas to
Speaker 1: be partisans in here. They've never been serious jurists. Maybe
Speaker 1: they were serious jurists, but not in the last ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen years have they been serious. They've been always
Speaker 1: take thief. What they believe is the own the Libs
Speaker 1: partisan right. Never may never embarrass your own party in
Speaker 1: any way. Anyway, The point is is that they they've
Speaker 1: stopped being legal guys a long time ago. But I
Speaker 1: thought both Corsa and Kavanaugh had come in here so mild.
Speaker 1: The real surprise to me is that Kavanaugh ended up
Speaker 1: in the descent on here, and it was interesting. He
Speaker 1: of course had to write his own He wrote the
Speaker 1: overall descent and he's hiding behind foreign policy, which of
Speaker 1: all the weak arguments the Trump lawyers were making, it
Speaker 1: was the strongest of the weak arguments. Was saying, well,
Speaker 1: this is part of foreign policy, and a president has
Speaker 1: to conduct foreign policy. Still, at its core, this was
Speaker 1: not about trade. This was about who governs, who's in
Speaker 1: charge of the purse in the United States of America.
Speaker 1: So the Court ruled six to three that the International
Speaker 1: Emergency Economic Powers AIPA reminds me of the Simpsons movie
Speaker 1: ep ba yepa, this is ai ba IPA. Sorry, I
Speaker 1: couldn't help myself. So it does not authorize the president
Speaker 1: to impose sweeping global tariffs. Six justices ended up in
Speaker 1: the majority, three dissenters. But here's what matters. There were
Speaker 1: seven opinions. Seven. Okay, that tells you something. This Court
Speaker 1: agreed on the result, but not on the reasoning. Chief
Speaker 1: Justice Roberts wrote the controlling opinion. His argument was institutional, straightforward.
Speaker 1: Regulate importation does not equal impost tariffs. Simple as that
Speaker 1: Congress knows how to say duties, Congress knows how to
Speaker 1: say tariffs. It did not say either of those two
Speaker 1: words in the i EPA legislation. Tariffs are taxation. Taxation
Speaker 1: belongs to Congress. Hard stop. Then there's the there there's
Speaker 1: the concurring opinion that I would want all of my
Speaker 1: wanta be law school folks. And you know I always
Speaker 1: joke I don't play a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer,
Speaker 1: but I have been playing one on TV for a
Speaker 1: long time. I am I'd like to think I have
Speaker 1: gotten sort of a pretty decent legal education over the
Speaker 1: last thirty years, as I love reading me some good
Speaker 1: Supreme Court opinions or just sense at times, because you
Speaker 1: learn a lot about the politics of the court when
Speaker 1: you do. And he wrote separately, and he leaned hard
Speaker 1: into what's known as the major Questions doctrine. And then
Speaker 1: he also called out pretty much five of his colleagues,
Speaker 1: by the way, kind of amusing, but still before we
Speaker 1: get to what he called him out on, he was
Speaker 1: tackling major Questions, right, which is the idea that when
Speaker 1: a president claims extraordinary economic power, Congress must speak clearly.
Speaker 1: And here's where it gets interesting, or so it's called
Speaker 1: out all of his colleagues, first the liberals for what
Speaker 1: he described frankly as a flip flop, because he basically said, hey,
Speaker 1: you opposed this idea of the major questions when it
Speaker 1: limited democratic administrations, in particular Biden on issues involving COVID
Speaker 1: in the workplace, COVID mandates, and the student loan issue.
Speaker 1: But now you're using the same structural instinct. Justice Kagan,
Speaker 1: she was joined by Sotomayor, agreed with the outcome. But
Speaker 1: rejected the idea this was a major question issue. She
Speaker 1: said that the ordinary statutory interpretation was enough. Essentially, she
Speaker 1: was trying to defend the fact that she was not
Speaker 1: flip popping here. She was trying to disaggregate the rationale
Speaker 1: she used to be in favor of Biden using emergency
Speaker 1: powers to do the student loan cuts, and she was
Speaker 1: trying to essentially separate it from her what appears to
Speaker 1: be literally the opposite point of view, which to somebody
Speaker 1: with no skin in the game, you know, the same way.
Speaker 1: It looks like robertson excuse me, Thomas and Alito were
Speaker 1: partisans here. Essentially, of course, is saying he said, hey,
Speaker 1: looks like Kagan, So to my own Jackson essentially have
Speaker 1: been partisan here as well. Then you have Justice Brown Jackson.
Speaker 1: She leaned into legislative history, saying Congress never intended AEPA
Speaker 1: to become a tariff machine, and therefore that's why she
Speaker 1: came to the same conclusion as roberts On the other side,
Speaker 1: Justice Kavanaugh wrote the principal dissent in his argument foreign
Speaker 1: affairs is different. He saw this as part of foreign affairs.
Speaker 1: So the president traditionally has brought her authority here and
Speaker 1: major questions doctrines shouldn't apply in the same way in
Speaker 1: trade and diplomacy. Then Justice Thomas went even further, arguing
Speaker 1: Congress can delegate tariff authority broadly. He basically said, nope,
Speaker 1: these emergency powers delegated it all away, and the President
Speaker 1: was perfectly within his constitutional rights to do all of this.
Speaker 1: So to say this was it your typical liberal conservative
Speaker 1: split is an understated It was a structural split, and
Speaker 1: that matters. And by the way, just a little history
Speaker 1: lesson here, because I was curious, how often have we
Speaker 1: had seven of the nine justices all write their own
Speaker 1: either supporting opinions or dissent. Well, in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: during the Pentagon Paper's case New York Times versus the
Speaker 1: United States, all nine justices wrote their own opinion. They
Speaker 1: agreed on the ruling, but they did not agree on
Speaker 1: how they got there right. They went nine nothing, but
Speaker 1: they ended up having individual opinions explaining that away a
Speaker 1: case that effectively struck down all existing death penalty laws
Speaker 1: in the United States. Furman versus Georgia nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: same thing, All nine justices wrote their own rationales for
Speaker 1: how they got to their opinion, and then of course
Speaker 1: dread Scott, the infamous dread Scott decision, one of the
Speaker 1: worst in the history of the Supreme Court, also featured
Speaker 1: all nine justices in the last few decades. Seven opinions
Speaker 1: usually signal a massive turf war between the different wings
Speaker 1: of the Court. And as I've told you, there's three
Speaker 1: distinct wings of the court, okay, and I think Gorcious
Speaker 1: and Kavanaugh are sort of somewhere in between the two
Speaker 1: of the conservative wings. Right, you have sort of a
Speaker 1: institutionalist conservative wing which is anchored by Roberts and Barrett.
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh mostly is with them on these institutional rulings. In
Speaker 1: this case it was Gorsich, not Kavanaugh. Thomas and Alito
Speaker 1: are usually in the more on the on the further
Speaker 1: further the right spectrum, a little more in favor of
Speaker 1: even stronger executive authority essentially, but a bit more partisan,
Speaker 1: you know. There takes seem to be grounded in well,
Speaker 1: what ruling do we want to get to, and then
Speaker 1: they find a rationale to get there. And then of
Speaker 1: course you have the three liberals that rarely do they
Speaker 1: do they break ranks. So it is a. I think
Speaker 1: a court that is split more in three than it
Speaker 1: is in two, because that's what Donald Trump does, right.
Speaker 1: He has divided his own party in that case, and
Speaker 1: you see that divide on on on the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: So I think that is there a is there is
Speaker 1: there that? Or is this a case where they all
Speaker 1: wanted to explain their own rationale? And I think it
Speaker 1: is clear that they really didn't agree on they you know,
Speaker 1: you had a strong majority agree that the president overstepped
Speaker 1: his constitutional overstepped his constitutional authority, but they just disagreed
Speaker 1: on exactly what how he overstepped that authority. Still I
Speaker 1: can't help but when you when you look at it,
Speaker 1: sort of seven responses like that, it really is sort
Speaker 1: of it reminds me of the coalition against Trump in general, right,
Speaker 1: which is there's a large majority of the country, say
Speaker 1: fifty five sixty percent that don't like how Trump governs,
Speaker 1: the general direction that Trump is taking on. This episode
Speaker 1: of The Chuck Podcast is brought to you by Zebiotics.
Speaker 1: Let's face it, after a night with drinks, it's hard
Speaker 1: to bounce back the next day. You have to make
Speaker 1: a choice either have a great night or a great
Speaker 1: next day. Well, well, that's where pre alcohol comes in.
Speaker 1: Zebiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically
Speaker 1: engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle
Speaker 1: rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink,
Speaker 1: alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut.
Speaker 1: It's a build up of this by product, not dehydration
Speaker 1: that's to blame for the rough days after drinking. Pre
Speaker 1: alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just
Speaker 1: remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night.
Speaker 1: Drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Now. Look,
Speaker 1: I don't drink anymore, so I can't give zebiotics pre
Speaker 1: alcohol a personal endorsement. But my producer Lauren does drink
Speaker 1: and he tried it out. Lauren, how was your experience, I'll.
Speaker 3: Be honest, Chuck. I was a bit skeptical at first,
Speaker 3: but the other night I went out with my wife
Speaker 3: to our favorite spot from Margarita's and tried pre alcohol
Speaker 3: beforehand and got to admit I was surprised by how
Speaker 3: good I felt the next morning. Disable the pop right
Speaker 3: out of bed, get a workout in, have a great
Speaker 3: day of work, so pre alcoholic gets my stamp of approval.
Speaker 1: So there you go. You ready to try it, Go
Speaker 1: to ze biotics dot com slash Chuck podcast right now.
Speaker 1: You'll get fifteen percent off your first order when you
Speaker 1: use Chuck Podcast at checkout. Plus it's backed by a
Speaker 1: one hundred percent money back guarantee, so there's no risk.
Speaker 1: Subscriptions are also available for maximum insistency. Remember to head
Speaker 1: to ze biotics dot com slash Chuck podcast and use
Speaker 1: the code Chuck podcast at checkout for the fifteen percent discount. Again,
Speaker 1: use the code chucktodcast. This episode of the Chuck Podcast
Speaker 1: is brought to you by American Financing. Let's be honest,
Speaker 1: the math just isn't adding up lately. Between the grocery
Speaker 1: store and those skyrocketing insurance premiums. Even with a steady job,
Speaker 1: more families are being forced to rely on high interest
Speaker 1: credit cards to cover expenses. So if you're a homeowner
Speaker 1: caught in this cycle carrying balances with interest rates in
Speaker 1: the twenties, frankly even the thirties, it's time to get
Speaker 1: some relief. Right now, mortgage rates are at a three
Speaker 1: year low, and my friends at American Financing are helping
Speaker 1: homeowners pay off that high interest debt at rates in
Speaker 1: the low fives. Their salary based mortgage consultants don't just
Speaker 1: push loans on you, They build exit strategies from debts.
Speaker 1: On average, they're saving their customers eight hundred dollars a month,
Speaker 1: so if you start today, you may even delay the
Speaker 1: next two mortgage payments. There are no upfront fees or obligations.
Speaker 1: To find out how much you can save. American's home
Speaker 1: for home loans is American Finance eight sixty six eight
Speaker 1: eight five ten eighty one. That's eight six six eight
Speaker 1: eight five ten eighty one or Americanfinancing dot net slash
Speaker 1: the Chuck Toodcast. Important disclaimer NMLS one A two three
Speaker 1: three four NMLS Consumer Access dot Org APR for rates
Speaker 1: in the five start at six point one ninety six
Speaker 1: percent for well qualified buyers. Call eight six six eight
Speaker 1: eight five one zero eight one for details about credit
Speaker 1: costs and terms, or Americanfinancing dot net slash the Chuck Toodcast.
Speaker 1: But they don't all agree that as to on the
Speaker 1: same things as to what he's doing right, there are
Speaker 1: some that don't like what Trump's doing but maybe like
Speaker 1: what he's doing in immigration. There are some that may
Speaker 1: be like what he's doing in immigration, but don't like
Speaker 1: what he's doing on tariffs. But it is it does
Speaker 1: sort of the fragmented court knows that Trump is an
Speaker 1: unconstitutional president and probably the most abuse abusive of the
Speaker 1: constitution of any president we've had, going even Nixon included.
Speaker 1: And yet right there you can't get a coherent, singular
Speaker 1: message to sort of take them on, and even in
Speaker 1: the legal community, you can't do that. Now there's Trump's response,
Speaker 1: And as I said on Friday, before knowing Trump's response,
Speaker 1: I said, he's the wild card here. There was a
Speaker 1: real opportunity right this This economy sucks, people don't like it,
Speaker 1: and you know, these tariffs have been attacked on consumers.
Speaker 1: It is served as inflationary. In fact, earlier, just before
Speaker 1: this tarif ruling came out, we got news the economic
Speaker 1: growth stagnated massively in the fourth quarter, right under one
Speaker 1: and a half percent growth, which is just terrible. Anything
Speaker 1: under two doesn't even allow us to sort of keep
Speaker 1: up with inflation. That is not good, and it is
Speaker 1: part of it is attributed to the shutdown, but there
Speaker 1: also has been this continued, you know, as we're seeing,
Speaker 1: you know, for about six months many businesses tried actually
Speaker 1: not to pass on the cost of the tariffs that
Speaker 1: ended in the last quarter and the begin and we've
Speaker 1: seen in January a lot of price spikes in particular,
Speaker 1: all of that has gone away. And that's so so ironically,
Speaker 1: you know, the best thing that could have happened to
Speaker 1: the Congressional Republicans was for these tariffs to be viewed
Speaker 1: as unconstitutional. That's if Trump would go along and accept
Speaker 1: the premise that the Supreme Court is correct here. That's
Speaker 1: not what he's doing. And this is what should make
Speaker 1: all of us pause here.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 1: The President didn't respond by arguing on the merits. He
Speaker 1: didn't argue about the statutory interpretation. He didn't respond by
Speaker 1: seeing the court misread history. He responded by doing what
Speaker 1: he does best, attacking his own appointees for simply being disloyal.
Speaker 1: And it is a reminder, right if we did not
Speaker 1: have lifetime appointment to Supreme Court. He tried to fire Gorsage,
Speaker 1: he tried to fire Barrett, just like he's doing with
Speaker 1: the Fed. So just keep that in mind. The bounders
Speaker 1: knew that. I mean, look, none of us love this
Speaker 1: lifetime appointment business. And maybe we should have age limits,
Speaker 1: and there's some ways to end it. But what you
Speaker 1: cannot have as an executive having the ability to fire
Speaker 1: somebody in another branch of government. And obviously our founders
Speaker 1: knew that, and that's why it's important to give Supreme
Speaker 1: Court justices this. So here he is personally attack Neil
Speaker 1: Gorsuch and Amy Cony Barrett. Neil Gorsuch, who was voted
Speaker 1: with Trump quite a bit. In fact, he's rarely in
Speaker 1: that institutional Every once in a while he surprises you.
Speaker 1: I was pretty convinced he'd be with the seven to
Speaker 1: two majority, Like I said, the surprise for me was capital.
Speaker 1: But Trump did the usual personalization, right, he said, this
Speaker 1: was an embarrassment to their families. So he's attacking the
Speaker 1: families of Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barr. And we
Speaker 1: know when Trump does this, it does it does you
Speaker 1: know all of a sudden there are mentally unstable people
Speaker 1: out there who start doxing people start going after it is.
Speaker 1: It is terrible what he does, and it's designed as
Speaker 1: a chilling effect, right, what you know, he goes after
Speaker 1: anybody that was supposedly that he viewed as on his side,
Speaker 1: and when they break ranks, he he goes after him
Speaker 1: in nasty ways because he's trying to prevent it from
Speaker 1: happening again. He's afraid it's going to get contagious. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing, more and more people, more and more Republicans.
Speaker 1: I think this is why I think this could be
Speaker 1: such an important moment that the breaking points don't happen.
Speaker 1: The breaking points are realized six months after that breaking
Speaker 1: point happens, right, And so you know, if we go
Speaker 1: on and I promise you Democrats sweep the midterms, we'll say, Okay,
Speaker 1: this thing started collapsing. And it really sort of took
Speaker 1: another nose dive with the Supreme Court ruling and then
Speaker 1: his just unhinged response to it. And look, we're all
Speaker 1: kind of numb to this. Oh, just another day at
Speaker 1: the office. He's just attacking members Supreme Court. He also
Speaker 1: thinks there's some conspiracy blaming foreign influence. You have the
Speaker 1: conspiracy of these foreigners right there infiltrating the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: This is some foreign influence campaign on Justices Gorsach and
Speaker 1: amy Cony. Barrett. Let's take it all the way through.
Speaker 1: Tell me how that works, mister President. Tell me how
Speaker 1: there's foreign influence on Neil Gorsich. Tell me how there's
Speaker 1: foreign influence on John Roberts. You know you can't. You're
Speaker 1: gonna throw this out there. Give me some details. Show
Speaker 1: your proof. I'm sure your proof is with the with
Speaker 1: the with all the stuff you found out during when
Speaker 1: you when you swore that you had evidence that Barack
Speaker 1: Obama wasn't born in the United States. I'm sure that
Speaker 1: evidence is in the same place at the evidence of
Speaker 1: of that's somehow foreign interest swayed Neil Gorsach and Amy
Speaker 1: Cony Barrett. Show your evidence. You don't do that. What
Speaker 1: you do is you count on your lapdog supporters to
Speaker 1: just take your accusation and run with it, and you
Speaker 1: count on algorithms to amplify it and make it seem
Speaker 1: like a legitimate talking point. It's disgusting, it's awful, and yeah,
Speaker 1: we already have Look, another person came after you, mister
Speaker 1: President at mar A Lago. All right, stop this. The
Speaker 1: more you do this stuff, the more you put everybody
Speaker 1: at risk physically. You're putting the lives in dangers of
Speaker 1: two Supreme Court justices that you appointed, You appointed these people,
Speaker 1: and you're attacking them and attacking their families. It's outrageous
Speaker 1: and it's awful. And the again, right, you have an
Speaker 1: entire Republican party who just doesn't respond to this anymore.
Speaker 1: I understand rationally why they don't. Doesn't get him anywhere,
Speaker 1: just causes more problems for them, And it's all sort
Speaker 1: of self preservation is why you don't speak out. But folks,
Speaker 1: he is super weak. This is the absolute definition of
Speaker 1: an emperor with no clothes, and every day we keep
Speaker 1: finding out how little he's wearing under his little garments there.
Speaker 1: So he obviously is decided not to not to do
Speaker 1: this the normal way any other president when they're set back,
Speaker 1: they criticize the court, they're frustrated, they say this or that,
Speaker 1: but then they are like, figure out another way. Maybe
Speaker 1: they want to work with Congress. But nope. He doesn't
Speaker 1: view his loss as a constitutional issue. He viewsed the
Speaker 1: loss as a loyalty issue. But let's go back to April.
Speaker 1: And this is why I fear long term impact of
Speaker 1: Trump less than most people do. He really is lazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, he is super lazy. Right. I often used
Speaker 1: the joke look he's too lazy to be Hitler, he's
Speaker 1: too lazy to be Orbon, he's too lazy to be
Speaker 1: air to one. Okay, forget any of these other you know,
Speaker 1: forget using the north star of the Nazis. Right, just
Speaker 1: picked today's sort of authoritarians. Too lazy to be Orbon,
Speaker 1: too lazy to be air to one. Right. Imagine, you know,
Speaker 1: he actually had some political capital in the first ninety
Speaker 1: days of his administration, and he could have probably strong
Speaker 1: armed his narrow congressional majorities in the House and Senate
Speaker 1: to give him the authority if he simply said back
Speaker 1: in late March, Hey, Congress, I want I want specific
Speaker 1: tariff authority. I'm going to I'm a better negotiator than
Speaker 1: you are. I'm going to negotiate these trade deals, but
Speaker 1: I need to control the tariff. I need you to
Speaker 1: delegate tariff authority to the president. Let's debate it, let's
Speaker 1: vote on it. And there'd have been wouldn't have been easy,
Speaker 1: and he may not have won that argument, but that
Speaker 1: is how you try to win an argument. And then
Speaker 1: if you can't win the argument, then he can go
Speaker 1: find his own Republicans to challenge the primary folks and
Speaker 1: you try to do it that way. It's what FDR
Speaker 1: would do when he had racal centrin Democrats to some
Speaker 1: of his ideas, but he also had pretty decent political
Speaker 1: capital with Republicans in that moment. You certainly know he
Speaker 1: would have strong armed the House at that time. Right,
Speaker 1: he was pretty much the House Speaker at that point,
Speaker 1: and John Thune was in go along, get along mode.
Speaker 1: I know, McConnell and you know. And they could have
Speaker 1: done it through the reconciliation process when they were doing
Speaker 1: their big beautiful bill. They were too lazy to pursue
Speaker 1: because it's what was it going to be hard? They
Speaker 1: were going to have to do some good old fashioned
Speaker 1: horse trading. But remember, right, the greatest weakness Donald Trump
Speaker 1: has is his laziness. It will always be the key
Speaker 1: as to why he didn't have the success he could
Speaker 1: have had in business. Right, too lazy in the casino
Speaker 1: business to right, he didn't want to deal with competitors,
Speaker 1: so bought them up, drowned himself in debt, and walked away. Right,
Speaker 1: He's just always looking for a shortcut. Right, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: has shortcuted his way to being a billionaire. Good for him.
Speaker 1: He's used the power of the federal government to actually
Speaker 1: make himself a billionaire. Again a shortcut. But as president,
Speaker 1: his agenda is failing and he's failing to remake the
Speaker 1: American economy in his vision because he's too lazy to
Speaker 1: work with Congress. Bottom line, had he done that, he'd
Speaker 1: had a shot. Markets would have been calmer, his political
Speaker 1: capital was fresher, Party was more unified in that moment,
Speaker 1: and he wouldn't have gotten all the authority he would
Speaker 1: have wanted, but he would have gotten some targeted authority
Speaker 1: and it would have been legitimate. But again, he didn't
Speaker 1: want to bother He wanted speed, he wanted leverage, immediate leverage.
Speaker 1: He wanted unilateral control. But it's lazy because doing it
Speaker 1: doing it every way I'm describing is a little bit harder.
Speaker 1: It's effort, It takes it. You have to have an
Speaker 1: attention span a little bit greater than a nat Well,
Speaker 1: we know he doesn't. So he reached for the emergency
Speaker 1: powers because they worked so well during COVID. So he
Speaker 1: loves these shortcut emergency powers that Stephen Miller consistently finds
Speaker 1: for him now. And he didn't want to have a
Speaker 1: debate in his own Party, and this avoids deliberation. Well,
Speaker 1: guess what his shortcut ran into Article one. So within
Speaker 1: hours of the ruling, Trump announces a new global baseline
Speaker 1: tariff under Section one twenty two of the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four Trade Act. So he's going back even further now
Speaker 1: in congressional authorization to try to find a legal way
Speaker 1: around this. By the way, this new fifteen percent flat
Speaker 1: tariff that he's sent across the board expires in one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty days, so it is he's going to
Speaker 1: need to go to Congress if he wants to continue it.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to Congress weighing in on this. This
Speaker 1: is where it belongs, and I think it's going to
Speaker 1: be quite the MRI. We're going to find out where
Speaker 1: the Republican Party is today. Because one thing that has
Speaker 1: been true since Donald Trump took his second oath of office.
Speaker 1: Every day he's lost a Republican supporter. Every day or
Speaker 1: every week, somebody leaves the reservation. Nobody he has not
Speaker 1: added anybody to his coalition. You see it in the
Speaker 1: form of elected officials breaking from him. You see it
Speaker 1: obviously in all of these in all of these polls.
Speaker 1: But what his response to this ruling is not good
Speaker 1: in the short term. This will be good in the
Speaker 1: long term because we've established some guard raids, but it's
Speaker 1: going to be unstable in the short term. We have
Speaker 1: a bunch of instability where they'll be refunds. Justice Kavanaugh
Speaker 1: warned of chaos. Yeah, I mean, there was no reason
Speaker 1: to violate the Constitution, But there is some truth to this. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's chaos. The importers had to pay billions under this
Speaker 1: i epa misuse of the IEPA authority. They're going to sue.
Speaker 1: They're going to want their money back. Sounds like the
Speaker 1: government's going to fight having to give any of the
Speaker 1: money back. These are lawsuits could take years. It's not
Speaker 1: good for small businesses that need to deal with imports.
Speaker 1: It's not good for any business, but small businesses. Big
Speaker 1: business can can figure out how to mitigate the impact
Speaker 1: of this on their on their bottom lines. They can
Speaker 1: write it down right, they can, and they can get
Speaker 1: some tax savings out of something like this. But boy,
Speaker 1: small business, this is a killer. That's why it was
Speaker 1: NFIB was a part of the groups, a part of
Speaker 1: the bigger group of people that were suing over this,
Speaker 1: and oh By the way, the President just exploded the
Speaker 1: deficit with his illegal tariffs, because what looked like was
Speaker 1: going to be the ability to actually see some revenue
Speaker 1: come into the country used to at least shrink the
Speaker 1: deficit annual deficit. I don't think we were going to
Speaker 1: make any progress on the debt itself, but to shrink
Speaker 1: the deficit, well, now, if you've removed it, you know
Speaker 1: he was. Look, this has always been part of a
Speaker 1: larger project. As I've tried to let try to walk
Speaker 1: people through, we're ultimately the goal here. The people that
Speaker 1: have really gotten a hold of Trump are the folks
Speaker 1: that want to get rid of income taxes. And you've
Speaker 1: seen in the States, you've seen attempts to get rid
Speaker 1: of property taxes. There are a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: that want to move all taxation back to being consumption oriented, right,
Speaker 1: much more like a vat tax, like the European right
Speaker 1: that everything is consumption oriented. Well, guess what that was
Speaker 1: our tax policy before we before the sixteenth Amendment and
Speaker 1: legalized income taxes. And you know what, that was worse
Speaker 1: for everybody, and it meant poor people paid a lion's
Speaker 1: share of the taxes. Rich people hid from paying most
Speaker 1: taxes because they were consumption based and the impact was
Speaker 1: much greater on lower income people than it wasn't higher
Speaker 1: income people, which is what made the income tax popular
Speaker 1: in that time. It was to it was to make
Speaker 1: the rich start paying their fair share. And here we
Speaker 1: go again, right, it's rich and wealthy people. They don't
Speaker 1: want it. They think that once they have money, they
Speaker 1: shouldn't get taxed on it until they spend it, and
Speaker 1: dindo with their property. Well, good luck funding any service
Speaker 1: that government provides today if you take away income taxes
Speaker 1: and property taxes. But we are going to have a
Speaker 1: ton of instability now for a while. Right, he's going
Speaker 1: to all right, so we found one hundred fIF the
Speaker 1: day's worth of ways to do tariffs. So he's going
Speaker 1: to find there's sort of five or six, my friend
Speaker 1: Bruce Melman, go check out his substack. There's five or
Speaker 1: six other pieces of various authorities that he can start
Speaker 1: to rebuild his tariff structure. And he'll do that, but
Speaker 1: it's going to cause all sorts of instability in prices.
Speaker 1: Prices aren't going to come down, they're only going to
Speaker 1: go up. And at this point, right, you think Oh, great,
Speaker 1: there's going to be no terriff. But as a business,
Speaker 1: you have to plan that there's going to be some
Speaker 1: more tariffs somewhere. So this is a mess. But you know,
Speaker 1: did anybody expect Donald Trump to leave? I mean, at
Speaker 1: this point, when he leaves office on January twenty, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty nine, we're going to have half the White House
Speaker 1: probably not be rebuilt, a Kennedy Center that's gutted and
Speaker 1: not finished, half built structure, and an economy in tatters
Speaker 1: because of the mess he has created with this tariffs.
Speaker 1: So let's zoom out internationally. What's going to happen all
Speaker 1: these trade deals he cut using this illegal tariff authority.
Speaker 1: How many countries are going to say, hey, we want
Speaker 1: a new deal. The deal we cut is no longer operational.
Speaker 1: I think quite a few countries are going to do that.
Speaker 1: So if the tool he used for leverage is unstable,
Speaker 1: then the leverage itself shrinks. And oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: he still hasn't finished this trade deal with China and
Speaker 1: he's going to meet with she in April. My god,
Speaker 1: has it ever been a better environment for the Chinese
Speaker 1: than the environment Trump is created? Now he's alienated every
Speaker 1: major ally the United States has right handing over China,
Speaker 1: you know, handing, Canada and India, all these in the
Speaker 1: European Union better trade relations with China than with the
Speaker 1: United States. And he has sort of usurped his own
Speaker 1: leverage that he was trying to manufacture in going back
Speaker 1: and forth. Heck of a job, Trumpy, because every foreign
Speaker 1: leader is going to look at the Supreme Court rule
Speaker 1: and go Court's gonna intervene. We may there may be
Speaker 1: some refunds. Congress may have to insert its control again,
Speaker 1: why do we have to negotiate with Trump on these
Speaker 1: trade deals? So we'll see, it's going to be a mess.
Speaker 1: But Donald Trump's been weakened quite a bit. So here's
Speaker 1: where it's going to get interesting politically if this now
Speaker 1: moves to Congress, and we'll see, right Mike Johnson does
Speaker 1: not want to put these votes out there now. I mean,
Speaker 1: right now, Trump's going to be super vulnerable to Republicans
Speaker 1: walking away from him, right, I mean, we've already seen
Speaker 1: a handful of Republicans and Trump got angry when a
Speaker 1: when a Colorado Republican voted against voted to get rid
Speaker 1: of that symbolic vote to get rid of the Canadian tariffs,
Speaker 1: and Trump withdrew his endorsement endorsed his primary opponent. Uh Now,
Speaker 1: in some ways, if Trump wants to try to purge
Speaker 1: his party and reorient it around his protectionist vision for
Speaker 1: for the United States, then this is how he's you know,
Speaker 1: he's going to have to go find more like minded
Speaker 1: folks and get them elected to Congress. But I'll tell
Speaker 1: you this, Colorado's have always been a free trade state.
Speaker 1: Colorado's was one of those states that, you know, while
Speaker 1: they lean left there, they're you know, they're not anti
Speaker 1: right to work, not the most pro union state. They
Speaker 1: don't like tariffs. It's free trade state. I have a
Speaker 1: feeling that Jeff heard, the congressman that Trump wants endorsed
Speaker 1: and has now unendorsed, knows his electorate better than Donald
Speaker 1: Trump knows that electorate. So bottom line is this is
Speaker 1: an MRI moment for the Republican Party. Right We're going
Speaker 1: to find out who is still a free market conservative
Speaker 1: and who isn't. So we'll find out if they're how
Speaker 1: big this fracture is. We know there's a small fracture
Speaker 1: in the Republican Party over trading tariffs. We know there's
Speaker 1: a silent minority. I still think it's close to a majority.
Speaker 1: That's close to a majority that doesn't like these tariffs,
Speaker 1: but they're scared to say anything publicly. You got to
Speaker 1: cover the Supreme Court. Well, we see more folks, especially
Speaker 1: as balloting gets closer, expose themselves as free marketeers. We'll
Speaker 1: see and there might be votes. A rational reaction by
Speaker 1: a president would be to try to get authority in Congress,
Speaker 1: try to persuade, try to find a way to do this.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's going to try to do
Speaker 1: this that way. I don't I don't expect him. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's already responded as I mean literally, A Democratic strategist
Speaker 1: said to me, if I could have scripted Trump's reaction
Speaker 1: to this ruling, I couldn't have scripted it any better.
Speaker 1: I mean, he is. He is owning that every tax
Speaker 1: hike now in the country, every consumer tax hit. He
Speaker 1: just announced a fifteen percent tax hide and consumer goods
Speaker 1: across the board, So you now know that if you're
Speaker 1: paying more, it is directly associated with Trump's economy. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: So I said in April this would likely end in
Speaker 1: the situation we're in now. The only surprise was that
Speaker 1: the ruling wasn't even more emphatic it was seven two
Speaker 1: or nine zero. But what happens next is far more important.
Speaker 1: Does Congress reassert its authority in the moment? Do we
Speaker 1: see free market republicans speak out publicly? Does the loyalty
Speaker 1: tests continue by Trump? If Gorsach and Barrett are disloyal
Speaker 1: for reading a statute narrowly? What happens the next time
Speaker 1: the disagreement is over something bigger than Tariff's So this
Speaker 1: wasn't about trade policy. This is about how we govern
Speaker 1: and whether we have three co equal branches of government.
Speaker 1: And Donald Trump shortcut just ran straight headlong into the
Speaker 1: brick wall that is the US Constitution. And guess what,
Speaker 1: He's super unpopular at the moment. Let me tell you
Speaker 1: about a new poll in the Washington Post. I want
Speaker 1: to run through this for a few minutes before we
Speaker 1: get to the interview. Now, it's a poll of all adults,
Speaker 1: and so far as we've seen the pattern, when it's adults,
Speaker 1: it's his job approval can't get out of the thirties.
Speaker 1: When it's registered voters, you'll see his job approval. It's
Speaker 1: somewhere in the forty one two percent range. Sixty disapproved.
Speaker 1: It's that disapproval number is huge. Here's a few more things.
Speaker 1: Do you approve a disapproval of the way Trump is
Speaker 1: handling This is again Washington Post Ipso's pole. So it's
Speaker 1: a you, gov, i'm, i'm, it's episodes. I'M it's not
Speaker 1: my favorite methodology. But look that ship has sailed, but
Speaker 1: he is upside down on every single issue. He's got
Speaker 1: a majorities disapproving of him on every issue. They tested
Speaker 1: us Mexican border. Fifty percent disapprove of his policy. That
Speaker 1: was the best issue he performed on. Forty seven percent
Speaker 1: approve of his border policy, Fifty eight percent disapprove of
Speaker 1: his immigration policies, fifty seven percent disapprove of his handling
Speaker 1: of the economy, sixty two percent disapprove of the relations
Speaker 1: that he has with other countries, sixty four percent disapprove
Speaker 1: of the tariffs, and sixty five percent hate this inflationary
Speaker 1: Now here's the thing that ought to scare democrats. Americans
Speaker 1: are split on who they trust to handle the country's
Speaker 1: main problems. Here's the specific wording of the question. Overall,
Speaker 1: who do you trust to do a better job handling
Speaker 1: the country's main problems Trump. Of the Democrats in Congress, well,
Speaker 1: thirty three percent picked Trump, thirty one percent pick Democrats
Speaker 1: in Congress. Thirty one percent said neither. How about that? Right?
Speaker 1: Does that not tell you where America really is? Right?
Speaker 1: You know, you basically have the base of the basis
Speaker 1: of two parties saying one thing and everybody else feeling
Speaker 1: I don't trust either one of these parties at the moment,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, I continue to wonder, is this
Speaker 1: an opportunity for a third party and independent? Does this?
Speaker 1: You know, are Democrats going to realize they have a
Speaker 1: huge problem that their brand is shit. They are seen
Speaker 1: as way too liberal, way too progressive, way outside the
Speaker 1: mainstream on some of these issues, and this is why
Speaker 1: they don't have confidence and sort of the rest of
Speaker 1: the electorate. Right the base is animated on hat and Trump,
Speaker 1: and that might be enough in the midterm, but this
Speaker 1: poll is still revealing as again, Donald Trump unpopular in
Speaker 1: every single issue that matters to Americans. The fact that
Speaker 1: this is not a blowout, that Democrats aren't more trusted
Speaker 1: right now to handle everything than Trump by ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen or twenty points. It's a reflection on the Democratic
Speaker 1: grand that's that's just a reminder of a red flag,
Speaker 1: all right. I like I said, I've got a terrific
Speaker 1: interview with Get to gainda Beer here it is, like
Speaker 1: I said, the perfect neighbor is I used the MRI
Speaker 1: metaphor before. I think it's an MRI and race and
Speaker 1: culture in America a little bit. Some of our gun
Speaker 1: laws are stand your ground laws is sort of relevant
Speaker 1: in here. But here's the beauty of this documentary again,
Speaker 1: using only footage from body camera, no narration, no talking heads,
Speaker 1: it is a classication. You get to decide your own
Speaker 1: reaction without letting others try to influence you and tell
Speaker 1: you what you're seeing. You're seeing it all raw and
Speaker 1: in real time. And I highly encourage it. I really do,
Speaker 1: because I think it will when you hear people say that,
Speaker 1: you know, it is just a reminder that we've raised
Speaker 1: a lot of racists in this country multiple generations, and
Speaker 1: it's going to take a while for us to eradicate
Speaker 1: that strain, that virus out of the American society. We're
Speaker 1: making progress, not fast enough, and this, this this documentary
Speaker 1: will tell you that. So let's sneak in a break
Speaker 1: and when we come back to my conversation about the
Speaker 1: perfect name. Do you hate hangovers, We'll say goodbye to hangovers.
Speaker 1: Out of Office gives you the social buzz without the
Speaker 1: next day regret. They're best selling. Out of Office gummanies
Speaker 1: were designed to provide a mild, relaxing buzz, boost your mood,
Speaker 1: and enhance creativity and relaxation. With five different strengths, you
Speaker 1: can tailor the dose to fit your vibe, from a
Speaker 1: gentle one point five milligram microdose to their newest fifteen
Speaker 1: milligram gummy for a more elevated experience. Their THHC beverages
Speaker 1: and gummies are a modern, mindful alternative to a glass
Speaker 1: of wine or a cocktail. And I'll tell you this,
Speaker 1: I've given up booze. I don't like the hangovers. I
Speaker 1: prefer the gummy experience. Soul is a wellness brand that
Speaker 1: believes feeling good should be fun and easy. Soul specializes
Speaker 1: in delicious hemp derived THCHC and CBD products, all designed
Speaker 1: to boost your mood and simply help you unwine so
Speaker 1: if you struggle to switch off at night. Sol also
Speaker 1: has a variety of products specifically designed to just simply
Speaker 1: help you get a better night's sleep, including their top
Speaker 1: selling sleepy gummies. It's a fan favorite for deep restorative sleep.
Speaker 1: So bring on the good vibes and treat yourself to
Speaker 1: Soul today. Right now, Soul is offering my audience thirty
Speaker 1: percent off your entire order. So go to gitsold dot
Speaker 1: com use the promo code todcast. Don't forget that code.
Speaker 1: That's getsold dot Com promo code todcast for thirty percent off.
Speaker 1: Having good life insurance is incredibly important. I know from
Speaker 1: personal experience. I was sixteen when my father passed away.
Speaker 1: We didn't have any money. He didn't leave us in
Speaker 1: the best shape. My mother single mother, now widow, myself
Speaker 1: sixteen trying to figure out how am I going to
Speaker 1: pay for college and lo and behold, my dad had
Speaker 1: one life insurance policy that we found wasn't a lot,
Speaker 1: but it was important at the time, and it's why
Speaker 1: I was able to go to college. Little did he
Speaker 1: know how important that would be in that moment. Well,
Speaker 1: guess what. That's why I am here to tell you
Speaker 1: about Etho's life. They can provide you with peace of
Speaker 1: mind knowing your family is protected even if the worst
Speaker 1: comes to pass. Ethos is an online platform that makes
Speaker 1: getting life insurance fast and easy, all designed to protect
Speaker 1: your family's future in minutes, not months. There's no complicated process,
Speaker 1: and it's one hundred percent online. There's no medical exam
Speaker 1: require you just answer a few health questions online. You
Speaker 1: can get a quote in as little as ten minutes,
Speaker 1: and you can get same day coverage without ever leaving
Speaker 1: your home. You can get up to three million dollars
Speaker 1: in coverage, and some policies start as low as two
Speaker 1: dollars a day that would be billed monthly. As of
Speaker 1: March twenty twenty five, Business Insider named Ethos the number
Speaker 1: one no medical exam instant life insurance provider. So protect
Speaker 1: your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free
Speaker 1: quote at ethos dot com slash chuck. So again, that's
Speaker 1: ethos dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary and
Speaker 1: the rates themselves may vary as well, but trust me,
Speaker 1: life insurance is something you should really think about it,
Speaker 1: especially if you've got a growing family.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: One of the more powerful documentaries that you will hear
Speaker 1: about during the Academy Awards is called The Perfect neighbor,
Speaker 1: and it is by the filmmaker Geta Gandibier, Getha Gandibier.
Speaker 1: My apologies there, and it is First of all, the
Speaker 1: film itself is unique because it's the type of documentary
Speaker 1: I love best, meaning no talking hits. It is a
Speaker 1: documentary of real footage and it's about a story sadly
Speaker 1: in my home state of Florida. And the standard ground
Speaker 1: law will come into play here a minute, but it's
Speaker 1: a story that's more. This is not a gun story.
Speaker 1: This is a society story. This is a story of race,
Speaker 1: This is a story of policing. This is a story
Speaker 1: of how we live together as Americans. And it's incredibly
Speaker 1: powerful and it couldn't have been done without bodycam footage.
Speaker 1: So if you haven't seen it, it's on Netflix now,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend it. It's powerful, it's disturbing. It's also heartbreaking,
Speaker 1: as we were just discussing its grief and rage, as
Speaker 1: Gita will tell you wrapped up in one and Pizza
Speaker 1: joined me. Now, Gita, how did I do introducing your film?
Speaker 2: That was great? Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: You're first of all, it's nominated for all sorts of awards.
Speaker 1: How important is an Academy award to you?
Speaker 4: So the Academy Award is a huge honor. I think
Speaker 4: it's every you know, it's a dream. Honestly, it's a dream.
Speaker 2: And sometimes feels like a pipe dream, you know, in
Speaker 2: our in our field.
Speaker 4: But I think what makes it so significant it's that
Speaker 4: it's our peers who vote right, people that we admire,
Speaker 4: people that inspire us, our idols, our colleagues, you know,
Speaker 4: so that community feels so meaningful, and the idea that
Speaker 4: they choose your film of the many, many many disturbing
Speaker 4: films means so much. So that makes it an incredible honor.
Speaker 2: Again, a dream. I think beyond that though, to all.
Speaker 4: The awards really give us platform to talk about the
Speaker 4: issues that and the impact that we want to have
Speaker 4: goes far beyond the film. We're really hoping for change,
Speaker 4: that the film will be a vehicle for change.
Speaker 2: So I think the the.
Speaker 4: There's two things that come into play with the awards.
Speaker 4: The just the owner of it all and so grateful
Speaker 4: that the platform is equally important.
Speaker 1: No, and you know, kudos to Netflix for making you know,
Speaker 1: for promoting it. Not just there's one thing to just
Speaker 1: put it on your streamer. It's another thing to actually
Speaker 1: promote it and make sure people can see it.
Speaker 4: Which they could have honestly, And this was an independent film.
Speaker 4: We made this independently. My team Message Pictures, Park Pictures
Speaker 4: joined us, SOB Productions also joined us. We were a
Speaker 4: very small but mighty scrappy team for very little money.
Speaker 4: We also got some development funding, but the from Peacock,
Speaker 4: but they chose not to take the film ultimately, so
Speaker 4: we but you you know, small resources. But the Sundance
Speaker 4: Film Festival accepted the film and really give that platform.
Speaker 4: That was our first premiere. And after that Netflix made
Speaker 4: us an offer. So Netflix took it to the next
Speaker 4: level again, a global platform.
Speaker 1: Look, my head is in two different places. Like one part,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the decision to go without
Speaker 1: a narrator and to use all the bodycam footage. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, I do think we should spend a
Speaker 1: few minutes on the story itself, sure, and so I
Speaker 1: want to begin with there, which is what did you
Speaker 1: when did you become you know, how closely were you
Speaker 1: following this story in real time in Marion County, Florida.
Speaker 1: You know, I hate to say it, when I watched this,
Speaker 1: it was a very you know, I knew a little
Speaker 1: something about the story itself, so I knew I was
Speaker 1: going to end. But that community, that fight, I've seen that,
Speaker 1: it's a very familiar thing. What was unfamiliar was to
Speaker 1: see it chronicled, yeah, right in real time, and that's
Speaker 1: what made it, I think so powerful. But I am
Speaker 1: curious what was your familiarity with the story at different
Speaker 1: points in time while it was unfolding.
Speaker 4: Sure, so there is a personal connection to this story
Speaker 4: because Ajica Owens was a family friend, so you were
Speaker 4: involved from the minute that had happened.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, from the minute that you.
Speaker 1: Show you knew immediately you were brought in. Did you
Speaker 1: know about what was happening in that neighborhood before.
Speaker 2: She was killed?
Speaker 4: No, we didn't, and we myself and Mama say, we
Speaker 4: am talking about myself and my husband.
Speaker 2: Who's also a producer on the film that come onto.
Speaker 4: And my teammate Message Pictures, Alisa Payne and Sam Pollard,
Speaker 4: you're my producing partners. We got a distress call though
Speaker 4: from my sister in law who was best friends with
Speaker 4: Ajaca Owens.
Speaker 2: And when I say sister in law, she's really my
Speaker 2: cousin in law.
Speaker 4: But we culturally don't differentiate like she's We're very close.
Speaker 2: That's my sister in law.
Speaker 1: I've got cousins, Yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 4: But just you know, in case anybody wants to, you know,
Speaker 4: wants to fact check it, right, cousin in law. But
Speaker 4: we got we got a call the night that had happened,
Speaker 4: and we're immediately on the ground trying to support the
Speaker 4: family and help gathering the children and getting Achica's mother
Speaker 4: into town.
Speaker 2: And also we.
Speaker 4: Were very aware that the story needed to be in
Speaker 4: the media because without media attention, cases like Ajica's often get.
Speaker 2: Swept under the rung.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's so much gun violence, unfortunately in our
Speaker 4: society that it's almost an everyday occurrence.
Speaker 2: There's another story of somebody getting.
Speaker 1: Shot and neighbor dispute with it turning into a deadly
Speaker 1: gunshot is sadly almost it probably is a daily occurred.
Speaker 2: Daily occurrence, right, more or less.
Speaker 4: So, so we were because we work in media, our team,
Speaker 4: that's what we felt.
Speaker 2: We could do and how we could help.
Speaker 4: And Susan was not immediately arrested because of stanyar ground laws.
Speaker 4: They had to stand your ground investigation, and we have
Speaker 4: the precedent of the Trayvon Martin case that happened in Florida,
Speaker 4: So we were deeply concerned that there would be no
Speaker 4: justice for Ajica. And then about two months later, Susan
Speaker 4: was eventually arrested. About two months later, we received the
Speaker 4: body camera footage from the family lawyers and who we
Speaker 4: were still involved with the family and again still trying
Speaker 4: to support the case because we didn't know. Again, we
Speaker 4: were worried it might languish, you know, it could take
Speaker 4: years for anything to happen. But the footage came to
Speaker 4: us and they asked us to go through it.
Speaker 2: They were like, can you look through it? Is there
Speaker 2: anything in here for the media?
Speaker 4: And it was about thirty hours of material and I
Speaker 4: was shocked. I'd never seen that much footage around a
Speaker 4: case before.
Speaker 1: Can I just say, I'm I was oddly impressed with
Speaker 1: how much there was in How you know, I'm a
Speaker 1: cynic on this stuff. I assume all these guys are
Speaker 1: going to turn it off when the real you know,
Speaker 1: and they there was so much there. It felt real.
Speaker 1: It felt like I got a real sense of how
Speaker 1: Marion County Police officers handle these disputes.
Speaker 4: Yes, now one hundred percent, and they were there so
Speaker 4: often because Susan called so often. But I think what
Speaker 4: struck me is that you got to see in this
Speaker 4: footage the community as they were before, and it was undeniable.
Speaker 4: You got to see this beautiful multi racial community living together,
Speaker 4: loving each other, acting like a big extended family, taking
Speaker 4: care of the kids, you know, And you got to
Speaker 4: see the kids playing outside, being precocious and funny.
Speaker 2: And you know, and loved.
Speaker 4: And because there is so much gun violence, we are
Speaker 4: used to seeing the grieving family.
Speaker 2: We know the.
Speaker 4: Aftermath of what happens, but we never get to see
Speaker 4: the before me, the story of this community and what
Speaker 4: they had to go through and how one outlier who
Speaker 4: was emboldened by Stanley ground laws plus combined with our
Speaker 4: access to guns, disrupted their whole world.
Speaker 1: What did you know? What when did you know you
Speaker 1: had a film?
Speaker 2: Sure? So, when when we saw the body camera.
Speaker 1: Footage, immediately like this is I can do something with that? No?
Speaker 4: Because because what Because like I said, it was thirty hours,
Speaker 4: It came in a jumble, it came on a thumb
Speaker 4: drive and there were folders. But there's the cops unintentionally
Speaker 4: function like multi camera with the you know, with the footage,
Speaker 4: because sometimes there were two of them unseen.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there was a little it could be a little uh,
Speaker 1: it was a little love don't I don't want to
Speaker 1: say it, you know, sort of like wait what I mean?
Speaker 1: You know it's sort of dizzying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But this is again the nature.
Speaker 4: This is not production footage, right, they just just it's
Speaker 4: please evidence. But I spent about two weeks along with
Speaker 4: Nikon Kwan two again my producer and partner, stringing it
Speaker 4: into a timeline. I used to be an editor, so
Speaker 4: I pieced it together and synchronized all the footage and
Speaker 4: the sound, and also took time to figure out the chronology.
Speaker 4: And it was once we had the whole thing strung
Speaker 4: out and we watched it down and we could understand
Speaker 4: the chronology and what happened, that's when I was like, Aha.
Speaker 1: The family. So one of the things I was curious
Speaker 1: about is that the family attorney immediately asked for body
Speaker 1: cam footage for every incident that had ever taken place
Speaker 1: to differ in that neighborhood.
Speaker 4: Okay, I asked, of course, for the court case, that's
Speaker 4: what they would need, right, So they asked for everything,
Speaker 4: and what you see in the film is pretty much
Speaker 4: what we got, what the.
Speaker 2: Lawyers were given.
Speaker 1: There was also some ring whether it's some doorbell cameras
Speaker 1: or wing cameras as well.
Speaker 4: Right, I was part of it also because that was
Speaker 4: collected as evidence. But I think the thing that to
Speaker 4: me that struck me was that I felt like the
Speaker 4: footage played like a horror film. It played to me
Speaker 4: I thought of films. I come from a scripted background.
Speaker 4: Originally I came up with Spike Lee and Sam Pollard.
Speaker 1: And actually it had a Jaws vibe to me, the
Speaker 1: original Jaws, right, which is the you know, the initial
Speaker 1: Steven Spielberg horror creator of that moment of where you
Speaker 1: don't see, you don't see the menace, but you know
Speaker 1: it's coming out there. And that's what I felt body
Speaker 1: came for. You're just like I had. I just got
Speaker 1: the Jaws vibe in that sense, because you know it's
Speaker 1: building up, but you don't know when it's coming, but
Speaker 1: you know it's coming.
Speaker 2: Nobody has said Jaws before. I love that.
Speaker 4: The references for me were paranormal activity and you know,
Speaker 4: things that used and also the Blair Witch Project, like
Speaker 4: films that were made that was meant to be found
Speaker 4: footage or you know again CCTV footage, surveillance camera footage.
Speaker 4: So those were sort of my references, and I wanted
Speaker 4: to make something that was immersive, that would grip audiences
Speaker 4: and hold them. Oftentimes, when we make documentaries, particularly if
Speaker 4: they're social justice, sometimes people don't want to you know,
Speaker 4: they don't want to hear it, like or they're not interesting,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: I that was. Look, I had my wife and I
Speaker 1: was saying, I'm gonna watch this from an interview. She's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like you know, I know this story.
Speaker 1: I don't know right, like because you're right. And that's
Speaker 1: why I'm like, no, people, you need to see this.
Speaker 1: You need to see it because it's a groundmaking way
Speaker 1: to make a movie. Number one. So there's a technical
Speaker 1: aspect of this that's I mean, I'm not a voter,
Speaker 1: but if I were to me, this is why to me,
Speaker 1: it's an e're the easy winner simply because it's both
Speaker 1: a technical You've done something new and interesting and different
Speaker 1: in a basically because we now have all this stuff
Speaker 1: we didn't. You know, you couldn't have made this with
Speaker 1: Trayvon Martin it didn't exist, but one of the other no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: and so, and then there's the powerful story itself that
Speaker 1: you tell where you don't have to you're not trying,
Speaker 1: You're you're you're helping people get to a place, but
Speaker 1: you're not preaching. You're not telling people what should be,
Speaker 1: what to think, You're just showing. You're letting us decide
Speaker 1: what should be. And you're like, that wasn't right.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that. Now we trust our audience. I
Speaker 2: think that was a big part of it.
Speaker 4: We were are belief that we could live in this
Speaker 4: body camera footage and the you know, the police evidence footage.
Speaker 2: And there was a couple of thoughts.
Speaker 4: One was that we didn't want to go back and
Speaker 4: retraumatize the community by making them relive it again interviewing them.
Speaker 2: They've they'd already been interviewed by detectives, they'd lived it, like,
Speaker 2: I didn't want to burden them with that.
Speaker 4: Then the the other part of it is we felt
Speaker 4: the body camera footage was really undeniable and right now
Speaker 4: we live in a time where everything the media does
Speaker 4: is questioned, and with this footage, there was no film
Speaker 4: crew on the ground, right there was we were not
Speaker 4: there directing anything. So again, because it is police evidence,
Speaker 4: you see things exactly as they happened, no one, there
Speaker 4: was no outside journalist influencing, So so I think that
Speaker 4: makes it undeniable to audiences. And also you can see
Speaker 4: in this footage again how this community was oftentimes after
Speaker 4: after people of color in particular are victimized after a
Speaker 4: crime happens to us, we are often criminalized, and our
Speaker 4: children are adultified. And we felt in the footage again
Speaker 4: the police did not mean to capture this, but they
Speaker 4: did that. Again, this community, this incredible community, and this
Speaker 4: like you have the mother who says, you know, oh,
Speaker 4: these kids, they're all mine, and the father comes out
Speaker 4: and is like, I look out for these kids like
Speaker 4: they're my own. You see in footage, even footage that
Speaker 4: Susan shot, the adults playing football with the kids like
Speaker 4: it was and the kids are outside having like you know,
Speaker 4: healthy connected fun.
Speaker 1: And I think what all of our political leaders say, hey,
Speaker 1: kids need to be outside more, not in front of
Speaker 1: their screens. Right, these kids were outside.
Speaker 4: They were outside, and I think and also you saw
Speaker 4: a community of upstanders like Susan, the two neighbors, and
Speaker 4: it wasn't. It's interesting because even though it is about race,
Speaker 4: and Susan tried to weaponize race.
Speaker 2: You know, you see the two.
Speaker 4: Neighbors that AA that lived on either side of Ogica
Speaker 4: or white women and were complete upstanders.
Speaker 1: What I saw it as is this is why it's
Speaker 1: a familiar community to me. In Florida. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of this is just a working class middle sort
Speaker 1: of what I working class, you know, strivers is what
Speaker 1: I would call it though, right, working crass driver community
Speaker 1: who like don't want to live in an apartment complex
Speaker 1: with their kids, want their kids to have more of
Speaker 1: a of a of a of a you know, sort
Speaker 1: of that whatever whatever, the idealized version of growing up
Speaker 1: in a neighborhood and all that stuff and there, and
Speaker 1: you know, these communities are all over Florida. It's sort
Speaker 1: of what makes Florida an attractive melting pot to many
Speaker 1: people and why they move. And it's affordable.
Speaker 2: It's the best of us. It's really that's the American dream.
Speaker 4: It's the best of us, right, like a place where
Speaker 4: and with that strong social network. I think Susan, on
Speaker 4: the other hand, is sort of represents a microcosm of
Speaker 4: all the bills that are plaguing our society.
Speaker 2: She kind of holds a mirror up.
Speaker 1: Two movies jumped out at me with her, because there
Speaker 1: been attempts to sort of portray that character, is what
Speaker 1: I would call it. Right, We know this person exists,
Speaker 1: this person lived in my neighborhood. We all had a
Speaker 1: person like this, right, and you don't quite know what
Speaker 1: they were. Right. You had the Clint Eastwood movie where
Speaker 1: he's the old man torn out Bohite Tornado or something
Speaker 1: like that, where grand grands grand Tino. That's right, And
Speaker 1: then I was thinking of the that Michael Douglas movie
Speaker 1: right falling Down whatever, you know, the whole white grievance,
Speaker 1: white rage. Right. She she felt like a very familiar character,
Speaker 1: right that we'd seen portrayed. But here was here here,
Speaker 1: I think there's there's this assumption that maybe these folks
Speaker 1: no longer exist. No, well, she very very much she
Speaker 1: must exist. I'm curious, did you want to what did you?
Speaker 1: I was? I wanted to know more of like how
Speaker 1: did she become so broken? She's broken? There's no doubt
Speaker 1: she's broken. We don't know what's it.
Speaker 2: We don't know this.
Speaker 4: She moved into the neighborhood two years before everything happened,
Speaker 4: and we don't have much of her backstory, you know,
Speaker 4: nor did we want to speculate on it.
Speaker 1: No, I get that too, but it's clear she some
Speaker 1: somebody something something she's broken, and you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know who knows when it happened, right, might have happened
Speaker 1: years ago or two years ago.
Speaker 2: You might just be racist though until.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's the thing. She got broken early. Then,
Speaker 1: you know, I always say you, you know you have
Speaker 1: to be raised a racist?
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: I do believe that. I don't think, because kids are
Speaker 1: not racist unless they're caught it now.
Speaker 4: And I appreciate you thinking of that as broken, because yeah,
Speaker 4: it should be thought of that way. But I think
Speaker 4: I was the one thing I wanted to say, though,
Speaker 4: is that she also seemed to be someone who absorbed
Speaker 4: a lot of the rhetoric that is coming from the
Speaker 4: top down today in our country, which is manufactured fear,
Speaker 4: weaponized racism again, and that those kind of things combined
Speaker 4: with her access to weapons.
Speaker 1: PA, well, think about those law What was this the
Speaker 1: incident in Saint Louis. Absolutely it was about three years
Speaker 1: ago with a guide shot and then was the kid
Speaker 1: who went to the wrong door. It was going to
Speaker 1: go happen more.
Speaker 4: It happened recently there was a woman who was supposed
Speaker 4: to clean someone's house and came to the door and
Speaker 4: the man shutter the wrong house. Like it is, this idea,
Speaker 4: but the manufactured fear is a tool to divide us, right,
Speaker 4: and when we fear our neighbors, when we like again,
Speaker 4: then we're okay with them being kidnapped and put in
Speaker 4: detention centers. Right, Like, it's used the idea, and it
Speaker 4: allows an authoritarian government to say things like, noah, we'll
Speaker 4: protect you. We just need to get rid of these
Speaker 4: people over here. So she seemed to be a symptom
Speaker 4: of all those societal ills.
Speaker 1: And that is why, in some ways I wanted to
Speaker 1: know more, Like is she just sitting on her lounge
Speaker 1: chair watching one feed of stuff? And you know, is
Speaker 1: her information ecosystem very blind or oriented? Right? You know?
Speaker 1: But it struck me she never had anybody with her.
Speaker 4: Yeah, then at once, now when she was moving out
Speaker 4: of the house, that was her sister.
Speaker 2: There was a woman there who was her sister.
Speaker 4: But other than that, that was that we didn't see
Speaker 4: much of anybody near her. But what's interesting, like I said,
Speaker 4: is there were other older women.
Speaker 2: There was another woman who was her neighbor who appears
Speaker 2: in that.
Speaker 4: Same scene, who is an older woman who similarly lives
Speaker 4: in that neighborhood. But she was the only one. That
Speaker 4: is what is so interesting. She is the only one
Speaker 4: who ever complained.
Speaker 1: Right, which tells you, you know, says more about.
Speaker 2: Her than anything else, and anything else.
Speaker 1: You know, the try to me all, you know, your
Speaker 1: documentary sort of makes the case that in some ways
Speaker 1: this was a form of premeditation. Now we can debate that.
Speaker 1: I get that that there's the letter of the law
Speaker 1: and premeditation, but this was not manslaugh. I think we
Speaker 1: all know that. And yet I understand that the state
Speaker 1: of Florida passed a law that tied the hands of
Speaker 1: those prosecutors.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I think also I will say this, I
Speaker 4: think the prosecution, from what happened in the Trayvon Martin
Speaker 4: case and others, I think they went for the lowest
Speaker 4: hanging fruit as.
Speaker 1: Well, because I wanted a conviction.
Speaker 4: They wanted a conviction, and with Trayvon Martin, George the
Speaker 4: Merman walked in the charge's murder, so I think with
Speaker 4: manslaughter and Florida, manslaughter carries up to forty years, sorry,
Speaker 4: thirty years. Manslaughter carries thirty years. So I felt, I
Speaker 4: feel that they thought they could get a conviction with
Speaker 4: manslaughter and.
Speaker 2: That she would serve. She would still end up with a.
Speaker 1: Long sentence effectively life. Effectively, she was going to be
Speaker 1: incarcerated for.
Speaker 4: Right yeah, for a sixty years, right yeah, thirty.
Speaker 2: You know, as she ended up with twenty five.
Speaker 4: She had not committed any other violent crime before, so
Speaker 4: I think so, but the judge gave her.
Speaker 2: The maximum that he could and that was twenty five.
Speaker 2: So she will be if you know again, where she
Speaker 2: just served the entire sentence, she would be eighty five
Speaker 2: once she gets out.
Speaker 1: So so let's say Governor DeSantis watches this film. What
Speaker 1: do you hope he takes away.
Speaker 4: I hope he takes away the damage laws that Standard
Speaker 4: Ground do to communities. I hope he takes away the
Speaker 4: fact that we need gun control, that in Florida you
Speaker 4: can buy a gun like you can buy.
Speaker 2: A toaster or a microwave.
Speaker 4: And there's a point you see in the film where
Speaker 4: Susan is clearly behaving erratically, and there should have been
Speaker 4: a question around her buying a gun. I also hope
Speaker 4: it that folks take away DeSantis included how policing works
Speaker 4: and how they could have and should have caught Susan,
Speaker 4: you know, and seeing her as a threat earlier on
Speaker 4: instead of just treating her like a nuisance. But I
Speaker 4: think because they the police again were not equipped to
Speaker 4: handle it. But they also brought there, you know, they
Speaker 4: brought their own biases to the scene, and she was
Speaker 4: able to weaponize them.
Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting with them, you know. It was interesting
Speaker 1: to hear how the officers saying, look, I'm going to
Speaker 1: believe you, and I'm going to believe them. I remember
Speaker 1: that was like it stuck out at me, and it's
Speaker 1: like it it was a reminder of why it's important
Speaker 1: for all of this to be on tape. Yes, all right,
Speaker 1: and I and again I go back. You and I
Speaker 1: both know that if this happens ten years ago, there's
Speaker 1: every chance in the world she's never charged.
Speaker 2: Oh and if there was no footage, I don't know
Speaker 2: that she would be charged.
Speaker 4: If you didn't see her erratic, you know, her behavior,
Speaker 4: calling the cops again and again and again, and if
Speaker 4: you didn't hear the community side of the story, right this, Yeah,
Speaker 4: she could have walked, And this is we honestly we
Speaker 4: didn't until the very end. We had that in our
Speaker 4: hearts that like we were we were like, she's probably
Speaker 4: going to get off, Like it's no way, it's not possible.
Speaker 1: This is the story of the twentieth century. In these incidents,
Speaker 1: they all walk, it felt like almost all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, this is why you know, I sit here
Speaker 1: and it's like it's an imperfect body camera footage is
Speaker 1: imperfect on all those things, but it's better.
Speaker 4: And it's also incredibly relevant today when you think about
Speaker 4: what's happening in Minnesota, when we were living in a
Speaker 4: time where we have a government who will distort the
Speaker 4: truth at any given moment freely, has no no moral.
Speaker 2: Compass around doing that. You know, with the murders that
Speaker 2: have happened in Minnesota, where I says murdered a number
Speaker 2: of people is.
Speaker 1: Exact that we're debating whether or not they should have
Speaker 1: body cameras I know, and they're saying, well, we'll put
Speaker 1: them on, but we want to be able to could no, no, no, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're putting that in your hands of deciding when those
Speaker 1: cameras go on and off, you.
Speaker 2: Need it at all.
Speaker 4: It should be on it all time because like I said,
Speaker 4: there there is clearly audacity, you know, of the powers
Speaker 4: that be. They like again, they feel they can distort
Speaker 4: the truth at any given moment to their advantage.
Speaker 2: And I think with and body camera is still only
Speaker 2: in eight states, it's only required in eight states that
Speaker 2: law enforcement wear it, And it could not be more
Speaker 2: critical right now. And it's it is a double edged
Speaker 2: sword for communities of color because it's it's also a
Speaker 2: tool of surveillance, you know.
Speaker 1: And no, look, I think about this a lot, you
Speaker 1: know when it comes to privacy, but you and iron
Speaker 1: I fear that people younger than us have like, don't
Speaker 1: don't view it as surveillance.
Speaker 4: It's surveillance, yeah, and it absolutely is. So it's a
Speaker 4: double edged sword, particularly for vulnerable, the most vulnerable. But
Speaker 4: I think right now, the particularly with the case of
Speaker 4: Ice and what is happening and with who we have
Speaker 4: in power, it is absolutely needed all law enforcement and
Speaker 4: government agents should be required to wear it.
Speaker 1: Opinion. A few sort of technical things about doing the film.
Speaker 1: Every once in a while you would have body camera
Speaker 1: audio and then it would just did you do sort
Speaker 1: of just sort of almost file footage of the neighborhood
Speaker 1: once or something? Yes, so we did.
Speaker 4: There was we did shoot bee role of the neighborhood.
Speaker 4: So some of the things we shot, we shot vigils,
Speaker 4: we shot protests, the funeral, and we shot bee role
Speaker 4: of the neighborhood. And some of that was for we
Speaker 4: shot originally as to give to media to share with
Speaker 4: news because we wanted use organizations to to to talk
Speaker 4: about what was happening.
Speaker 2: And then some of it.
Speaker 4: We shot afterwards just as part of the film so
Speaker 4: that we could again sort of create texture and.
Speaker 2: Also as people could see what the neighborhood looked like.
Speaker 1: What was the Was it a struggle to get everybody
Speaker 1: greed to allow their likeness to be used.
Speaker 4: No, What's so interesting is that that community was really
Speaker 4: like a family. We the body camera footage, we had
Speaker 4: to sort of work in reverse and try and find people.
Speaker 4: I did like look at them and get them identified
Speaker 4: and then find them at some of the people. It's
Speaker 4: interesting some people came to us redacted by the police,
Speaker 4: Like some of the footage the police had.
Speaker 1: Already we had already redacted. It interesting why would they.
Speaker 2: I think there was us to redact all of it.
Speaker 2: I see it didn't happen, so we so then, but
Speaker 2: if there were people that we could not find, particularly children,
Speaker 2: we would.
Speaker 1: Just redacted it. We redacted it. So that's so that
Speaker 1: any of the blurred faces were not people that said, no,
Speaker 1: you can't do this. It was more of the other way.
Speaker 2: It was more it was more people we couldn't find.
Speaker 4: But there were one or two people who were worried
Speaker 4: about it and we wanted to We were respectful of them,
Speaker 4: of course. I think though for the most part, the
Speaker 4: community stood behind what we were doing. Like they really
Speaker 4: loved each other and they we actually showed the film
Speaker 4: to them before it aired on Netflix, and it was
Speaker 4: very hard. They had a very visceral reaction to it,
Speaker 4: but they afterwards they they kind of talked through it
Speaker 4: and with each other and you know, had a lot
Speaker 4: of memories. I think it was I think ultimately they
Speaker 4: said it was therapeutic and that they wanted it out
Speaker 4: in the world because they understood what we were doing,
Speaker 4: and they said no other community should have to go
Speaker 4: through that. There is only one family left on that block.
Speaker 4: Everyone else has left.
Speaker 1: They left, They moved.
Speaker 2: How did you stay? And that's how So it's like
Speaker 2: the ripple effect.
Speaker 1: What's your kids?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ripple effect is enormous.
Speaker 4: And that so that beautiful communal again community where kids
Speaker 4: came from all the neighboring streets to play on that
Speaker 4: one block decimated.
Speaker 1: Because they had the empty grass field. Every neighborhood has
Speaker 1: that one and it yes, there said, but so you're
Speaker 1: not sure. I don't know who owned it.
Speaker 2: Actually it belonged to the neighbor. It belonged to Susan's
Speaker 2: neighbor who allowed them to.
Speaker 1: Play there, who had said yes.
Speaker 4: So it was often out there with them like it was.
Speaker 4: It was they had permission to be there.
Speaker 1: So, you know, I just think about you know, I
Speaker 1: I often believe that it was a It was helpful
Speaker 1: that I grew up in Miami. When I grew up
Speaker 1: in Miami. I grew up in Miami in the in
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties, and we went through three race
Speaker 1: riots in the eighties, all of which might not have
Speaker 1: happened if there had been body camera footage. You know,
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about just that aspect, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we ripped. Now it's Miami a beautiful place today in
Speaker 1: some ways because of the pain we all had to
Speaker 1: go through in the eighties. I think there is there.
Speaker 1: You could make a case that in some ways it is.
Speaker 1: But I think about all this sort of last decade
Speaker 1: that we had and how many and the destruction of
Speaker 1: a coup of these communities, Liberty City in particular, and
Speaker 1: and how it could have been avoided. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and so easily. Now, I mean, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: so that's what makes your film both there was like
Speaker 1: a hopefulness to it, like look, this, this is this
Speaker 1: is why we need body camera footage. We get a
Speaker 1: fuller picture, you get the better story. You know who
Speaker 1: the guilty party is. There's no question who's the instigator.
Speaker 1: There's no question. This isn't it he said, He said,
Speaker 1: like Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman in that business, you know.
Speaker 1: But it hasn't. It doesn't eradicate racism.
Speaker 2: No, no, unfortunately it doesn't.
Speaker 4: But I think they the hope is is that it
Speaker 4: might the film for us in some ways, that it
Speaker 4: serves as a deterrence. And again, because of the outcome
Speaker 4: at the end of the trial, we're like, maybe people
Speaker 4: will think twice about, you know, trying to trying to
Speaker 4: pervert the law, which is already a problem in and
Speaker 4: of itself, but pervert stand your ground laws and use
Speaker 4: them claim self defense when you're actually committing a crime.
Speaker 2: And that is the.
Speaker 4: Hope and again, and the ultimate hope is to have
Speaker 4: this law eradicated state by state and particlarly because of
Speaker 4: the danger as.
Speaker 1: Opposes your career. You started working in scripted film with
Speaker 1: Spike Lee, and he is he had spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time doing scripted social justice messaging, right, you know,
Speaker 1: and what do you think is the more effective way
Speaker 1: to get a message across? When is a documentary better
Speaker 1: than better than scripted? And and is it you said
Speaker 1: something earlier that sort of hit me in this day
Speaker 1: and age when we're not sure what to believe. You know,
Speaker 1: in some ways the body camera footage is the most
Speaker 1: believable material you could come up with. That tells me
Speaker 1: that maybe the better way to to to to tell
Speaker 1: a story is with is with is with real footage
Speaker 1: rather than scripted you know, in manufactured book.
Speaker 4: I think they both I love both mediums and I
Speaker 4: think they both absolutely have their place.
Speaker 2: I think if you have.
Speaker 4: The material to make a really compelling documentary. Why not,
Speaker 4: particularly if you're telling a true story, because I think
Speaker 4: people connect connecting to the fact that this is someone's
Speaker 4: actual life. It impacts them differently, whereas if it's actors
Speaker 4: or people. You know. Again, I love scripted was where
Speaker 4: I started, and so and I love it so much.
Speaker 4: But if you have the means to tell the story
Speaker 4: for real, you know, then why not why not do that?
Speaker 2: You know? And I think.
Speaker 4: I think that truth is often stranger than fiction, you know,
Speaker 4: Like I the this film to me is a stuff
Speaker 4: have like you said, of a community of human behavior,
Speaker 4: of policaying, like it has so many layers and yeah,
Speaker 4: and it's real, right it is. It's this is stuff
Speaker 4: that actually unfolded. Uh So I think that makes it
Speaker 4: really powerful. But like like I said, I love both.
Speaker 4: I love both, and so I'm always happy to see,
Speaker 4: you know again, stories be told in multiple ways as.
Speaker 2: Creatively as possible.
Speaker 4: I think if it's really up to the vision of
Speaker 4: the team and the director to decide.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's funny. I think you set a
Speaker 1: bar here that I wonder for yourself, is it is
Speaker 1: it going to be? If you want to do a
Speaker 1: documentary about another topic and you don't have enough footage?
Speaker 1: Are you going to say, oh, geez, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. If I don't, I don't want to go
Speaker 1: back to the talking head.
Speaker 2: I might need to tap out. I feel like, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, I mean in some ways, right, You're like, well,
Speaker 1: this is I mean, there's I don't it's not. Who
Speaker 1: knows how often you can just get that, yeah, to
Speaker 1: tell a story.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it is a rare, tragic confluence of things
Speaker 2: that led to this film.
Speaker 4: But I you know, I kind of believe that, and
Speaker 4: this is interesting. I'm usually not a person who thinks
Speaker 4: like this, but I sort of feel like this film.
Speaker 4: There's a story about Ajica. Her mother always tells about
Speaker 4: how she was this.
Speaker 2: Ojika was a really vibrant, funny, bright person who had
Speaker 2: a lot of big dreams. She was young, you know,
Speaker 2: she was in her thirties, and she wanted better for
Speaker 2: herself and her family. And she used to talk to
Speaker 2: her and call her mom every day.
Speaker 4: They were very close and they'd talk about her plans.
Speaker 4: She wanted to be an entrepreneur. She was going to
Speaker 4: you know, be world famous, and her mother would laugh
Speaker 4: at her sometimes, like moms do you know, just like
Speaker 4: because of her ideas and you know, just whatever. And
Speaker 4: she would say to her mom and was one of
Speaker 4: the last things she said to her, and she would say, wait,
Speaker 4: you know you just.
Speaker 2: Wait, you laugh. But one day the whole world's going
Speaker 2: to know my name.
Speaker 4: So for us, we're left with that in her absence,
Speaker 4: and I kind of feel like she's a part of
Speaker 4: this somehow. She wanted the world to know her name,
Speaker 4: obviously never in this way, but that's become it's now
Speaker 4: on us to make that happen and to try to
Speaker 4: do more with her legacy and to make change in
Speaker 4: her name.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I think this film it has so much more.
Speaker 4: Every film is so important, but this film, in a way,
Speaker 4: there's a bit more weight on.
Speaker 2: On how what we do with it and the impact.
Speaker 1: How are her kids like it?
Speaker 2: It's I think it's up and down that for children.
Speaker 4: Children are both incredibly resilient but also fragile and are
Speaker 4: not I mean and this is this would devastate anyone.
Speaker 4: So I think they are. They are loved, They're deeply loved.
Speaker 4: The one incredible thing too, that we were able to do,
Speaker 4: which was part of my dream, was with this film.
Speaker 4: I had hoped that if we sold it then we
Speaker 4: could give the money to the family, because we had
Speaker 4: nothing to offer them. Otherwise, we didn't have any money,
Speaker 4: you know, we're just filmmakers. But the sale to Netflix
Speaker 4: that happened out of Sundown's allowed us to give the
Speaker 4: majority of the money to the grandmother and to the
Speaker 4: family so they could again these kids, children can have security,
Speaker 4: so they have that they are loved and taken care of.
Speaker 4: But there's struggle. There's emotional struggle, which will probably again,
Speaker 4: it's going to take many.
Speaker 2: Years to hear.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you ever get over it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think. Yeah, I think that's right. That
Speaker 2: kind of loss and that kind of trauma, you.
Speaker 4: Build resources and you build strength to work around it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I'm haunted just talking about it
Speaker 1: at the moment by her son, at the moment she's
Speaker 1: shot and he's just gasping for air.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, it's it is to see children, and it's interesting
Speaker 4: that grief. We've had many conversations about it because that grief,
Speaker 4: watching the children learn that their mother is not coming
Speaker 4: home is the most challenging thing I think.
Speaker 1: And that was on body camera footage that moment with their.
Speaker 2: Father, just because the police were around them.
Speaker 1: Just you know, you're just sitting there and you're just
Speaker 1: that was a moment I forgot it was body camera
Speaker 1: footage and I'm like, wait a minute, isn't just so intimate, right?
Speaker 1: It was felt it almost and then and then it's like, wow,
Speaker 1: what was that police officer invading their space?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was he invading themselves. But at the same time,
Speaker 4: the police are trying to comfort them. So she was like,
Speaker 4: it's weirdly human also like it's a moment of humanity
Speaker 4: that I think where the police officers were trying to
Speaker 4: hug them and we're trying to console them and didn't
Speaker 4: also didn't know what to do, you know, because it
Speaker 4: was such a so heartbreak. I think though, the it's
Speaker 4: interesting that footage because I think we are so numb
Speaker 4: to gun violence. Audiences react more to the grief than
Speaker 4: anything else. And we talked about it with Ajika's mother.
Speaker 4: I was like, do you want this in Like should
Speaker 4: we remove this?
Speaker 2: This is the worst day of these children's lives and
Speaker 2: here it is like do we want this out in
Speaker 2: the world. And she said to me, no, you leave that.
Speaker 1: In She was like, you leave that like Attil's mother.
Speaker 4: Yes, she was like, the world needs if they had
Speaker 4: to go through that, if my grandchildren had to live
Speaker 4: through that, the world can bear witness. You know, it's
Speaker 4: a society failing them. They need the world needs to know.
Speaker 4: And I was like, okay, whatever, you know, that's obviously
Speaker 4: it's her call.
Speaker 1: What do you want the average police officer to learn
Speaker 1: from this?
Speaker 4: I think that I would love this to be used
Speaker 4: as a tool for police training, and I think I
Speaker 4: do think there's multiple things at play here. I think
Speaker 4: a lot of police departments are not trained or equipped for.
Speaker 2: These kinds of issues. They're civil, they see them as civil.
Speaker 1: And it was funny to even hear that once during
Speaker 1: the thing, well that's criminal, where Susan's trying so hard
Speaker 1: to like get that, Yeah about criminal, I'm here for that.
Speaker 4: You know what's interesting, though, is we did have a
Speaker 4: police officer, a former law enforcement officer, approached us after
Speaker 4: a screening. He approached my producer and Elisa Payne and
Speaker 4: talked to her and she was nervous because you know,
Speaker 4: he came up and said, I I'm a I used
Speaker 4: to be in.
Speaker 1: Law enforce, and she was like, Okay, here we go.
Speaker 2: I'm about to get a lecture. But he was like,
Speaker 2: you know what after the third time Susan called here
Speaker 2: in this state and this was in Utah, he said,
Speaker 2: in this state, she would have been flagged as a
Speaker 2: problem and she.
Speaker 1: Would have been interesting.
Speaker 4: He would have been ticketed. She would have been given
Speaker 4: a warning for abusing emergency services, for essentially calling for
Speaker 4: things that were founded.
Speaker 2: And she was like, in the.
Speaker 4: The community would have been told they could file restraining
Speaker 4: order or charges against her for harassment.
Speaker 2: And that is that.
Speaker 1: How many states have laws like that? I didn't you know, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know, but it's true.
Speaker 4: I do think and we have I think I understand
Speaker 4: that in states, if you constantly call the police and
Speaker 4: it's unfounded, you can be you know, you become Well.
Speaker 1: We've had we I had to pay a fine because
Speaker 1: our alarm went off and our fire alarm went off
Speaker 1: and the fire department came. And I thought, well that
Speaker 1: in some ways that is reasonable. I just you know,
Speaker 1: that should be fined, and like I understood it. I
Speaker 1: was like, oh Jesus, I you know, I hate this
Speaker 1: thing anyway, you know, but I know we have some
Speaker 1: form of that here in Arlington.
Speaker 2: There's no real emergency.
Speaker 1: Right, there was not a fair point, and I.
Speaker 4: Think she so they said that, And then I also
Speaker 4: believe that really there there should be alternative services to police,
Speaker 4: which are for again, community disputes, mediation, mental health crises,
Speaker 4: that type of thing.
Speaker 1: I think that's we don't have enough law enforcement officers
Speaker 1: and then they would have to hire I mean that's like, right,
Speaker 1: we are so well, we're underfunded in things that we
Speaker 1: don't prioritize.
Speaker 2: That's exactly well, I don't know that we because some
Speaker 2: police departments are very well funded, but the funding goes to,
Speaker 2: you know, only specific things.
Speaker 4: Some of that funding could go to again services that
Speaker 4: where you send out a social worker, a psychiatrist, you know,
Speaker 4: like and a team of nurses.
Speaker 2: Like this is the kind of thing now here.
Speaker 4: In New York we're talking about for people who are
Speaker 4: having or who are either unhoused or maybe having a
Speaker 4: mental health crisis, because otherwise they end up dead. If
Speaker 4: you call the cops, people get shot, you know, So
Speaker 4: there should be something else in place.
Speaker 2: And I feel like if the police are meant to
Speaker 2: deal with criminal stuff, first of all, you see, they
Speaker 2: don't prevent anything, because Ajka ended up dead regardless, right,
Speaker 2: even though they came home.
Speaker 1: True it didn't work. They were responsive. You can't say
Speaker 1: they weren't responsive. So in that sense, good they were.
Speaker 2: They didn't prevent anything.
Speaker 1: They tried to de escalate in the moment. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have it didn't prevent it.
Speaker 2: Didn't They didn't have a solution.
Speaker 1: And also Susan, but I get the sense they almost
Speaker 1: felt like they couldn't impose a solution. They didn't. It
Speaker 1: wasn't they didn't know what to do. I did get
Speaker 1: the sense they didn't know what to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then they are not they are not trained.
Speaker 1: Actually, I think we got we got a hint. And
Speaker 1: I'm curious. So there was a moment where one that's sorry,
Speaker 1: where one of the officers they leave. You know, this
Speaker 1: is probably the third time that they second or third visit.
Speaker 1: This is sort of early in the film, and the
Speaker 1: officer refers to her as an fing b.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of them says that, another one calls her a.
Speaker 1: Psycho, and then the audio abruptly cuts. I was curious,
Speaker 1: was that your editor there edit that's shut off, was
Speaker 1: like realized she was She was probably saying something despair.
Speaker 1: It was like, God, she's a and then she like, so,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing they're like, well, if you're gonna dispara, you know,
Speaker 1: be careful getting caught on camera disparaging people or something.
Speaker 1: She then that means that's the police officer realizing I
Speaker 1: better shut this off before I get myself. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's right. So there's a sense where the officers know
Speaker 1: who the party that's in the wrong here. They didn't
Speaker 1: know it. They don't have any Is it the law
Speaker 1: that's missing? Is it or is it their training? I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't what what do you think is the issue here?
Speaker 2: I think they never saw her as a threat. I
Speaker 2: think she was able to weaponize her as a nuisance, yeah,
Speaker 2: but not a threat. And she was able to weaponize
Speaker 2: her race and privilege to make that true. Had she
Speaker 2: been a person of color filming children and using hate
Speaker 2: speech against them and saying threatening things, I don't think
Speaker 2: this would have gone the way it did, or that
Speaker 2: she would have, you know.
Speaker 1: Not been she might have been an intervention.
Speaker 2: It's more than a nuisance.
Speaker 4: And they also the police also didn't see the community
Speaker 4: is needing protection from her, you know. So I think
Speaker 4: This is unfortunately that they aside from lack of training,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera, and again they are our bar
Speaker 4: for the police. My husband says, this is so low
Speaker 4: that we often mistake they're polite. We missed stake their
Speaker 4: politeness for competence. You know, they didn't see her as
Speaker 4: a threat.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, in Florida, you could not go there like like
Speaker 2: a toaster or microwave, so that could make anybody a threat.
Speaker 2: And even after she behaved radically driving her car into
Speaker 2: a fence, there was a scene where we saw that
Speaker 2: they didn't think about it.
Speaker 1: You know, she never got connected.
Speaker 2: M like, hey, systemic issue.
Speaker 1: She's a she's uniquely broken. I go back to broken.
Speaker 1: I always like to use broken because I assume everybody
Speaker 1: has the potential. Yeah, and you know so you usually
Speaker 1: try to go with broken. But she was something happened right,
Speaker 1: she was not she was She did not process the
Speaker 1: way most people process.
Speaker 4: But she was left over here to fester, right by
Speaker 4: them then saying, oh.
Speaker 1: My guess is she alienated everybody in her own life?
Speaker 4: Huh?
Speaker 1: I mean it was not, and I don't to me,
Speaker 1: the footage doesn't lie. You didn't paint her as a loaner.
Speaker 1: But we never saw her with anybody, and that doesn't
Speaker 1: surprise me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we knew know she attended a church, so there
Speaker 4: was you know, she was there was a community like.
Speaker 1: She was clearly always miserable. I mean, if if kids
Speaker 1: playing drives you crazy, you've got your own issues.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But I think the thing that's really important to say
Speaker 4: here is too the system also failed her. The system
Speaker 4: failed Ajica and her family and that viewpoint.
Speaker 2: But it failed her. She should have never had access
Speaker 2: to again. She should have never you know, if there
Speaker 2: had been an intervention, she would not be in jail
Speaker 2: for ostensibly the rest of her life.
Speaker 1: I mean, one law Florida did pass. Was there a
Speaker 1: red flag law after the Parkland shooting that has been
Speaker 1: quite effective in Florida. What happened, and she would have
Speaker 1: been a prime candidate, uh, perhaps for it. Yeah, they knew,
Speaker 1: you know, and that is a question. Did they know
Speaker 1: she was a firearm owner? Because they could have found
Speaker 1: out that they chose.
Speaker 2: To, they could have fell out, but they just did not.
Speaker 1: They never chose to.
Speaker 4: But she also saw her play victim, right, She weaponized
Speaker 4: victimhood the minute she thought she was in trouble, suddenly.
Speaker 1: Welcome to our welcome to our politics and social media everybody.
Speaker 4: Also, yes, weaponizing victimhood and I think but that has
Speaker 4: been a strategy, I have to say, all like, it's
Speaker 4: part of white grievance, right, It's like and also white
Speaker 4: women and their and fear when you look at Emma
Speaker 4: Till's case, right, has led white women and as we
Speaker 4: you know, it's now termed Karen is a Karen.
Speaker 1: I saw that the kids were you Karen, Karen.
Speaker 2: But it's been the weaponization of racism right since.
Speaker 1: The time neighbor named Karen. She hates it. I feel
Speaker 1: bad for her that her name's now a pejorative.
Speaker 2: Helpless people have been lynched because of a white woman said, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm afraid. I don't feel safe. They you know, they
Speaker 2: whistled at me or he said he talked to me,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: I mean that's how I until died. So we think
Speaker 4: about this and and Susan was doing that. She was
Speaker 4: doing that, and it's like a modern version of that.
Speaker 1: So so what's next for you? Projects? I mean, I
Speaker 1: know most documentaries have like eight projects that they and
Speaker 1: they're waiting for see which one is going Okay, this
Speaker 1: one's ripe, right, it's.
Speaker 4: Last year, I should say my Message Pictures which is
Speaker 4: Sam Pollard, Alisa Payne and myself and the con Kwon
Speaker 4: two is a longtime collaborator. We had Katrina come Helen
Speaker 4: high Water come out on that in October. It was
Speaker 4: a very successful series was number one for them for
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks or for at least a week,
Speaker 4: but it did really well for them. And then we
Speaker 4: also had a short come out, The Devil Is Busy,
Speaker 4: which I co directed with Crystal and Hampton, my best
Speaker 4: friend from college, and that is also nominated for an Oscar.
Speaker 4: So I have two films that are nominated, which is
Speaker 4: apparently the first time it's ever happened for a woman,
Speaker 4: two films all right directed, So that is a huge
Speaker 4: you know again for me in honor, also a little
Speaker 4: disappointed that I am the first.
Speaker 2: It should have happened already, but whatever, I'll take it.
Speaker 1: So its yeah.
Speaker 2: And then we have the perfect So so now we are.
Speaker 2: So we're starting up.
Speaker 4: There is another documentary which we'll be announced in a
Speaker 4: couple of weeks that we're about to we're beginning on
Speaker 4: that we're excited about and then we're also diving back
Speaker 4: into scripted. We have some because I come from scripted,
Speaker 4: Alisa comes subscripted, Sam does scripted, so where ni Con
Speaker 4: was an animation producer, so we have we want to
Speaker 4: sort of branch out into back into other forms that
Speaker 4: we've always been part of.
Speaker 1: Well. One of the things that I've since leaving sort
Speaker 1: of the legacy media world is realizing that there are
Speaker 1: just a million ways to teach people. Yes, right, and
Speaker 1: you know, film, especially with this younger generation that is
Speaker 1: much more visual than they are text. And there's I
Speaker 1: say that I'm not judging, you know, we all learn differently,
Speaker 1: we all absorb differently, and the visual medium as a story,
Speaker 1: you know, and telling stories in some way the best storytellers.
Speaker 1: We need now more than ever in order to educate
Speaker 1: the country about our history, educate people about our history.
Speaker 1: So in that vein, I mean where you know this
Speaker 1: to me is is it's an education film as much
Speaker 1: as it's you know it's there to it's there to
Speaker 1: visually show you something that you can read about. This
Speaker 1: is not a new story, but this was told in
Speaker 1: a more powerful, in a different way, in a way
Speaker 1: that is hopefully going to get absorbed by people who
Speaker 1: may not read. You know, a story I just had
Speaker 1: an author on not too long ago, the person who
Speaker 1: wrote about and the Barn that Emmettil was killed in,
Speaker 1: right Thompson. And it's a terrific book. But in some
Speaker 1: ways not everybody reads books.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so it's like, how do we reach people?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Ryan Coogler told a really beautiful story we were We
Speaker 2: have Sinners has been on the you know, we've sort
Speaker 2: of been on the road together and the team.
Speaker 1: You've been seeing you've been doing the circuit with. Yes,
Speaker 1: Sinners is another that's awful, which is such a way
Speaker 1: to do horror.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's such a like again, such a thrill for us.
Speaker 4: But he talked about how in the neighborhood he grew
Speaker 4: up in, like, there were elders who actually, because of
Speaker 4: lack of schooling or they had to leave school at
Speaker 4: an early age, you couldn't read. Like they could run
Speaker 4: a business, they could navigate street signs, they could understand,
Speaker 4: they couldn't actually read and comprehend a book.
Speaker 2: That they had.
Speaker 1: Movies.
Speaker 2: Movies were their medium, you know, a medium for them
Speaker 2: to like gain information and think about the world and
Speaker 2: interact with it because they didn't have the privilege of
Speaker 2: learning how to read. And I thought that was so
Speaker 2: powerful and that I have.
Speaker 4: There's some relation to that for me with like the
Speaker 4: women in my family who you know, again elder women
Speaker 4: not my mother's generation, but further back, who might have
Speaker 4: been taken out of school at like a young age.
Speaker 1: They're supposed to you know, at the keep house or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so for them even movies were like an
Speaker 2: escape and something, you know, a medium that they could
Speaker 2: really be immersed in.
Speaker 1: So is there a topic you haven't done that you
Speaker 1: want to tackle.
Speaker 2: I would like to do a comedy. I would like
Speaker 2: to do something I think I've in need. I would
Speaker 2: like to do a humorous movie. That's my That's one
Speaker 2: of the.
Speaker 1: Dreams, just that of funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the humor is so critical. Humor is a
Speaker 2: revolutionary So I feel like that is something.
Speaker 1: That I would like. It's also another way to teach.
Speaker 2: Yes, it is, and it's been used in so many ways.
Speaker 2: I think about Whoopy Goldberg talks about moms Mabley, who
Speaker 2: was her icon, who used that platform of comedy to
Speaker 2: talk about deeply political things she would never have been
Speaker 2: able to talk about otherwise.
Speaker 1: So what me I to get a creator? And I'm
Speaker 1: very curious how do you use AI and what are
Speaker 1: you comfortable with and what are you going to fight
Speaker 1: to the death on when it.
Speaker 2: Comes to the side, we don't use that. I don't
Speaker 2: use that as in my filmmaking, So that does not.
Speaker 1: Are you convinced you'll never use it?
Speaker 4: I I am right now convinced I'll never use it.
Speaker 2: But I can't predict the future, right.
Speaker 1: No, I mean I don't think any of us know
Speaker 1: how they Yeah, I do tools get changed on us
Speaker 1: and you're.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, and also too, does it just become so
Speaker 4: ubiquitous that we have no choice?
Speaker 2: I'm worried about that. I would like to say I
Speaker 2: will never use it.
Speaker 4: I and that is my stance, But there comes a
Speaker 4: point where you end up shut out, right, like if you,
Speaker 4: for example, like I know I will not have a
Speaker 4: cell phone, but then if you don't like it, actually
Speaker 4: you have.
Speaker 1: You just to navigate the word like now you can't.
Speaker 4: Not have one, you cannot have one, and my children too,
Speaker 4: Like it's interesting.
Speaker 1: Even in speaking of surveillance, I always say this, imagine
Speaker 1: if the government. Imagine if the government had said we're
Speaker 1: you have to carry a phone with you all the time.
Speaker 1: What do you mean we have to carry a phone
Speaker 1: with us? Right, yeah, yeah, we all did it voluntarily.
Speaker 1: It's but I think, but.
Speaker 4: I think so that's the thing, like I right now, no,
Speaker 4: but twenty years from now.
Speaker 1: I mean you talked about you have a friend who's
Speaker 1: doing an animation. I mean that that that scares me
Speaker 1: at how that will be the first I fear that's
Speaker 1: the first thing that falls.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the first to.
Speaker 1: Go because it's so expensive and labor intensive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.
Speaker 4: You know, but I think we'll have to see it's
Speaker 4: up to our community, right, like we really have to make.
Speaker 1: Decisions well, and it's also up to the public hopefully.
Speaker 1: The stuff that's made with AI is you know, it's
Speaker 1: like you don't want to eat plastic fruit, no, you no?
Speaker 1: And I think we've all learned, oh gross, it looks good,
Speaker 1: but probably.
Speaker 4: Right we continue to see the value in what we
Speaker 4: do and don't want to replace.
Speaker 1: Us with well, and it goes like I said, it
Speaker 1: goes back to to take this back to the beginning
Speaker 1: as we land this plane that you know, I believe
Speaker 1: there's a premium on real life in person live authenticity,
Speaker 1: no editors, no anything, and in some case your body
Speaker 1: camera footage is all of that wrapped up. It is,
Speaker 1: you know, the the pushback against you know, manufactured content.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you for saying that. That means a lot.
Speaker 1: Well, look, good luck and uh, I know who I'm
Speaker 1: rooting for night.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: All right, it's great to get to know. Well, let's
Speaker 1: get into the time machine because guess what, let's just
Speaker 1: say thematically, it sort of fits with the UH with
Speaker 1: the broader theme of the beginning of this podcast having
Speaker 1: to do with emergencies and how those in power can
Speaker 1: abuse UH legislation that gives them emergency power. So let's
Speaker 1: get into the time machine. Where are we going? We
Speaker 1: were going back to February twenty seventh, nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: the German parliament building known as the Reichstag burned. The
Speaker 1: fire matters, but the story isn't the flames. The real
Speaker 1: story is how fragile Germany's political system already was, how
Speaker 1: quickly legal authority became a vehicle for authoritarian power. And
Speaker 1: to understand the night of the Reichstag fire, you have
Speaker 1: to understand why Adolf Hitler was even in office in
Speaker 1: the first place, because he didn't seize power, he was
Speaker 1: handed power. That's how this authoritarian regime in Germany began.
Speaker 1: By the early nineteen thirties, Germany was exhausted. The Great
Speaker 1: Depression had devastated the economy. Remember America was pursuing that
Speaker 1: horrible protectionist tariff policy that was essentially causing the rise
Speaker 1: of nationalism all around the world. That's my historical opinion.
Speaker 1: But it had devastating impact than the European economy, particularly
Speaker 1: the Germans. Unemployment sword banks collapsed. Faith in the parliamentary
Speaker 1: democracy in Germany erode it. The president, Paul von Hindenberg,
Speaker 1: had already appointed three chancellors in rapid succession before he
Speaker 1: ends up appointing Adolf Hitler. First, it was Heinrich Bruening.
Speaker 1: He governed through the harsh austerity measures during the depression.
Speaker 1: He was the one that had to cut spending and
Speaker 1: wages in hopes of trying to stabilize the currency. Instead,
Speaker 1: it deepened public misery and he lost support inside that parliament.
Speaker 1: Then came Franz von Poppen, who had virtually no base
Speaker 1: inside parliament and ruled almost entirely by presidential emergency decree.
Speaker 1: He alienated both the left and the right and could
Speaker 1: not build a governing coalition. And then the last one
Speaker 1: before Hitler was a gentleman by the name of Kurt
Speaker 1: von Schlatscher who tried to split the Nazi Party and
Speaker 1: construct a cross party alliance. It failed and he quickly
Speaker 1: lost Hindenburg's So in under three years, Germany cycled through
Speaker 1: three increasingly unstable governments. And during that entire period they
Speaker 1: had something called Article forty eight, the emergency clause of
Speaker 1: the Weimar Constitution, which was used regularly to bypass parliament
Speaker 1: because parliament was so dysfunctional and divided, so emergency rule
Speaker 1: had already been normalized in German society's some From there,
Speaker 1: Hitler didn't invent the habit. He stippingly stepped into the void.
Speaker 1: So how did Hitler get there? In nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party had surged to become the largest party
Speaker 1: in parliament. It was real popular support, but he did
Speaker 1: not The Nazi Party did not have a majority in parliament,
Speaker 1: but in the November nineteen thirty two elections, the Nazis
Speaker 1: actually lost seats. Momentum was slipping. Hitler was not inevitable.
Speaker 1: But what changed was the calculation of the elites. Again,
Speaker 1: just think about the Republican Party circa twenty sixteen. But
Speaker 1: I digress. So what changed was elite calculation. Conservative insiders,
Speaker 1: especially Franz von Poppin, believe they could use Hitler's popularity
Speaker 1: to stabilize government. They assumed that they would dominate the Captain,
Speaker 1: that they could box Hitler in, that his radicalism could
Speaker 1: be managed, that his mass following could be harnessed. Well,
Speaker 1: they were wrong, but they tried so. On January thirtieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three, Hindenberg appointed Hitler Chancellor. Not because he
Speaker 1: was democratic, not because he had a majority in parliament
Speaker 1: he did not, but because the elites at the time thought, well,
Speaker 1: he's got the biggest block of supporters and we can
Speaker 1: control him. Or so they thought, so he gets appointed
Speaker 1: January thirtieth, twenty seven. Twenty eight days later, excuse me,
Speaker 1: February twenty seventh, the Reichstock burns now a Dutch communists
Speaker 1: Marinis vander Lub was arrested at the scene. Most historians
Speaker 1: today believe he likely acted alone. Whether the Nazis helped
Speaker 1: or simply exploited the fire is still debated to this day.
Speaker 1: Right was it an inside job? Was you know? Was
Speaker 1: vander Lubi a patsy? But politically it didn't matter. Hitler
Speaker 1: immediately framed the event as the beginning of a communist uprising,
Speaker 1: and that framing found fertile ground. Enemy of my enemy
Speaker 1: is my ally, and everybody feared the communists in Germany.
Speaker 1: Germany had a growing Communist block inside the Reichstock Street.
Speaker 1: Clashes between Nazis and Communists were common. Political violence was
Speaker 1: happening a lot. The violence was real and fear moved quickly.
Speaker 1: So the next day after the fire, February twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: Hindenberg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree under Article forty eight.
Speaker 1: That decree suspended, essentially what is the equivalent of our
Speaker 1: first Amendment. It suspended freedom of speech, freedom of the press,
Speaker 1: freedom of assembly, protections against arrest without charge. This was
Speaker 1: constitutional authority, legal authority. Their constitution essentially created a dictatorship. Legally.
Speaker 1: Thousands of communists were arrested immediately, their ability to organize
Speaker 1: a campaign was crippled. And then here's the here's the
Speaker 1: key with it. A week later, they're holding elections. Anyway,
Speaker 1: they were having another round of elections in March. So
Speaker 1: on March fifth, nineteen thirty three Germany votes, the Nazi
Speaker 1: Party receives forty three point nine percent of the vote
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty eight seats, not a majority. Even
Speaker 1: after the fire, even after the repression, the Nazis did
Speaker 1: not command a majority of German voters. But here's where
Speaker 1: the mechanics mattered. The Communist Party won about twelve percent
Speaker 1: in that election, but many of its deputies were prevented
Speaker 1: from taking their seats. They wouldn't let the Communists in there.
Speaker 1: So it you take away the Communists, suddenly that looks
Speaker 1: like they do have a majority. So when you combined
Speaker 1: with conservative allies, the Nazis had the numbers to move forward.
Speaker 1: Later in March, they passed something called the Enabling Act,
Speaker 1: in a granted Hitler's cabinet authority to legislate without parliamentary approval.
Speaker 1: Just they just he would decree. There was no more
Speaker 1: legislative bridge in Germany at this point. By the way,
Speaker 1: to get this pasted, it required two thirds majority. The
Speaker 1: legislature basically voted to eradicate its existence. And why did
Speaker 1: it pass because the Communist Party members weren't allowed to vote,
Speaker 1: they were absent. Some opposition members were simply intimidated by
Speaker 1: the Nazi thugs. Conservative parties calculated that cooperation was safer
Speaker 1: than resistance. Again go back to nine twenty sixteen. Sorry,
Speaker 1: the authoritarian turned required votes, it required signatures, it required
Speaker 1: a legal procedure. The German dictatorship was done via constitutional rules.
Speaker 1: Why did it work well? By February nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: emergency governance had already been normalized. Parliament had already been
Speaker 1: weakened in Germany. The economic crisis had eroded faith in
Speaker 1: liberal democracy in general. What they looked around and wasn't working.
Speaker 1: People didn't like people didn't like that economy. Elites believed
Speaker 1: the temporary authoritarian measures would restore order. So the Reichstag
Speaker 1: fire did not create authoritarianism, but it accelerated a system
Speaker 1: that was already leaning in that direction. And that's what's
Speaker 1: so always been so unsettling about this incident and history,
Speaker 1: because the incident is not the fire or the arson.
Speaker 1: The most unsettling part of this story is its legality.
Speaker 1: German democracy didn't collapse because laws were ignored, just the opposite.
Speaker 1: It collapsed because the laws were used expansively, but they
Speaker 1: were used, and they were used under crisis conditions. Our
Speaker 1: emergency powers are not inherently authoritarian. It's who uses those
Speaker 1: emergency powers. But when crisis becomes the organizing principle of
Speaker 1: governance and legislatures differ rather than assert authority, emergency becomes permanence.
Speaker 1: Hitler did not overthrow the system in one night. He
Speaker 1: operated within it, stretched it until it snapped, and then
Speaker 1: created his own scary version. The reichs Dog didn't fall
Speaker 1: in flames, It fell with signatures. Boy, such a reminder.
Speaker 1: History doesn't repeat, but it certainly does. Right, all right,
Speaker 1: little question time. By the way, I might as well
Speaker 1: share this with you so that don't name anything Hindenburg,
Speaker 1: because Hindenburg is a politician and Hindenburg is a blimp
Speaker 1: all end in catastrophe. That's the real takeaway. That's my
Speaker 1: other takeaway from our time machine history of the Reichstag Fire.
Speaker 1: But anyway, let's take some questions.
Speaker 2: Ask Chuck.
Speaker 1: This comes from Jaye New York, and he says, hey,
Speaker 1: you mentioned last week that populism almost always leads to
Speaker 1: with anti semitism. It is an accurate correlation with some
Speaker 1: obvious historical examples Hitler's Germany. But my question is why
Speaker 1: does populism lead to anti stism? Is it simply because populis
Speaker 1: often look for a scapegoat and Jewish people provide an
Speaker 1: easy target as a non Jewish person. I've accepted the
Speaker 1: correlation of populism anti Semitism. I've never really considered the
Speaker 1: why Jay It's an excellent question. I think one is
Speaker 1: we're a super small minority already. Two that's so, and
Speaker 1: minorities get scapegoated generally. Two Jews do punch above their
Speaker 1: weight in corporate America, in the finance world, So in
Speaker 1: tough economic times it becomes if you already, especially if
Speaker 1: you you know, look, there's less anti Semitism in South
Speaker 1: Florida because there's more Jews that live in South Florida, right,
Speaker 1: you know, they're to me, the correlation of anti Semitism
Speaker 1: usually is where there's fewer Jews. Right wherever you see
Speaker 1: the least amount of Jews, you'll see the most amount
Speaker 1: of anti Semitism. Some of it's driven by some some
Speaker 1: hateful sects of Christianity, not Christianity itself, but there are
Speaker 1: some sort of sex that most Christians would denounce that
Speaker 1: that that use religion to sort of teach hate of Jews.
Speaker 1: But it's it. I've all, you know, looked as I
Speaker 1: look at it, and you're just like I just I
Speaker 1: find it amusing that this tiny you know, that that
Speaker 1: we Jews here that were like point three percent of
Speaker 1: the globe's population or something like that, and yet we're
Speaker 1: and in fact, we're still below our population high are
Speaker 1: below the popular what the Jewish population of the globe
Speaker 1: was pre World War Two. And you know, we're apparently,
Speaker 1: you know, behind all these incredible conspiracies. So we really,
Speaker 1: I guess, punch above our weight. But look, it's always
Speaker 1: easy to scapegoat entities you don't know. And it's still
Speaker 1: there are still huge pockets in this country, huge pockets
Speaker 1: around the world that no Jewish people exist, but have
Speaker 1: never met one. So when you have not when you
Speaker 1: don't know anybody as a three dimensional figure, it's easy
Speaker 1: to turn them into sort of two dimensional enemies. It's
Speaker 1: the best explanation I have, But it is, you know,
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. I mean, it's interesting the way you
Speaker 1: word it, you sort of you accept you accept that
Speaker 1: as an accurate correlation. I mean it just it just
Speaker 1: is always what happens. I think sometimes we forget that,
Speaker 1: you know, bad ideas are usually not rational. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: a better way to look at him. Next question comes
Speaker 1: from Bills from Newburg, Oregon, but he says temporarily false Church, Virginia. Well,
Speaker 1: it's nice to have you as a neighbor, Bill, he says.
Speaker 1: I think if you answer this one, then I'll enter
Speaker 1: the five timers club. If that means that you've read
Speaker 1: five of my questions on here. If you do honor
Speaker 1: me thus, I humbly thank you. Is this the first
Speaker 1: administration that runs the most like a business that you've
Speaker 1: ever seen? Long a mantra of Republicans, I think they
Speaker 1: finally got their wish and this administration is run the
Speaker 1: most like a business or any other. Your defense of
Speaker 1: Casey Watperson's corporation is acting rightly in the face of
Speaker 1: the Epstein files made me shake my head. I think
Speaker 1: this administration is handling the Epstein files exactly the way
Speaker 1: a corporation's PR department went. I often say go Kaines,
Speaker 1: but this time I'll say go Seahawks, my adopted team.
Speaker 1: Thanks billis I didn't know I was defending the Casey
Speaker 1: Washerman Corporation ex actly rightly in the face anyway, Not
Speaker 1: quite sure. I get the question you're asking if it's
Speaker 1: running more like Well, it depends on if by running
Speaker 1: the business, do you do what's in the best interest
Speaker 1: A business is supposed to do what's in the best
Speaker 1: interest of its bottom line. The question does Donald Trump
Speaker 1: run this administration and the best interest in the bottom
Speaker 1: line of the United States, or does he run it
Speaker 1: in the best interests of the bottom line of Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: I know that sounds a bit sort of like hyperbole,
Speaker 1: but I feel like he makes more decisions based on
Speaker 1: what's in his best interest in the private sector, he
Speaker 1: and his friends, et cetera. But it's not always in
Speaker 1: the best interest at the bottom line of the United States.
Speaker 1: So that's where you know he's picking winners and losers.
Speaker 1: So I understand the I understand the premise here question.
Speaker 1: I just don't see the evidence that he is running
Speaker 1: it like a like a If he's running it like
Speaker 1: a business, he's not running it like a business that
Speaker 1: wants to grow, expand and be successful over time. Right,
Speaker 1: it feels like he's running it more like how does
Speaker 1: a legacy business that's trying to survive rather than thrive.
Speaker 1: But I've always you know, if you ran the government
Speaker 1: like a business, you would you probably would get rid
Speaker 1: of a lot of poverty measures because they you know,
Speaker 1: you might get rid of. You might not stockpile as
Speaker 1: much defense weaponry either, right, you know, so there'd be
Speaker 1: a lot of regulation, a lot more regulation you might
Speaker 1: get rid of if you were running it like a business. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I don't think he's running it in the best interests
Speaker 1: of the US government's bottom line. I think ultimately, if
Speaker 1: he's running it like a business, he's running it in
Speaker 1: the best interests of his own bottom line. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to see where you caught what I was saying about
Speaker 1: Casey Wasserman, and how you any I wasn't defect. I
Speaker 1: look at the Casey Wasserman situation and think, you know,
Speaker 1: I was talking with the journalists who said that they
Speaker 1: they had a line. The way they were dealing with
Speaker 1: it is anybody with Epstein ties pre two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: they weren't going to treat treat like what were you
Speaker 1: thinking that they were willing to give anybody preos basically
Speaker 1: pre charges being brought against him some benefit of that.
Speaker 1: There's a middle ground of people that sort of still
Speaker 1: kept in touch with him and then until he you know,
Speaker 1: then and then walked after that, and then there's anybody
Speaker 1: that you dealt with him after two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: you don't, right, Wasserman is one of the few that
Speaker 1: is being punished for emails that go back to twenty
Speaker 1: oh two, twenty three that don't seem to go there.
Speaker 1: So that would be one, but it is, you know,
Speaker 1: and yes, I do agree that the Epstein files in
Speaker 1: that sense are being Yes, the handling of that on
Speaker 1: a pr level, I'll give you that that right, The
Speaker 1: best way of business would do is just put it
Speaker 1: all out there, make every you know, don't organize it
Speaker 1: for people, make other people have to figure it out.
Speaker 1: The problem with this is that every couple of days
Speaker 1: there's like a new It feels like a new development
Speaker 1: because you know, somebody is you know, methodically, you know,
Speaker 1: there's hundreds and thousands of people methodically going through these
Speaker 1: these files, and there's always something new to find. And
Speaker 1: again you look around, I mean, I miss this. I'm
Speaker 1: a I'm an adjunct professor at USC. Apparently we had
Speaker 1: some USC professors get caught up in the Epstein files.
Speaker 1: So this has been like a machine gun that went
Speaker 1: off erratically and bullets went everywhere, and everybody's paying a
Speaker 1: price except Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump's paying a
Speaker 1: price too, right, you know, is he going to pay
Speaker 1: a direct price or does he pay an indirect political price?
Speaker 1: And I think he's paying the indirect political price more importantly, Bill,
Speaker 1: if that is your five timer, congrats, welcome to the
Speaker 1: five Timers club. Maybe we should get mugs or something,
Speaker 1: get some swag for that as well. Next question comes
Speaker 1: from Philip in Biloxi. He says, hey, they're my Congressman.
Speaker 1: Mike Eazell surprisingly is embracing the Supreme Court's decision. He
Speaker 1: was interviewed locally on WLOX where he said, and I'm paraphrasing,
Speaker 1: we may not like it, but the Supreme Court is
Speaker 1: the final word, and we have to obey the law
Speaker 1: of the land. He's also running a local radio that
Speaker 1: says something like, thanks to Trump and Eazel, the economy
Speaker 1: is booming and we're living in a golden age, which
Speaker 1: is why I say it's surprising because he normally echoes
Speaker 1: all of Trump's talking points. Thanks also for being the
Speaker 1: only national voice I know that occasionally speaks about Mississippi politics,
Speaker 1: Philip and Biloxi. You know, that's very heartening to hear.
Speaker 1: And I think it is a reminder that that I
Speaker 1: do take the more optimistic approach about elected officials, that
Speaker 1: most of them do want to accept the structure of
Speaker 1: the constitution. That really the most abusive, the person that
Speaker 1: has the least amount of respect for it is the
Speaker 1: guy sitting in the oval office. And and yes, you
Speaker 1: certainly have people who don't want to look like they're
Speaker 1: on the wrong side. And notice how you know that
Speaker 1: there's different ways you can you can sort of accept, well,
Speaker 1: Supreme Court the law of the land. He doesn't want
Speaker 1: to get caught being anti Trump, but he may be
Speaker 1: very happy that this happened, you know. So the point
Speaker 1: is is that given where he is at, you know,
Speaker 1: I think the the he couldn't get caught pushing, you know,
Speaker 1: publicly celebrating the Supreme Court ruling. So I think there's
Speaker 1: a difference. Right, I'm curious to see who celebrates it,
Speaker 1: who uses the this is a moment. You know, who
Speaker 1: else is Don Bacon not running for reelection? Right? Who
Speaker 1: else goes that far? Out on the limb on that.
Speaker 1: But and let's see, you know, what does he do
Speaker 1: if he does have to vote in Congress on any
Speaker 1: of these things. I'm not convinced that Trump wants to
Speaker 1: go do that, but we'll see. Next question comes from
Speaker 1: an elected official, John m imperially, a mayor from New Jersey,
Speaker 1: and he writes, first, Chuck, thank you for the podcast
Speaker 1: Political Junkie and amateur Historians Dream Come True. I'm the
Speaker 1: mayor of a small town in New Jersey and frequently
Speaker 1: electure on American history and specifically the Constitution from a
Speaker 1: quote citizen's point of view. So here's my question. What
Speaker 1: if the Constitutional Convention had been held in the spring
Speaker 1: or fall of seventeen eighty seven rather than the summer.
Speaker 1: My point is that the delegates of the Constitutional Convention
Speaker 1: could not wait to get out of the hot, muggy,
Speaker 1: miserable Philadelphia that summer. The result of brilliant constitution and principle,
Speaker 1: but with way too many particulars rushed over and not
Speaker 1: properly thought out. One of the thought for you is
Speaker 1: to throw out in your podcast, exactly who are the
Speaker 1: founding fathers? The fifty six men who signed the Declaration
Speaker 1: of Independence, the thirty nine men who signed the Constitution
Speaker 1: or the six men who signed both. And when I asked,
Speaker 1: who do the six men who signed both are, no
Speaker 1: one gets it right. They are George Climber, George Reed,
Speaker 1: Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, James Wilson, and Benjamin Franklin. Mayor Imperiality.
Speaker 1: First of all, I want to come visit your town.
Speaker 1: Love love hearing this. Appreciate you loving the history part.
Speaker 1: I think you had to sign both. I think to
Speaker 1: be founding father. So let's go at the six right
Speaker 1: they should they shouldn't. We probably should make a bigger
Speaker 1: deal out of them. You know, I have confessed a
Speaker 1: few times that I'm a sports card junkie. I guess
Speaker 1: you called it a baseball card junkie. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine, Tops put out an American History set and
Speaker 1: it was great. It had like little insert sets of
Speaker 1: Medal of Honor winners, and every Medal of Honor winner
Speaker 1: up through two thousand and nine gave you a little
Speaker 1: and I I just loved it. I you know, my
Speaker 1: daughter was five at the time, and so I made
Speaker 1: a big deal and we built we have this great
Speaker 1: album of it and all this stuff, and and it
Speaker 1: has a whole bunch of subsets of those that signed
Speaker 1: the Constitution and those that signed the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 1: But we really ought to say, make a bigger deal
Speaker 1: on the six. You know, and you know, at least
Speaker 1: one is a name that most people already know of,
Speaker 1: Benjamin Frank. So it's a it's a pretty good it's
Speaker 1: a pretty good place to start. But that's a kudos.
Speaker 1: Let's make those Let's make the uh the founding six.
Speaker 1: Let's maybe over time we give them more and more
Speaker 1: of their due. Thanks for listening and thanks for your service.
Speaker 1: John another New Jersey and writes in this is John
Speaker 1: from New Jersey. I don't think it's the same, John,
Speaker 1: an he rights was waiting to hear your thoughts on
Speaker 1: these two news bits. One that Gallup ending its presidential
Speaker 1: tracking poll in two and Alila Mahea is beating Tom
Speaker 1: Malinowski in New Jersey special election. I think it's upsetting
Speaker 1: the Gallup is choosing to stop polling presidential approval rather
Speaker 1: than report on the current administration's coort rating. Do you
Speaker 1: see other firms mimicking this? And what are your thoughts
Speaker 1: on Mahia's win. I'm curious about how the June primary
Speaker 1: will go if there's more of a consolidation in that primary,
Speaker 1: But it looks like the establishment is already called lest
Speaker 1: a rounder. I did some Gallup thoughts on my sub
Speaker 1: stack last week. If you wanted to read those. You know,
Speaker 1: it's funny when you're in this, when you're making content
Speaker 1: in multiple places, you touch everything. You don't know if
Speaker 1: you've touched everything in every place, and I have not,
Speaker 1: you are correct. I have not touched New Jersey eleven here.
Speaker 1: I've done it in a couple other spots. I think
Speaker 1: I did it with the Silissa podcast, and we haven't
Speaker 1: touched and Gallop. I don't think I mentioned on the
Speaker 1: podcast maybe quickly in passing, but I did write up
Speaker 1: on gal I look, first of all, parse the announcement
Speaker 1: very very carefully from Gallup. Gallup said they're going to
Speaker 1: stop publicly releasing their job approval on the president. I
Speaker 1: didn't get clarification of whether they're not actually asking the question.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely malpracticed, and not ask the question on any
Speaker 1: survey you're doing on anything in the public policy space
Speaker 1: at all, because you've got it is it is a
Speaker 1: helpful way to at least understand how partisan folks are
Speaker 1: behaving where they lie. It gives you a better sense
Speaker 1: of which policy ideas have political traction versus those that
Speaker 1: may have, you know, or less driven by ideology, more
Speaker 1: driven by popularity. It's it's just a it's it's it
Speaker 1: would be malpracticed not to have that piece of data
Speaker 1: with you. It is hard not to wonder Gallups Primary.
Speaker 1: You know, they do a lot of survey work and
Speaker 1: private survey work, and they have a lot of federal contracts.
Speaker 1: The lack of trust anybody has in this country right
Speaker 1: now of any corporation and Donald Trump is amazing because
Speaker 1: a lot of people immediately looked up the amount of
Speaker 1: federal contracts that Gallup has with the government, sees that
Speaker 1: was quite a bit and could easily see right, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump already was mad at Politico, So then everybody in
Speaker 1: the government had to cancel their political subscriptions, whether they
Speaker 1: had a political produce subscription somewhere, et cetera. And it
Speaker 1: sounds like Gallup was worried about its bottom line and
Speaker 1: worried about its business. It's possible they thought there was
Speaker 1: no upside to it, since a whole bunch of other
Speaker 1: people were putting it out publicly. Nobody was saying Gallups
Speaker 1: was the best of the polls that are out there.
Speaker 1: Gallup had the best brand name out there, but their
Speaker 1: poll for a long time hadn't been the best poll.
Speaker 1: It had been sort of problematic for a long time.
Speaker 1: You know. I remember when they stopped, they had a
Speaker 1: daily tracking pole, which was a total mess because while
Speaker 1: I don't think their methodology changed, how people interpreted the
Speaker 1: changes just created all sorts of friction, and they did
Speaker 1: a terrible job of communicating when they're when the tracking
Speaker 1: pole would change. So, you know, I think Gallup got
Speaker 1: out of the public polling business a long time ago.
Speaker 1: Right when it used to be the CNN USA Today
Speaker 1: Gallup pole, that was the you know, basically the only
Speaker 1: pole that was considered better than that one was NBC
Speaker 1: News Wall Street Journal. But over time, the CNN the
Speaker 1: Gallup pole had shown a lot more instability, and I
Speaker 1: know that we we certainly stopped using it as a
Speaker 1: reliable indicator. So I'm not going to sit here and
Speaker 1: call the Gallup pole, you know, but I but it
Speaker 1: would be it would be malpractice, not the doing any
Speaker 1: survey that you do public, public or private in order
Speaker 1: to understand your survey better, in order to have a baseline,
Speaker 1: in order to know your your your survey isn't totally
Speaker 1: out of whack. You know, job job approval is one
Speaker 1: of those ubiquitous questions that helps you and you know,
Speaker 1: understand whether you basically have a you know, it's a
Speaker 1: the fact that so many other posters do it, it
Speaker 1: serves as almost a check to make sure you're you
Speaker 1: don't have a you know, you know for sure, do
Speaker 1: you have an out could you have an outlier survey,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So do pay attention to the fact that
Speaker 1: they just simply said they stopped they were going to
Speaker 1: stop publishing the result. Again, I can't imagine anybody would
Speaker 1: actually stop asking it. I mean again, it's a it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those questions. It's almost like a stabilizing question.
Speaker 1: It helps you understand whether your your survey is is
Speaker 1: A is a trustworthy uh A trustworthy survey. As for
Speaker 1: the MAHI, I think look that the most fascinating aspect
Speaker 1: of this was the aggressiveness of apac Right. They wanted
Speaker 1: to take Malanski down. They went after them hard, and
Speaker 1: they were successful. They is the negatives of Malinowski, and
Speaker 1: they see but the candidate they were hoping to help
Speaker 1: ended up finishing third, and the candidate that benefited from
Speaker 1: APEX attack ads in Malinowski was somebody further to the
Speaker 1: left than Malinowski and perhaps just as unfriendly to some
Speaker 1: of APAX issues as Malanowski had become. So it was
Speaker 1: really one of those a reminder that when you do
Speaker 1: attack ads and multi candidate races in primaries, know what
Speaker 1: you're trying to do. If you're trying to take somebody out,
Speaker 1: do know who could benefit you know? And are you
Speaker 1: sure you're going to end up with somebody that isn't
Speaker 1: going to be more more of a problem for your issues?
Speaker 1: In this case, I think it was. It was that,
Speaker 1: I think it And this is where when interest when
Speaker 1: a big interest group goes after somebody, sometimes it's you know,
Speaker 1: Canada and candidate be cancel each other, it's out and
Speaker 1: a candidate ce ends up benefiting. We got some three
Speaker 1: way prime. We got a three way primary coming up
Speaker 1: in Texas, Right, We're going to see something like that
Speaker 1: take place. Right, does Wesley Hunt benefit from all the
Speaker 1: cornant attack ads on Paxton right? Rather than Cornyn. I mean,
Speaker 1: it certainly looks like Cornan has not benefited from all
Speaker 1: these attacks on Paxton, but instead the demo generic Democratic
Speaker 1: vote has benefited when matched up against Paxton in general
Speaker 1: election matchups, and Paxton's negatives keep going up, but it
Speaker 1: is not helping Cornyon. So it is a reminder that
Speaker 1: basically negative ads can work, but don't assume those negative
Speaker 1: ads will accrue to the benefit of another candidate. That
Speaker 1: if you want to benefit, it could always accrue to
Speaker 1: a third candidate. But as for look, I think I certainly,
Speaker 1: you know, I see why everybody's going ahead and rilly
Speaker 1: knocked off somebody who used to have the title Corners
Speaker 1: and seem to win despite not being the biggest spender
Speaker 1: or anything like that. So I understand why the establishment
Speaker 1: at this point is like, well, might as well, might
Speaker 1: as well get behind money. Next question comes from Robert Leeds.
Speaker 1: Any rights, Hey check meet the press, missus. You I
Speaker 1: worked in several campaigns. Anyway, I'm a Gold trader and
Speaker 1: have said for years that during Trump's first term and
Speaker 1: again during the second, Gold seems to do weird things.
Speaker 1: On the eve of the job's report, huge sell orders
Speaker 1: would come in overnight when the market was strong, gold
Speaker 1: would crash for five seconds, go back up, and then
Speaker 1: a bearsh report will come out at eight thirty. After
Speaker 1: seeing your podcast today, I wanted to share this. You're
Speaker 1: doing a great job. Thanks. Well. What he was talking
Speaker 1: about was this weird again. And I think we've got
Speaker 1: to get some regulatory structure around these prediction markets versus
Speaker 1: gambling markets, et cetera. But there's got to be a
Speaker 1: way to deal with fraud. And somebody gained the jobs numbers.
Speaker 1: Right when Peter Navarro goes out warns of a bad
Speaker 1: jobs report, jobs report turns out much better the next
Speaker 1: day than what he went out there. And of all
Speaker 1: people to go out there as somebody who's already of
Speaker 1: questionable credibility on his information in general, right, that just
Speaker 1: smells crazy. And you know this is where I you know,
Speaker 1: we're going full speed into these new markets without you know,
Speaker 1: we were building the ideas first and trying to come
Speaker 1: up with the regulation later. Very hard to put regulation
Speaker 1: on something that's already left the station. And I'm concerned
Speaker 1: about this, but we don't seem to have a very good,
Speaker 1: very interesting what you say on gold, You've just explained
Speaker 1: why I do not get involved in those markets at all.
Speaker 1: I don't trust them. I think there's the people that
Speaker 1: are most involved are doing it as hedge hedges and
Speaker 1: games and gaming it in some form, and those are
Speaker 1: just not That's not where my comfort level is, you know,
Speaker 1: like I like, I'm more of them. My financial advisor
Speaker 1: and I were more of the warm Buffett acolytes, right,
Speaker 1: like investing in companies that people use, you know, durable goods,
Speaker 1: not always durable goods, but some durable goods, some texts
Speaker 1: on this, on that, but you know, companies that actually succeed,
Speaker 1: not just hypotheticals. Next question comes from Dan in Fairfax.
Speaker 1: He goes, hey, I consider myself an informed voter, but
Speaker 1: I am lost when it comes to this issue. From
Speaker 1: what I gather, a judge in Tazewell County has ruled
Speaker 1: twice that the redistricting effort shouldn't proceed, but the state
Speaker 1: government is moving ahead anyway. I also read that state
Speaker 1: democrats think any lawsuit of posing the measure can only
Speaker 1: be filed in Richmond, which is really confusing. Further, the
Speaker 1: state Supreme Court doesn't seem to think this is anhe
Speaker 1: requiring urgency can you explain what's going on. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Dan in Fairfax. Look, it's a fair point. I think
Speaker 1: the the the legis the Democrat The Democrats and the
Speaker 1: legislature continue to believe that the Supreme Court is going
Speaker 1: to overrule this staswell judged like they did the last time.
Speaker 1: But let's just step back. You know, I find this
Speaker 1: whole campaign. I've seen the ads, the ads for Yes
Speaker 1: use every talking point I was using about why there
Speaker 1: shouldn't be re redistricting around, and it was just like confusing,
Speaker 1: Like when you hear an ad or you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I agree with that. I agree with that. You know,
Speaker 1: there shouldn't be politics in this. We got to take
Speaker 1: the politics out of this. That's why you've got to
Speaker 1: vote yes. You're like, wait what And I sit here
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I'm you know, am I being gas
Speaker 1: lit by this ad campaign? Look? Ends, justify the means
Speaker 1: is bad policy, period And ultimately that's what this entire
Speaker 1: effort in Virginia is about. Ends, just find the means.
Speaker 1: We have to do this now because of what they're
Speaker 1: doing in Texas. We have to do this now, and
Speaker 1: what they might do in Florida, what they might do
Speaker 1: in Indiana, what they might do in Missouri. Uh, I
Speaker 1: get it, politics, ain't bean bag. You've heard me say
Speaker 1: it before on the Virginia front. Your right to be confused.
Speaker 1: I'm very confused too. Some of it had you know.
Speaker 1: I Ultimately it feels as if these state supreme courts
Speaker 1: are you know, and what we've seen, the courts are
Speaker 1: ultimately going to side with uh legislatures on this because ultimately, right,
Speaker 1: that's that's who has the supremacy here is the legislature.
Speaker 1: Uh And if this is what they've chosen to do,
Speaker 1: and they're going to the voters. So I suspect that
Speaker 1: this stay you know, I guess it's weird early voting
Speaker 1: starts before the end of the stay, right. I think
Speaker 1: early voting is supposed to begin the six and this
Speaker 1: stay this this, this is supposed to basically be a
Speaker 1: not a statement, sort of an injunction against this that's
Speaker 1: till the eighteenth. I think it's extraordinarily confusing. I have
Speaker 1: a feeling this map's going to pass pretty but this
Speaker 1: amendment to do this is going to pass pretty easily.
Speaker 1: But I'm just I don't think this is a good
Speaker 1: long term look for Democrats. And I you know, I understand, Hey,
Speaker 1: you got to get power now, you'll worry about how
Speaker 1: it looks later. Is the mindset. But again it goes
Speaker 1: back to ends justify the means. And we're watching an
Speaker 1: entire Republican party that's probably going to regret at some
Speaker 1: point being an ends justify the means party. And they've
Speaker 1: been that party in particular since certain certain orange haired
Speaker 1: man strode down an escalator. And it is, it is,
Speaker 1: it is. I can tell you this. I know Spamberger
Speaker 1: is going to regret having to start this partisan and
Speaker 1: it's interesting how she is having you know, some of
Speaker 1: it is just because the legislatures this there, this redistrict effort,
Speaker 1: you know, they vary, the clock is sticking, you know,
Speaker 1: they they literally had to move this in days and
Speaker 1: get it done even before she got sworn in. And
Speaker 1: it has put her more as a partisan actor than
Speaker 1: I think I ever thought she would want to be,
Speaker 1: and look like very curious to see, by the way,
Speaker 1: what her State of the Union response comes across. As
Speaker 1: I think when you're when you're the Democrats, it's who
Speaker 1: i'd pick, right, you want to pick somebody who just
Speaker 1: won and won by a lot from a state that
Speaker 1: used to be you know, and share her profile from
Speaker 1: the national security space. So I I you know, I
Speaker 1: think I get why they picked her. I do, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm there's two ways about sort of her tenure.
Speaker 1: If you're going to do hardcore politics, better to do
Speaker 1: at the start of your term, and then you moderate
Speaker 1: us the term goes on. On the other hand, it's
Speaker 1: hard to make. You know, this is a first impression
Speaker 1: for a lot of voters in Virginia. But Dan, I'm
Speaker 1: as confused, and the ad campaigns are only more confusing.
Speaker 1: But look, it's gonna pass because this will be a
Speaker 1: super small turnout election and we already know those that
Speaker 1: are fired up on any messaging that involves checking Trump
Speaker 1: are gonna win the Battle of Turner. All right, last
Speaker 1: question for this episode comes from Jim Tobahana, Pennsylvania. I
Speaker 1: think you're giving me your age, but I'm not gonna.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do it. I don't want to. I
Speaker 1: don't watch you bragging about how much younger you are
Speaker 1: than I am. Jim, all right, just because you got
Speaker 1: you got eight. If you've been on this planet eight
Speaker 1: less years than I have, you don't have to rub
Speaker 1: it in my face.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Anyway, your question, does international diplomacy have a greater long
Speaker 1: term impact on legacy Trump, with his focus on the
Speaker 1: second term so much abroad, I don't see how this
Speaker 1: positively impact his legacy. Putting his name on statues the
Speaker 1: Kennedy Center giving seems like a short term ego boost
Speaker 1: for him, band aid that the next administration can reverse. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: long term legacy seems like strengthen in the US with
Speaker 1: a focus domestically, with an emphasis on improving his approval rating.
Speaker 1: Focusing on more of a bipartisan agenda would be the
Speaker 1: biggest way to improve as a long term legacy. Am
Speaker 1: I right? If prices continue to soar in the behavior
Speaker 1: of his cabinet, no Marf k Junior Agency's ice, he's
Speaker 1: diminishing his own legacy. Jim, you're you know you're doing
Speaker 1: You're you're applying something that I used to have to
Speaker 1: ban during my meet the press days during our staff
Speaker 1: in There'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop
Speaker 1: trying to use logic with me. You know, in the
Speaker 1: Trump era we banned logic. Jim. Everything you're saying is
Speaker 1: so logical. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, right George W.
Speaker 1: Bush did that. Right, He's like, you know what, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna focus on pep bar. By the end, I realized
Speaker 1: that Rack was gonna be a terrible legacy all this stuff,
Speaker 1: but he's still you know, there were some things he
Speaker 1: did that that were about his legacy. And guess what
Speaker 1: one of the most positive legacies he has is what
Speaker 1: he's done in helping fund cures for AIDS in Africa
Speaker 1: and what the pep far program has done. I know
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk and that dose people. I have been
Speaker 1: trying to destroy that last positive legacy of the Bush administration.
Speaker 1: But you know this goes back to I, don't you know,
Speaker 1: Trump's the first guy.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I used to do these exit interviews with retiring members
Speaker 1: of Congress when I when I had my multiple when
Speaker 1: I with with the Daily Rundown and with then I
Speaker 1: would eventually change it to Meet the Press Daily and
Speaker 1: Meet the Press now. And I used to do these
Speaker 1: exit interviews with retiring members both sides of the aisle
Speaker 1: and get as many of them that would sit down,
Speaker 1: and they were really legacy questions, and you know, but
Speaker 1: I also wanted to know, like you know, when was
Speaker 1: the first time you wanted to run for office? And
Speaker 1: why do you want to run? Things like that? You know,
Speaker 1: because I've done these sort of candidate interviews going back
Speaker 1: thirty five years now where people want to run for
Speaker 1: office the first time, you know, back at the hotline,
Speaker 1: we used to interview these candidates Cook Report, and we
Speaker 1: used to you know, piggyback on the Cook Report. This
Speaker 1: is what they They do this more strenuously than we
Speaker 1: did a hotline back in the day. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that I that I've learned from those interviews
Speaker 1: over the years is that I used to say, you know,
Speaker 1: it always made me feel better about the democracy because everybody,
Speaker 1: whether they were, no matter where they were on the
Speaker 1: political spectrum hard left, center, left, hard right, center, right, independent,
Speaker 1: whatever you wanted to put it, they all ran for
Speaker 1: office on for one thing. There was always something they wanted.
Speaker 1: There was the initial trigger. You know. I remember talking
Speaker 1: to one commresceman, I said, so, what got you involved
Speaker 1: in Congress? His first office was on the school He
Speaker 1: was mad that they drew drew the lines, drew his
Speaker 1: kid out of a certain school district. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: on the school board and he admitted, he goes. Once
Speaker 1: I got on the school board, I realized they had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the lines. It was somebody else,
Speaker 1: he goes. But but I got involved and and and suddenly,
Speaker 1: he said, the more he learned about government and how
Speaker 1: it worked, the more interested he got. So Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: one of the few people to successfully gain office whose
Speaker 1: simple motivation seemed to be sort of the same motivation
Speaker 1: somebody has to go streaking on a football field. They
Speaker 1: just wanted to be noticed, right. They just wanted to,
Speaker 1: you know, be famous. They wanted more people to have
Speaker 1: to respect them. It's a weird motivation. But he wasn't
Speaker 1: motivated because he's got an issue he cares the most about.
Speaker 1: He was maybe he has a daddy. There's plenty of
Speaker 1: We've had a handful of presidents and presidential candidates who
Speaker 1: I think got involved in politics as there they felt
Speaker 1: like it was the only way to please their dad,
Speaker 1: you know, boys said, there's a lot of politics is
Speaker 1: filled with presidents are filled or it's amazing how many
Speaker 1: of our presidents have daddy issues one way or the other,
Speaker 1: including this one, by the way. But I don't think
Speaker 1: he really cares, you know, when you when you're so
Speaker 1: worried about putting your name on stuff, it shows you
Speaker 1: that you really don't care about Like the Institute of
Speaker 1: Peace was never his idea. He just wanted to slap
Speaker 1: his name on it because it uses the word peace.
Speaker 1: The Kennedy Center isn't his idea, but he wants to
Speaker 1: slap his name on it because he's afraid his name
Speaker 1: is going to disappear. You know, He's only a real
Speaker 1: legacy is going to be that ballroom in the White House, right,
Speaker 1: And I think he thinks, hey, they still call the
Speaker 1: balcony Truman's balcony, so hopefully they'll always have to call
Speaker 1: you know, the ballroom will always be the Trump ballroom.
Speaker 1: Well he might get that, and there'll be some Donald.
Speaker 1: There'll be some Donald J. Trump elementary schools, and I
Speaker 1: you know, you know, we know this, it will be.
Speaker 1: But I don't think he's got an issue. He If
Speaker 1: he cared about one issue throughout his entire career, it was,
Speaker 1: you know, his belief in tariffs. But even that, I
Speaker 1: don't think he fully understood why he believed in tariffs
Speaker 1: other than he was trying to come up with a
Speaker 1: talking point to insert himself into a political conversation back
Speaker 1: in the late eighties. So again, to go back to
Speaker 1: your question, Jim, everything about him makes sense, But you're
Speaker 1: that that's not how Trump's wired. It's just not how
Speaker 1: he's wired. You know, you're you're one hundred percent right
Speaker 1: in these things. By the way I've gone, we've gone
Speaker 1: now a couple hours, and I didn't get to and
Speaker 1: I'm going to save this for Wednesday, but we're going
Speaker 1: to do I'm going to give you. I'll give you
Speaker 1: this hint now, the Christy Nomes Senate campaign. That's a
Speaker 1: fascinating exit ramp that the Trump White House is trying
Speaker 1: to come up with to get rid of Nome. Fascinating situation. Also,
Speaker 1: want to get into the Maha moms and how yet
Speaker 1: another monsanto, the first major donation they'd ever given to Trump.
Speaker 1: Let's just say they reminded Trump of that. That's why
Speaker 1: they got the executive order that they got. But those
Speaker 1: Maha Moms, We're going to get into that too on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: So look, it was a hugely busy weekend. That last
Speaker 1: question reminded me of a couple other issues. I didn't
Speaker 1: get to get to. Maha moms, and Nome for South
Speaker 1: Dakota Centate where two of them. But I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: I'm just going to leave that as a tease for
Speaker 1: the next episode in forty eight hours. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: By the way, we're having some of our you guys
Speaker 1: have been great. I know there's some new subscribers out there,
Speaker 1: some new devots. I appreciate having you. How do I
Speaker 1: know new Because we keep growing and things are going well.
Speaker 1: I can tell because I now got more people telling
Speaker 1: me hey, I've got fewer people coming up to me
Speaker 1: saying hey, I miss you. What are you doing now?
Speaker 1: Now it's like, hey, I miss you over there, but
Speaker 1: I really like what you're doing now. So that's all
Speaker 1: because you guys are liking, You're subscribing, word of mouth,
Speaker 1: all of those things. And so let's just say I
Speaker 1: appreciate it because it's you know, this is an entrepreneurial business,
Speaker 1: and it is credibility has earned one listener and one
Speaker 1: viewer at a time, and this growth tells me that
Speaker 1: you guys are help are expressed or saying that I'm
Speaker 1: earning it with you. So thank you, and with that,
Speaker 1: I'll see you A forty eight dollars