Latest / Normal Men / Episode 49 - No Apologies For The Dutch ft. Aaron Kleinman

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Episode 49 - No Apologies For The Dutch ft. Aaron Kleinman · Normal Men

• 0:00
  [A] Yeah, he's our. Ed is our resident audio pervert. And when we pervert, we mean pervert. It's bad.
• 0:07
  [B] It's true.
• 0:08
  [C] I don't know if you guys know Jeb Lund at all from online. Yeah, he's an audio pervert. Like, he was the one who was, like, teaching me. It's like, you gotta get the external mic. It's like, you gotta get Audacity. I'm gonna, like, mix it for three hours after this. Make sure we get the levels right. And I'm like, all right, dude. I just. Talking to computer.
• 0:27
  [B] We just hand it to a robot and have the robot do it. Don't tell anyone.
• 0:31
  [D] We'll get it.
• 0:32
  [A] Mostly, Dr. And I spend hours clicking away to get rid of everyone's likes and ums and ahs. It's great.
• 0:38
  [B] The good news is I. I have. I think I've managed to get Claude to understand that this is an audio tool.
• 0:46
  [A] Ah, good luck.
• 0:48
  [B] So there is a future where maybe Claude does the clicking for you.
• 0:51
  [D] The robot has gotten way better over the course of the year we've been doing this. I remember when we started, we first tried the robot and the robot sucked. The robot just.
• 0:59
  [B] That was a different robot.
• 1:00
  [D] Oh, okay.
• 1:02
  [B] We have a much better robot now.
• 1:04
  [A] We like to think the person designing the robot is getting better, but it's probably just the monkeys on typewriters thing.
• 1:09
  [D] No, it's gotten worse.
• 1:13
  [B] Not the first time.
• 1:18
  [A] This is Normal Men, a podcast from four men who are clinging desperately to normalcy in an era when that's asking a bit too. I'm George in Charlotte.
• 1:26
  [D] In dc.
• 1:27
  [C] I'm Proctor Malone in outer Florida.
• 1:29
  [E] I'm low tech Speedrun enjoyer.
• 1:31
  [B] And I'm Ed in Boston.
• 1:37
  [A] Well, joining us to discuss audio perversion tonight is Aaron Kleinman. You may know him as Bobby Big Wheel Online. And we have a variety of good and bad news to talk about this week, which is kind of nice. We get both sides of the spectrum, as opposed to just the deluge of bad news, which has been so common recently. I think we did have one week a couple weeks ago where it was like, ah, there's. You know, it's. It was nice to have a nice short like. Or not much news this week, good or bad. That was a nice change. And then the monkey's paw curled and here we are. So, Aaron, welcome, buddy.
• 2:07
  [C] Thanks so much for having me. I always thought of myself as a normal man. And so I just really was trying to get on the podcast for a long time.
• 2:14
  [B] I got bad news for you there.
• 2:16
  [C] Oh, no. Oh, no.
• 2:18
  [A] It's aspirational.
• 2:20
  [C] Yeah.
• 2:20
  [B] This is aspirational.
• 2:22
  [C] I know.
• 2:23
  [A] So the first thing we're going to talk about is the good news. I think this past Tuesday we had primary elections in.
• 2:28
  [E] Are we calling Ed's car good news?
• 2:30
  [D] No, that's coming up.
• 2:32
  [A] Car chat is last this week we are going to have car chat. But if you're one of those filthy cars.
• 2:38
  [D] Yeah, we're going politics to oil to automobiles tonight. That's the rotation.
• 2:44
  [A] Ironically, in the real world, it usually goes the other way. So this is how we're doing it. We're going to reverse reality here. So, yeah, last Tuesday, really, really good night of primary elections, North Carolina and Texas. So Aaron, what was some of the stuff that jumped off the page to you? Do you want to start with Texas or North Carolina?
• 3:02
  [D] Should we have Aaron explain what he's, what he does these days?
• 3:05
  [C] Sure, yeah.
• 3:06
  [B] Who are you?
• 3:07
  [E] Who am I?
• 3:08
  [C] So I'm the head of research at Heartland Signal, which is a multimedia media company that also has a radio station, WCPT 820 in Chicago. And I'm kind of, I went in there in October to kind of beef up all the work that we're doing and really get more of a state level focus on what we're doing. I want political coverage to kind of downplay what actually goes on in Washington, D.C. and Focus what actually happens in the states because there's just way too much attention to D.C. not enough the state level. That said, I really want to talk about this Texas US Senate primary so badly. And but because I think it has ramifications across really everywhere in politics because Jasmine Crockett had kind of figured out how to a problem that Democrats had in 2024. And the problem was that Democrats had no idea how to get news in front of people who hated news. And Jasmine Crockett had figured that out. You might not have. And it was kind of like a Trump thing where she would, she could make news for bad reasons. She could make news in a way that would embarrass you as her political ally, but she could get in front of people that weren't paying attention to the news. And she, you know, in December she decided, you know what, I can run for Senate based on this. And it was a really kind of, it was a test run of an idea that like campaigns don't really matter anymore. All you really need to do is be able to kind of penetrate the consciousness in a way, way that your opponents can't. And her main Problem is that her opponent could also do this. That maybe to a lesser degree, but also she just didn't run a campaign. And it actually really, you know, what, this was, what this race showed.
• 5:00
  [A] What does that mean, though? Like, didn't run a campaign, like, so she. What does a modern political campaign look like that she didn't do?
• 5:05
  [C] All right, so I don't want to bore you too much with, like, what the actual, like, block and tackle elements of campaigning are.
• 5:11
  [B] I assure you, I. Our audiences like that.
• 5:14
  [A] No, this is what we're here for. Yeah.
• 5:16
  [C] Yeah. Well, I, you know, we could get. But I mean that the. At the most basic level, you generally have a person in charge of the campaign who's not the candidate called the campaign manager. She didn't have one of those. She never really landed on one of those again. And I think we found out that her belief was that, oh, if I can, you know, I could just breeze through this primary against this state representative, James Talarico, I won't need to, you know, I can save my resources for the general election. And that's always a bad idea because, like, a primary is also, in general, a campaign's first chance to, like, actually see if what they're doing is working. Even though it's a different type of electorate, you can kind of like, it's a way to measure, like, oh, am I doing the right things here? It's like, only if you are just, like, insanely strapped for cash, which a U.S. senate candidate in a plausibly competitive rate state would not be, should you not do that. So she didn't really run that type of campaign. She didn't really run TV ads. I know everyone hates TV ads, but the reason why they spend so much money on them is that they do work. They work less at the presidential level than at lower levels. They work at, you know, but they, they. You could spend $100 million to move things 1 percentage point, and guess what? That 1 percentage point can be the difference maker sometimes. So sometimes you need to spend $100 million on TV. So she didn't run. She didn't run as many TV ads as Tal Rico. And also. But the main thing about Tal Rico is that he wasn't like this parody of a D.C. consultant, you know, generated candidate. He had the ability to penetrate the consciousness as well. He went on Joe Rogan. That was like the big thing after 2024. Someone who can go on Rogan. He went on Rogan, and Rogan said he should run for president. He went on Stephen Colbert CBS's lawyers were jawboned into, like, telling them to pull the. The interview, and it ended up getting, like, 85 million views on YouTube. Again, you know, that's an inflated metric, but, you know, relative to everything else on YouTube, that's still pretty good. And so, you know, he was able to kind of, you know, do well in the attention economy as well. And the fact that he actually ran a campaign is what ended up making the difference. And so there's this idea. Yeah.
• 7:21
  [A] Dispatch from friend of the pod at socialism, Ellen Blue sky, who said he lives in Texas, 18th congressional district, which is, you know, urban Houston, that this is a place where Crockett needed to absolutely run up the score. Like, she needed to win a huge margin here, because heavily black, heavily progressive, or heavily Democratic, at least. Like, this is where a bunch of her votes were. And he was like, I didn't see anything from her during the campaign. I didn't see literature. I didn't see signage. I didn't see any canvassing, anything. Like, nothing. So it's not just about, like, oh, she didn't buy TV ads. It's like the basic infrastructure campaigns that has been around for 150 years just didn't.
• 8:04
  [C] Yeah, she didn't have people block walking, which, you know, canvassing is still like, you know, again, people really got tired. And it's kind of losing its marginal utility, as are all campaign tactics. And it is kind of a question going forward, like, how much does this stuff really matter? Because increasingly people's attention is on their screens. Increasingly, people's attention is governed by forces outside of, like, communities that are more governed by algorithms and group identifications. And so it's like, does this stuff even matter anymore? It's a big question, actually, and it matters less than it used to, but it still really matters. And Jasmine Crockett kind of found that out the hard way. And so James Talrico is now your Democratic Senate nominee in Texas.
• 8:48
  [A] Should we also talk a little bit about, like, the coalitions that came out for each of them? Because I think it's interesting things about the party.
• 8:53
  [C] Well, it does, but also it's kind of like they're the real election sickos, actually called it, because East Texas, where is really kind of the base of the Democratic Party, is heavily black and kind of west and South Texas. It's whiter and more Latino. And if you look at kind of the 2020 U.S. senate map, that's what I use for my benchmarks on election night. And it was. It looked very similar to 2020 with some notable differences. And I think it's kind of just, you know, Crockett maybe did a little better than her companion candidate, Royce west did in like, some suburban areas where I kind of like, she actually did bear among the wine moms than people might think, you know, because she's been on MSNBC so much. But Tal Rico, you know, he had similar to the winner in that one too, MJ Higar, where he really cleaned up among Latino and, you know, really Anglo voters in the western part of the state. And like in Austin, where he's, you know, where he's from, he ran up like a 50 point margin in Travis county, home to Austin. And Austin does have a significant black population too. So that was, you know, when I saw that on election. You know, I'm a bit more conservative on like calling races on election night, but when I saw that Travis county result like that, he was up by 50 in Travis County. When, like, she needed to lose by 20, I'm like, oh, she's toast. And so, yeah, and it kind of
• 10:19
  [D] turned out that that was, that was the story of the election, right, that there. That basically Talarico ran it up in two urban areas over his expectations. But other than that, the numbers were maybe consistent with, With Crockett pulling it out.
• 10:32
  [C] Yeah, a little bit. I mean, you know, you mentioned Houston earlier. Houston was supposed to be the big battleground. And like, she probably didn't need to win. She didn't win Harris county by as much as she needed to. Harris county is the home to Houston, so she probably could have done a little better there. She, like, you know, she ran like, a bit behind her benchmarks in like, the Dallas and Houston areas, and he just blew her out in South Texas and Austin and San Antonio. And that was the difference.
• 10:58
  [A] So do we have any indication that. I'm not talking about online freaks who have. That that whole race got so polarized in ways I just don't understand online. But, like, in real world politics, like, my understanding is that the kind of voter that is, that was Crockett's base is one of the most reliable voters for Democrats in a general election. Like, would you agree with that assessment? And like, is there any reason to be worried about this being like a harm for general election turnout from the traditional coalition in Texas?
• 11:26
  [C] I. I really don't. I mean, if you look at like, Tyler, because poll numbers like his unfavorability among Democrats is net negligible. They might not have heard of him, but nobody's like, mad at him for this primary. And so, you know, people are worried, like, you know, can a black candidate on the ticket goose turnout among kind of among lower propensity voters? You know, maybe. But, I mean, I think the main thing that's gonna be turning out voters is Trump. And, you know, it's like, at the margins, you know, maybe, you know, having a black candidate on the statewide ticket would really get turnout up, you know, among, you know, in, you know, urban Houston, urban Dallas, you know, parts of East Texas. But, you know, it really is going to come down to Trump, and he, Trump ends up being a great motivator for the Democratic base. And so. And also, I think, Tal Rico, you know, one of the mistakes that Beto actually made in 2018 was that he kind of down. He didn't think that he had to invest as much into turnout operations in, like, Houston and Dallas as much as he should have. Wouldn't have made a difference, but it would have made that race even closer. And Talarico is smart enough to kind of learn from that. And I think that he will be doing everything he can to get those voters out. And you're talking about. Sure, there'll be some cases of people where they're not going to come out because Crockett isn't on the top of the ticket, but I don't think there are that many of them.
• 12:48
  [E] I will say it did get pretty polarized on Blue sky, and I'm sure the same was true of Twitter. It was utterly adult next to what is going on with the main primary. Oh, God, I said this on Blue
• 13:04
  [A] sky without talking about the oyster guy.
• 13:05
  [E] Like, I. I said this on Blue sky. And I'll. I'll say it here for the first and possibly only time. Maine. Why can't you be more like Texas? Hold on.
• 13:16
  [C] I want to say, actually Republicans kind of had, you know, if you are like, oh, my God, Maine, two terrible choices, what are we going to do? At least you're not. I mean, hey, you know, Republicans, you know, they're. They're sleeping in the bed that they made. But in the 23rd district, they were facing a runoff between an incumbent who kind of, you know, very aggressively pursued an affair with a staffer who then, after things seemed to end poorly, she then literally killed herself by setting herself on fire. One of the most gruesome deaths imaginable. He had to pull out because of that scandal. And the person running in his wake is a gun influencer who has talked on his stream about reading Mein Kampf and really liking it and has had to frequently say he's not a neo Nazi.
• 14:11
  [A] Yes, he had.
• 14:12
  [D] He had. I believe it. I believe he had the 1938 edition special printed because he couldn't get it otherwise. So.
• 14:19
  [C] Yeah.
• 14:20
  [B] Which. Which is this. I know.
• 14:23
  [C] Brandon Herrera. Oh, this is also.
• 14:25
  [B] Yeah, I know who he is.
• 14:27
  [C] Yeah. And then this is also the district that has Uvalde in it.
• 14:31
  [B] Yeah.
• 14:32
  [D] So.
• 14:32
  [B] Yeah, it is.
• 14:33
  [D] We're still probably going to lose that district.
• 14:34
  [B] But hey, I'm, you know, Brendan Herrera is an atrocious piece of like, do not underestimate his ability to be disliked.
• 14:43
  [C] Yeah.
• 14:44
  [E] Yeah.
• 14:44
  [C] And. And also that's a district too, where the recent. Right. Word turn of that district. Because it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot of just like really redder than a dog dick Texas. But. And like, that part's gonna vote for him. But it has a lot of Latino voters who only very recently became Republicans, you know, and the Democrat candidate there, you know, was not like an A tier recruit or anything, but she seems to, like, be able to walk and chew gum and talk and so, like, you know, maybe she could beat this guy and, you know, at least force Republicans to be like, we are Supporting the Minecamp 1938 edition owner for a good, you know, at least make them make that argument, you know.
• 15:30
  [A] Yeah. What about the Texas Senate primary side? Should we talk about that a little
• 15:33
  [C] bit on the Republicans? Yeah. John Cornyn, you know, overperformed. He actually won the first round, but it's going to a runoff now. And in spite of all the advantages he has of, you know, institutional support and two things really remain is that in a runoff, an incumbent's at a disadvantage for the. Also Rand's votes because they probably in general don't want to go to an incumbent. And in Texas, Republican runoffs historically have been dominated by the far right. And that's what Ken Paxton is. And he has a intimate connection with the far right in many cases at a personal level. And so, you know, they're going to spend another two months duking it out. Maybe another. Again, $100 million of TV ads there.
• 16:18
  [D] Aaron. Aaron was gesturing towards. Towards Paxton's sexual proclivities with that, with that line there. For those, for those who may not be up on the Texas state government gossip.
• 16:30
  [C] Yeah. I mean, his wife divorced him for. On biblical grounds. Right. But it's, you know, it. It's hard. We could, you could do a whole podcast about all of his ethical lapses. He's been under indictment for the entire time he's Been attorney general for securities fraud. And just because, like. And that's like, that's like a footnote on his career like that.
• 16:52
  [E] When Aaron says you could do a whole podcast, he doesn't just mean an episode, a series, he means an entire podcast.
• 16:59
  [A] Also being under indictment for securities fraud these days, even, you know, dating back for whatever, six years or whatever. It's been 12 years.
• 17:07
  [C] You really.
• 17:07
  [A] 12. Sorry.
• 17:08
  [B] Whatever.
• 17:09
  [C] So much for a speedy trial, right? And,
• 17:14
  [E] yeah, that's like getting banned from Waffle House in Florida. Like that one guy in the Republican primary here.
• 17:20
  [B] Yeah, well, what.
• 17:23
  [A] That was literally banned from. From Waffle House.
• 17:26
  [D] He was doing some kind of a statewide Waffle House tour, and for reasons that have not been explained, he said that Waffle House told him he can't show up in Waffle Houses anymore. So.
• 17:36
  [B] So this is not a mutually agreed on terms of a settlement.
• 17:41
  [E] Apparently you're not allowed to be racist at Waffle House. You can do any manner of other violent things and crimes, but being racist,
• 17:50
  [A] not one of them.
• 17:51
  [E] So being racist, good on you. Waffle House, sort of.
• 17:55
  [A] Yeah. If you've ever been to a Waffle House, you know why that's the case. I mean, it's just like, you get a full cross section of society in those places, and society tends to be pretty black in a lot of places where Waffle Houses are. So. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. Yeah.
• 18:07
  [B] Yes.
• 18:07
  [D] Smothered, covered, neutral ground.
• 18:10
  [A] Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Waffle House, brother.
• 18:14
  [D] So I want to go back just one second here because we. Aaron. Aaron touched on something that's a longtime hobby horse of mine, which is. Which is these. These border counties, RGV counties in Texas. My pet theory on that is that the reason that they swung so far Republican over the past several elections is the absolute gigantic federal money hose that Trump pointed at them before border fortification in term one that has been substantially toned down. That. That's not really where this giant amount of ice and CBP money is being spent anymore.
• 18:49
  [C] Taking the guys away from there and deploying them all over the country.
• 18:52
  [D] So they're not propping up local industry anymore the way that those guys may have been accustomed to under Trump. One might be an opening.
• 19:00
  [C] Yeah, maybe. I mean, a big part. That's part of it, but I think this is. There is a secular decline there in terms of just like, because, you know, maybe in, like, some of the cities kind of the southernmost part of the rgv. So, like, you know, you talk about, like, Brownsville and, and, you know, Hidalgo county and all that. Stuff like, those areas are like. Because they're like, actual cities, and those are like, you know, they're pretty dependent on, like, you know, light industry and commerce. You know, those. And Laredo, too, also. Like, those areas you kind of see, like, because they're actual cities, you could kind of see those, like, bouncing back. But, like, a lot of the, like, just like, super rural voted Democrat forever areas are just gone. Yeah, yeah. Like, they're gone. Those guys. You know, it's like the. You know, those are people, the residents there. It's like the border cross them. Their ancestors have been there for 200 years. They have very little culturally in common with the Democratic Party. And, like, Trump may piss them off when he talks about how he doesn't even speak Spanish, but just like, that's. It's gonna be harder than that to get those rural areas back. So I think you'll finally just see the rural urban split among the RGV counties that just. You see everywhere else.
• 20:13
  [D] It's heartwarming in a way that we can normalize.
• 20:17
  [C] You know, I mean.
• 20:18
  [A] Yeah.
• 20:20
  [C] I mean, really, the one exception to that, like, black voters, rural black voters, still vote super Democratic. It's like the. I mean, less so than it used to be, but it's still like, they're still like a bulwark of the party. But beyond that, like, rural, urban, you know, polarization has come across the board in this country. And that includes the rgb. Yeah,
• 20:44
  [A] definitely includes North Carolina, too, which is the other big state that had a primary on Tuesday. And there are a bunch of different ways to attack that, I think on the rural urban split, one of the best ways to start talking about it is talking about how Democrats are basically exercising party discipline at this point in North Carolina, which is very unusual historically. Republicans started doing it about 15 years ago, and now Republican or Democrats are very serious about that. So there were, what, three examples of this where you have four, actually. Four.
• 21:15
  [C] There are three. So there are three incumbent Democrats who frequently side with overrides, and then a four, an old incumbent who had lost his primary before he was trying to make a comeback and all. So, yeah, there are basically four Democrats who, you know, I mean, they still all supported Harris, as far as I can tell.
• 21:34
  [A] Yep.
• 21:35
  [C] They still consider themselves Democrats, but they cited against the governor, who's a Democrat, on a bunch of key votes, on transports, fans on ice, cooperation, and. And also, like, on budget, on utility stuff as well.
• 21:50
  [A] Yeah, that was the most recent one. Yeah. Basically rolling back some of the climate plan that had been agreed To.
• 21:55
  [C] Well, and also it was. It wasn't just that, though. It was also. It ended up increasing fees paid by ratepayers.
• 22:02
  [A] Yeah.
• 22:03
  [C] You know, which was basically a lobbyist giveaway.
• 22:06
  [A] Yeah. Just for folks that aren't familiar, North Carolina still has vertically integrated utilities. So when you. Where you hear headlines about the wholesale power market like PJM or whatever, like, that doesn't really impact us. When I pay my utility bill here in Charlotte, the wires that bring the electricity to my house, the substation that those attach to the long distance transmission lines attached to that substation, and the generation assets that are feeding those long distance transmission lines are all owned by the same company, which is not how it works almost anywhere else in the country at this point. There are still vertically integrated utilities in other places, but like North Carolina still has vertically integrated utilities. So Duke Power is incredibly powerful in this state because they are really important economically, obviously. And they're big. They're like a very, very large corporation. And this is, you know, the, the new deal arrangement around how utilities ran was very. Is very much alive and well in North Carolina and some other parts of the south too. So that's just. Yeah, they're a very powerful force within the lobbying efforts within the state. But yeah, Carla Cunningham's actually, she was one of the ones that lost.
• 23:06
  [D] Her.
• 23:06
  [A] Her one was she voted in favor of HB318, which was overriding Stein's veto of a bill that would require local sheriffs to cooperate more closely with ice. Her and Massif Mageed, who was in District 99, next one over from Cunningham. That's like five, 10 miles from my house. That's like, that's like, just like next to me in Charlotte. And it's wild because Masjid too, like Cunningham's district isn't necessarily the most liberal one you could come up with, but Majid's district is like, that's includes UNC Charlotte, which is a very large student population. I mean, these are not red districts in any way, shape or form. And like, I think in, in those two cases, I know them the best because they're, they're local.
• 23:51
  [D] They.
• 23:51
  [A] I mean, Cunningham was an incumbent who only got 22% of the primary vote. Majid only got 26. The party was like, no, we're done. Like, you're out. Go. Yeah, Stein endorsed on the other side and the candidates were high quality. And that's it.
• 24:05
  [C] Well, it wasn't just that Stein endorsed, but also they cut off access to party infrastructure for them. And so it meant that it was a lot Harder for them to, like, get voter lists and just communicate with the primary electorates. And also, I think part of it, too, was in the past. You know, the North Carolina Republican Party was very savvy. They're savvy operators. They basically got a sleeper agent to win state house primary in 2022 that they. And they got her to switch parties in 2023.
• 24:37
  [A] Yeah, that's a Tricia Cotham's saga. I think I've mentioned that several times on the podcast before, but between her mom, who is a county commissioner that lost her seat because of that whole thing, and Cotham herself, who got put into a much safer district that was gerrymandered to sort of protect her, she's going to lose that election. I'm very confident this coming fall. But just all sorts of skullduggery there. And that's, again, that's North Carolina and specifically really Mecklenburg County. Democratic politics being really, really not great. But we're showing signs of learning.
• 25:09
  [C] Well, and also past mistakes. And also, I think it's the, you know, kind of special interests in North Carolina decided, like, they saw that, oh, you know, the party's really aligning against these ones. We're not gonna, like. I don't think they got a lifeline from their big money there in a way that. Yeah. So with all that. And then Cunningham, in particular, like, she said that other cultures are, like, worse than. I forget what the exact quote is,
• 25:34
  [A] but the verbatim quote is all cultures are not equ. Immigrants come and believe they can function in isolation, refusing to adapt. And so this is like, a stream of thinking in certain parts. I don't. I don't want to try and, like, make it sound like it's very commonplace, but it is a stream of thinking in some parts of the black community that is very, very, like, hyperbolically anti immigrant.
• 25:58
  [C] She's. Yeah, she's part of a movement. I think it's called, like, the American Ados. Yeah.
• 26:04
  [A] Is it American Slaves of Slavery?
• 26:05
  [C] Yeah, yeah. American Times of Slavery, which, you know, was like, black nationalist for a while. Like, you think like, Marcus Garvey almost type stuff, but is increasingly kind of nativist.
• 26:17
  [A] Yeah, nativist imaginary, for sure.
• 26:19
  [C] Yeah. But it's also, like, weird. It's like they're also, like, pro reparations. It's a. It's an odd mixture of things and, you know, people. But yeah, so she kind of like, showed that belief there, which is a very unpopular belief in her district. And so that's why she only got 22% of the vote.
• 26:34
  [A] Yeah. But there were some other notable races inside Mecklenburg county that I wanted to highlight really quick. Vilma Leak was a county commissioner who. Very similar to Trisha Cotham. So Trish Cotham's mom. I always get mixed up which one's Trish and which one's. Which one's Trisha. But anyhow, the.
• 26:53
  [C] Her mom goes by Pat. Right.
• 26:57
  [A] They both have the first name Trisha. Legally, I think so.
• 26:59
  [C] That's why. Okay, I think. I think so.
• 27:01
  [A] The mom was a county commissioner and the daughter was the one that flipped from the Democrats to Republicans and flipped the NC Legislature's house majority closer or above the veto proof threshold that it needed to be at when she flipped from her Mint Hill district back in 2022. So there's. That's like an example of the kind of person that has been able to get elected and sort of entrench themselves in our county commission. And Vilmalique was like another example of this. And she lost her seat quite decisively to again, someone that is a much higher quality candidate. And just like it was trash getting taken out, which, you know, she didn't. She didn't have any high profile examples of being contrary to the party or whatever. But like, I just. I was so happy to see that she was one of the county commissioners that was most involved in breaking up a group I was involved with in 2020 called jail support, which was a sort of kind of anarchist type deal related to supporting folks getting let out of the county prison that established a 24,7 presence right outside the prison. And it ended up getting stormed eventually by the sheriff's department and Leek. I can remember being there on a volunteer shift and seeing Leek's car drive by the day before because she was like, she wanted to kick in heads. So like, seeing her out the door was just amazing. And my last race from Mecklenburg county and Georgia's little like vindictive tour, here is Rebecca Cannon winning. She was running. Running as. I mean, she is a prison abolitionist. She was a D.A. sorry, not a DA, a public defender while I was with Jail Support. And she was out bailing people out every day, like protesters from George Floyd protesters, folks from Jail Support, folks in the community, whoever. And then she went into private practice and has now run and ended up winning quite narrowly, but winning against a really high quality sort of establishment candidate. And the candidate she was running against was not like some nightmare or whatever, in my opinion, but definitely not a prison abolitionist. So it was just such a heartening night for Me as a Mecklenburg County Democrat and, you know, sort of with my politics, it was, it was just, it was great to see. There was other stuff going on in the state, though, like. So, Aaron, Phil Berger is like, we got to talk about him.
• 29:12
  [C] Oh, man. So, I mean, the Republicans killed the golden goose.
• 29:17
  [A] Yeah.
• 29:18
  [C] Bill Berger, you know, the sit for. You want to talk about vertically integrated operations. The state of North Carolina Republican Party, their lobbyists and donors and map makers and judges and state lawmakers are incredibly deeply integrated. And there are two men who sat at the center of that integration for a very long time. Tim Moore, world class pervert. Now he's in Washington, D.C. i bet he'll probably be speaker of the House in the next two decades.
• 29:53
  [A] And Phil Berger, by the way, quickly on Tim Moore. We had mentioned Kate Barr's effort to unseat him in the Republican primary and the possibility of Independence siding with her in that primary. That did not work at all. Just, we did a, we covered this on an earlier episode, Aaron, and I'm actually in that district and I ended up pulling a Democratic ticket in part because of Rebecca's race. But yeah, nowhere near enough crossover independent voters jumping into that primary. And she lost, I think by 60 points or something.
• 30:20
  [D] I like that we're thinking outside the box, but, you know, they're not all going to be winners.
• 30:25
  [A] Yeah, I just wanted to close that particular loop.
• 30:28
  [C] But yeah, Berger, he's the other one. And like, he really was the one who made sure that, like, the big donors were aligned with the legislature's priorities. He was the one keeping that money machine on more than anyone else. And like the, the fights within the Republican Party just get so arose that I can lose track. But like, there was a far right sheriff who ran against him and Trump actually endorsed Berger because Berger helped redraw the congressional districts in North Carolina to be even more gerrymandered. And Trump, Trump endorsed him. They spent $10 million on this guy. That was $800 per vote. $800 per vote. That's so, like, I know that. I don't know how to like, properly contextualize that other than if Trump did that, he would have spent 40 billion or $60 billion, 40 times more than he actually spent. That's how much they spent on this guy. And he, he was down on election night by two. They counted the provisionals. I think he's down by 23 votes now. And so that might be too much for a recount to overturn. So, like, they killed the golden goose
• 31:34
  [A] after trying to spend $10 million recounts. That's definitely short. I mean it's possible that a recount overturns it, but it's very unlikely at this point. And just for so folks know, this is like the rural suburbs and exurbs north of north and northeast of Greensboro, North Carolina. So like it runs up to the state line and like a little bit east down I40 and like, man, I just, I can't, I was, I saw that result. I was just like bruh, like what are y' all doing? And it unfortunately, I think there is another race. I think we can tie in on the Republican side in North Carolina. We can tie to national politics. That race was just local. Like it was just that people were pissed off about some casino stuff. I mean, as far as I can tell, it was not okay. You know, I mean, I don't know. Maybe Aaron, you have a different read
• 32:16
  [C] on it, but no, I, I, I, it again, I was unclear as to like the exact nature of it other than like there is kind of a very strong anti establishment strain within the problem party. Like they just like they hate everyone, they hate their incumbents too. And but yeah, I mean just, and like the guy running against him had a very good profile for Republican primary. He wore a cowboy hat and was a sheriff and they love that shit. And so, and that was enough. That was enough. And so I, you know, there's a guy who's going to replace Berger atop the sand hierarchy and but like they're not going to get us well integrated anymore. And so, you know, yeah, it was a huge shockwave and it really harms the long term prospects of the North Carolina Republican Party because the, you know, the Republican bench is, keeps getting thinned out.
• 33:12
  [A] And also like all, all signs point to North Carolina following Virginia and Georgia. And if you look at the primary turnout, I think that's like a really good way to think about it. So Cooper versus the 2022 Senate primary. And I'm going to use that because it's the most recent midterm election primary, right. For a Senate seat. Democratic ballots cast for and 90 plus percent, 92% of them went to Roy Cooper. But Democratic ballots cast in the primary up 33% versus 2022. Republican ballots cast were down 17%. Keep in mind we have a, we've are now in our third straight term for Democrats governing North Carolina. And despite the fact that Trump won the state in 2024, we did really well in the secretaries at the, in the Council of state. So all the statewide elected offices only a couple didn't go to Democrats. So the thinking is, like, if Republicans lose the state Supreme Court, which given how statewide offices have run and given what's on the ballot in the coming, and we've talked about this, you know, Proctor has pointed this out, and me and him have talked about this on past episodes, then all you need is two more elections and all of a sudden the state Supreme Court has a Democratic majority that breaks the NCGA's gerrymander, and we are now very close to a blue state. And yeah, so, like, I, I don't. Throwing Berger out at this point is just like, it's borderline suicidal.
• 34:37
  [D] Yeah,
• 34:39
  [C] yeah, it, you know, like sometimes the. There's an eruption of anger in like a red state at, you know, the legislative leadership and, you know, it's next, man up, whatever. But North Carolina, it's all hands on deck there. I mean, you know, I though George, you know, I've been hearing for 20 years, North Carolina is on the verge of turning blue. And so, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, you know, you got some good trends there, but I'll believe it when I see it. And there are some, you know, not great trends in terms of, like, you have a shitload of conservative retirees moving to the coast there. And that is really. And then you had the Lumbees and a lot of rural Dems turning against the party. And I don't know if they bottomed out. If they bottomed out, then maybe, yeah, you have a chance.
• 35:20
  [A] But the rural Dems thing hasn't bottomed out, but it's pretty close. I mean, you just. There's just not that many people left who are still registered Dems who are pulling Republic at this point like it exists. But like, that was the story of the 2000s for sure, or 2000s, early 2000s for sure. Now the story is like you said earlier, with the Rio Grande Valley, the urban, rural divide just going into overdrive and all of the growth in North Carolina, all of it is in the big urban centers and they are deep, deep blue and getting bluer. And Mecklenburg county is the perfect example of that. Right. Like us getting serious about. You do not vote for Republicans for any reason is a thing now. And there's enough people here that if that continues, that trend line continues. I don't care how many retirees are moving to the coast. They don't have the numbers. That is, that is the thing that Republicans claim will keep them viable. And I just. The Numbers aren't there.
• 36:10
  [E] George is really tired of the Atlanta United fans making fun of Charlotte FC
• 36:16
  [C] for them being
• 36:19
  [E] Red State.
• 36:20
  [A] There was actually some good news on trans folks sort of role in our politics out of Atlanta, too. They had a state House member lose her primary after she basically made fun of the idea that she could ever suffer political consequences for being. She was basically a turf, right? She was a Democrat turf. And she got shown the door by primary voters this past Tuesday. So, you know, there are definitely good things happening in a subset of the i85 corridor. I will. I'll put it that way.
• 36:54
  [E] We should clip that and send it to Gavin Newsom, by the way, and his.
• 36:58
  [D] Yeah, I would say. I would say that. I don't think that she was a full blown turf. I think. I think that her positioning was basically in the Newsom lane, where she was clearly, clearly to the right of where the Democratic Party now is on trans rights. But she wasn't over where the Republican Party is on trans rights, if that makes sense.
• 37:14
  [A] Now.
• 37:14
  [D] She was, she was a dick to parents of trans people. And I think that was, that was a real problem for her. But
• 37:22
  [C] if you want a preview of a take I have on trans rights, I think that, you know, if Republicans spend a hundred million dollars attacking Democrats on trans rights, they're losing because people won't care if, if the price of a barrel of oil is $120 and they won't care if, you know, inflation's still, you know, beyond that, inflation's still high, that the government's, you know, using ice to terrorize their own citizens. If all these awful things that are going on, they turn to trans, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna be too discordant. It's gonna be like, you know, in 2024, when we were like, oh, you know, all this bad stuff going on with the economy, but if we just run on abortion rights, people love us on abortion rights. And that may be. People may agree with you on one issue, but they're not going to vote on it. They won't always vote on it.
• 38:15
  [A] The thing I took heart from. And again, this is all primary stuff. Like there. There were general implications and general election implications that you could read out of it. But. But I just am really heartened that, like, basic party infrastructure and primary voters are being pretty consistent in my part of the south about this where, like, if you are that type of Democrat, like, it's not going to fly. And, you know, it's nice to see Democrats getting serious about making sure. That everyone's a team player for the coalition. Yeah.
• 38:45
  [E] So, Aaron, what you're saying is if Trump, though, reversed everything that he was wedded to doing, then it could turn. Then they could run 100 million bucks on trans rights. That's right.
• 38:59
  [C] If he can make it 2019 again through science or magic, then trans rights is a winning issue for Republicans. Yeah.
• 39:09
  [D] I feel like I'm old enough to have the sense that I've seen this movie before on trans rights. Right. Like back in, back in the 2000s, we had this. We had this backlash election in 2004 where gay marriage was widely credited as a winning issue for Republicans. And then they proceeded to get to absolutely eat on that everywhere besides on Proposition 8.
• 39:30
  [C] That's.
• 39:31
  [B] Yeah.
• 39:31
  [C] I mean, that's the thing. When you have like, like a kind of purely social issue with no real material consequences. The shelf life of that is so short.
• 39:40
  [D] And there's. And there's thermostatic backlash that hits.
• 39:43
  [C] There is. But it's just like, you know, you can get people. You can. You can only rile people up for so long about a threat that isn't real.
• 39:49
  [D] Yeah.
• 39:51
  [E] Yeah.
• 39:51
  [C] You know, and so once people. It's like, it's like it's been four years and nobody's tried to trans my child at school. Meanwhile, it's $5 a gallon at the pump. Well, you know, who's out of touch, my friends?
• 40:04
  [D] We should probably talk about NC4, particularly if we're going to talk about, you know, trends and trends in Democratic primaries.
• 40:11
  [C] So. Yeah, I mean, that's one. That's another one where I'm like, really? Because Valerie Fouche, who is like, for most part, pretty unoffensive member of the Democratic coalition, but she, like, is playing footsie with AI and crypto. And, you know, she had beaten Nita Alam in a primary early. You know, I think. Was it okay? It was the last cycle. Yeah. So she beat her in a primary in 2024, a far more progressive challenger, Alam, comes back and really kind of tries to, you know, a much more organized effort this time against an incumbent who really hasn't done too much people off again other than be in bed with crypto. And AI and Alam almost pulled it off. She came within, like, 1 percentage point of winning that primary. And I think we'll learn more because Illinois's primaries are in nine days and there's been way more AI and crypto spending in those. But I wonder if it's not. If it's not enough to just be like, oh, you vote them on everything. But if you're in bed with these right wing Trump donors, if that's enough to kind of turf you out and that almost was enough to turf Frouche out. And in Illinois, we'll get a better view of that with Laura Fine. And Unfortunately, Jesse Jackson Jr. Has some other things going for him right now. And Raja Krishnamoorthy, those are three candidates who've really gotten a lot of right wing money behind them in Democratic primaries, even though they by and large vote with Democrats on most issues except for AI and crypto. And so we'll see if kind of just that skepticism of kind of right wing industries enough to kind of just beat someone.
• 41:52
  [D] Do you see that AI crypto frame applying to the, the Texas Senate Democratic primary as well?
• 41:58
  [C] Well, no, I mean, you know, it could have because, because Crockett really was close with crypto though. You know, Talrico, I mean, you know, I, I like Talarico. You know, his, you know, he has good relations with Miriam Adelson. So, you know, his, his, you know, he has some right wing donors behind him too. But, and APAC is kind of a whole, APAC didn't really play too much in Texas and North Carolina, but it did a lot in Illinois. So we'll know a bit more about how much of a millstone APAC is, especially now in light of the Iraq or, sorry, Iran, who am I, George W. Bush in light of the Iran war, if there's a backlash there as
• 42:39
  [D] well, we're landing troops in Iraq too. So.
• 42:42
  [C] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 42:47
  [D] I think that, I think that, that the, the BIS Fine primary is going to be a big old mess, but maybe we'll say going deep on that for after it happens.
• 42:57
  [C] Yeah.
• 42:58
  [B] I just want to apologize to the audience for the frankly unbecoming amount of North Carolina talk. And we will be returning to our regularly scheduled main talk next week. Thank you.
• 43:10
  [A] That primary isn't until June where we're putting a complete blackout on all main primary news until June. You say the discovery of multiple more pet tattoos, which, let's be real, there got to be more of them, right?
• 43:22
  [B] You say that, but Proctor will suggest
• 43:24
  [C] it filing deadlines this week so it becomes timely. Yeah.
• 43:29
  [E] You're saying barring revelation of more tattoos like that's 100% going to happen.
• 43:36
  [A] What parts of the oysterman's body have you seen that we need to be informed about? Low tax?
• 43:45
  [E] None of them. I'm just playing the probabilities here.
• 43:48
  [D] The oyster, the oysterman's body is kind of an Amazing romance novel title. Somebody should use that.
• 43:55
  [A] Okay, so here you go, George.
• 43:58
  [E] My. My copy of John Maynard Keynes's Treatise on Probability.
• 44:03
  [A] Not even I own that book.
• 44:04
  [D] God,
• 44:07
  [C] I will say, you know, two months before Platner got in with his. I said, there's an inverse correlation between the quality of a candidate launch video and the quality of the candidate. And I have never been more vindicated.
• 44:20
  [A] It was a pretty good launch video.
• 44:21
  [C] It was very good. Because here's the thing. Those launch videos aren't geared toward voters. They're geared toward you, the donors. And so this is someone who makes. Who is great with donors. And so guess what? The people who are great with donors, you know, not always, but they tend to be pretty bad with voters. And you know, hey, you got three more months of this talk. So I'm looking, you know, good luck to all who are participating in that. I am doing my best to just let that play out.
• 44:48
  [B] I'm just gonna shout out that literally everyone I know quit that campaign. And this happened twice. They had two complete ejections of like all of their not paid for staff.
• 45:05
  [C] So that, that can actually be a good or a bad thing. Like I've seen can't amazing candidates not be able to hold on to staff because they're just insane political people.
• 45:15
  [B] Volunteers though.
• 45:16
  [C] Yeah. I mean, so like Amy Klobuchar, horrible boss, but also she does really well in elections just because she's just a
• 45:22
  [B] politics machine and how many Nazi tattoos ejected her volunteers?
• 45:27
  [C] Yeah, I know. Then there's the other one where it's like, oh, no, the campaign's a total mess. And it seems to be that this is more that one.
• 45:34
  [A] You want the lobbing binders at underlings kind of dead eyed politics psycho. Not the gets a Tottenkopf tattoo kind of dead eyed politics psycho.
• 45:42
  [C] That's exactly what I'm saying.
• 45:43
  [E] How much of. How much of Amy Klobuchar's body have you seen that would lead you to say.
• 46:08
  [D] I wanted to ask Aaron about. About Montana if he's got thoughts on it.
• 46:11
  [C] But yeah, Mont. So that's like. Again, I mean, it. Actually, you might as well talk about the price of oil, because here's the thing. If oil is this expensive come November, then yeah, but it's in play. So, you know, I mean, it was a really. I mean, I think people generally hate it when politicians do that. I don't know how long it lasts.
• 46:34
  [B] Just.
• 46:34
  [A] Can. Can we explain what happened for folks might not know.
• 46:37
  [C] So the incumbent demo or the incumbent Republican Senator, Steve Danes Waited until the day filing was due to announce that he wasn't running. And he made it so that. And because he was the incumbent, nobody else was really running for the seat. And then at the last. So he' like, I'm not running. And then the U.S. attorney, a Trump appointee for the state, ended up like having his petitions ready and he filed for the seat. And now even though he's not really been vetted by the public at all, he's the de facto Republican nominee in a pretty red state. This is a shady thing. It's like both parties do it in politics. It happened in Illinois when Chewy Garcia announced last minute he wasn't running. And this chief of staff was the only one to pull signatures in. I remember this happening in a Kentucky race like a few decades ago on the Republican side. Like both parties do it. It sucks when they do it. It takes votes away from people. I've never really seen too much of a backlash to it, unfortunately, because people tend to be like, well, that's politics, baby, and what are you going to do? But Montana, historically, again, it's getting more and more Republican. The people moving there are moving there because of Yellowstone and that's not great for Democrats. And you know, so it's like there might just be like a ceiling on Democrats they can't breach. But the main non Republican is an independent candidate, Seth Bodnar, who's the head of local university. You have a Republican tainted by kind of this shady deal. Maybe it's enough to get people out of their partisan silos. I don't know.
• 48:16
  [B] Do we, do we know how many potential contempt charges are on this U.S. attorney?
• 48:22
  [C] You know, it's in Montana. That border tends to not attract a ton of stuff. So you know, this guy, I mean, but he's still, you know, he is a Trump apparatchik probably. I mean, it's weird, like a U. S turn, like, okay, bribes.
• 48:38
  [B] How is he on kava bags? Something here?
• 48:43
  [C] Yeah, I mean, like, I'm guessing that like in a lot of states the U.S. attorney is like, especially one where, where like Trump probably doesn't care about the cases there. It's probably just someone who's friends with the senators and that's why also, like, he was the guy.
• 48:57
  [B] That's not nearly as fun, though.
• 48:59
  [C] I know, I know. So it's. But I mean, it's unclear. Like, I mean, the thing is this guy's totally unvetted. Who knows what kind of skeletons he has. And so we'll see what skeletons he does have. Maybe there is a cava. I don't think they have kava in Montana.
• 49:12
  [B] Yeah, that's a little too lib.
• 49:15
  [C] Yeah, it's a little lib coded. I mean, you know, you know, Missoula might have a. Yeah, they would be a good turf for kaba if they were within their retail footprint, but that's true. Yeah.
• 49:24
  [B] They probably at least have like a blue bottle coffee or something.
• 49:28
  [C] Yeah, I. I wonder, like, you know, if you're listening to this, please write the guys and tell them what the most bougie thing in Missoula is.
• 49:36
  [D] We.
• 49:36
  [B] We do have it at least one person in our cinematic universe who does live there. So this is.
• 49:42
  [C] They gotta have, like a Lululemon, because they're everywhere. And I'm sure there's a trade goes like. I mean, like, it's this thing now because, like, I remember when my wife and I, like, we. We went vacation in Montana like, eight years ago, and I was kind of amazed that, like, you can just, like, eat really well everywhere now, including, like, at Glacier National Park. There's just like, oh, yeah, like chefs who've just been priced out of New York. I'm like, you know what? I will live in Columbia Falls, Montana, and make the most amazing bites and burgers for the people coming through here. And so Montana can be secretly bougie.
• 50:15
  [D] So I. I vacation in Montana from time to time, and I just want to throw out five on black, which is a chain of, like, Brazilian bean bowl places that's, like, entirely contained within Montana. They've got a weird food scene. It's pretty good.
• 50:27
  [E] Okay, I'm just thinking of this. This federal prosecutor running for office and Trump debating whether he's going to endorse him and asking him about the tedious Smokey the Bear commercials and whether. Whether he's done anything to prose cute those.
• 50:45
  [B] What is he confusing Smokey the Bear with? Yogi?
• 50:51
  [C] No.
• 50:51
  [E] You don't remember that tweet?
• 50:52
  [B] No.
• 50:53
  [E] Oh, yeah.
• 50:54
  [B] I try not to pay attention to this.
• 50:56
  [E] Yes. Like, back I. A thousand years ago, Trump did a tweet in which he was just thinking aloud and said, who is paying for these tedious Smokey the Bear commercials?
• 51:10
  [A] Enough already.
• 51:12
  [C] That this is from the before times when he would sometimes just like. Yeah, this is when he was popping off about Diet Coke too.
• 51:18
  [D] Yes.
• 51:19
  [C] Yeah, yeah.
• 51:20
  [D] Thoughts on. Thoughts on, you know, Twilight romances. That was the.
• 51:23
  [E] That's right, Kirsten Stewart.
• 51:25
  [C] Yeah.
• 51:25
  [D] The times that were. All right.
• 51:28
  [A] Oil, Oil or Earl. So in case you've been living under a rock Oil is as of this moment recording on Sunday night about 9:00pm right now WTI is trading at, call it 110. Call it, yeah, 110. The figure that's front month WTI crude oil. So that's crude oil delivered to a big hub of oil infrastructure at Cushing, Oklahoma. Brent, which is North Sea light sweet crude, similar grade product, it's European benchmark and is sort of the de facto global benchmark. That's trading at, at 110 also, which is unusual. They've, they're in the same spot, which is unusual and speaks to how disrupted global oil markets have gotten because 20% of production is now not available. And not only can you not move tankers through Hormuz, you're starting to see a bunch of production shut down explicitly. So for instance, Kuwait, and I believe it's, there's one other country in the Persian Gulf, one of the other Gulf states shut in, started to shut in oil and gas production. Qatar, I think you a cutter. Okay, it's, it's all going to get shut in eventually. And so this is significant for a bunch of reasons. Reason number one is that once you shut it down, you don't just flip a switch. This is not being connected to the electricity grid and on and off like a big piece of machinery. Oil fields take a long time to both. Like if you're not taking the crude out, they start to break. And if you're not, if you don't have anywhere to put the crude, then you have to stop taking the crude out. And so you have to do what's called shutting and production. And that is a pretty dicey process and you got to be careful with it. So you slowly ramp down the amount you're extracting and pumping out of the fields and then it takes a while to slowly ramp it back up because you can't just turn all the pressure on immediately and hope that everything doesn't break. So in other words, the longer this closure takes place, the harder it is to get things moving again once it reopens. Same logic applies for gas, basically. We've also had a series of hits to Iranian infrastructure as well as the drone war continuing and nothing too disastrous yet, but a series of refineries and other production facilities as well as ships getting hit in the Gulf over the weekend. Hormuz has been closed for over a week now, like nine days now. And that has never happened before.
• 53:57
  [D] And
• 54:01
  [A] like if this, if it stays like this for a couple more months, then oil will be well north of $150, probably like 200. Oil at 110 doesn't shut the economy down. It's, you know, it drags consumers down a bit, but it's not like the end of the world. Oil above 120 starts to have real economic impacts. People don't have the same amount of money they would otherwise spend on discretionary stuff. Oil above 150 and into the 200 range is really important. Production starts just not happening because it's not worth pursuing. We are saving crude for stuff that, that people are willing to pay a huge amount for. Like, for instance, like the ability to eat.
• 54:41
  [D] Correct me if I'm wrong here though, like, nobody thinks oil is going to stay at 110. It might go higher, it might go lower. Both significant moves either way.
• 54:51
  [A] But like, well, so, so like, let's do a couple hypotheticals. Let's say don't, don't assume that this is like an actual forecast. I'm not doing, I'm not doing forecasting geopolitics here. I'm just saying like, imagine, right? Imagine the straight of hormones opens tomorrow, everyone goes back to normal, okay? Oil probably falls almost immediately to about $70 a barrel, something like that, maybe 75. Let's say things start to look more, more optimistic. And so now people are thinking, well, you know, crude spot markets are still so tight that we need to, you know, we would need to price futures near term futures at like 130, 140, but it's looking more optimistic. So that 75 scenario is now starting to look more likely. So now maybe we'll stick it right here at about 110, 120. But it won't be there for long, right, because events will un. Either there was a reason for optimism or there wasn't the equilibrium price for where crude probably should be given global production and inventories without this geopolitical hit is like high 60s at the highest. It's like, you know, probably more like $60 a barrel is more realistic given where global production is and what global demand's done. With 20% of global production offline, effectively the equilibrium price is like at least $200 a barrel. And for a long period of time it's maybe higher. Right? So like, yes, to your point, we could, we could have a situation where it sticks here for a few sessions as sort of information sorts itself out. But then you have to do the geopolitics overlay, which is like, well, what's the realistic scenario where it's where like we have enough good news that that's like, realistic. And I don't, I don't see one. So, yeah, I think, think. I think higher here is very likely.
• 56:34
  [E] I liked, I liked Aaron's comment. Aaron made a post on Blue sky saying that Texas A and M is going to be the first team where every player has a mech suit in response to oil prices being 110 bucks.
• 56:49
  [C] I mean, that, I mean, yeah, you're, you're going to. They're going to be the Harlem Gold Trotters and everyone else can be the Washington generals of oil states at this level. I mean, it's like. And so we all know that they're listening to this podcast in the Islamic Republic.
• 57:02
  [A] Yep.
• 57:03
  [C] And so, like, this is a huge point of leverage that they. So, like, Iran can be like, you can keep just like. I mean, is that what they're thinking right now? It's like, you can keep shelling us, you can keep taking stuff. Like, as long as we have the ace card, the straight of Hormuz, we know that we can force you to back down and we can make the Islamic Republic live to see another four decades.
• 57:25
  [A] I am not 100% sure that's true. And here's the thing. So the drone war and threatening Hormuz is something that is much easier to do than it would have been five years ago with conventional weapons. And the US pursuing this sort of campaign five or 10 years ago would have been far higher likelihood of completely degrading their ability to project power into the state of hormones. I don't have high confidence saying, you know, Iran can do this indefinitely because they. There still is an industrial and logistical operation underpinning the ability to project power into Hormuz. Right. Like, you still need guys on trucks, you still need warehouses full of drones. You still need maybe to produce drones or maybe not if you've got enough inventory, but then you need to protect the inventory and have it spread widely enough that it can both access launch points that are then useful or, you know, without being detected and also, you know, be dispersed enough that it's hard to get it all, you know, Like, I don't, I don't. One would assume that the US Military has some sort of idea of how many locations they need to hit before this is like, okay, they can't really keep firing these things off willy nilly. But like, I don't, I don't. Nobody has a really strong perspective on this without access to whatever version of Claude they're running inside the Pentagon.
• 58:49
  [B] So, yeah, is anyone gonna take them, like, at their word if they say it's okay. Right, like sure, they're gonna what's the downside?
• 58:56
  [C] Yeah, that's the thing. It's like they only need to get lucky once to freak out the entire oil market. Right.
• 59:02
  [A] Well they've hit multiple ships already. Yeah, like everyone's well aware what the risk is. I, I think, I think Iran's saying we're not actually going to hit. Like so for instance if Iran came out tomorrow and said, said you know, everybody but US flagged vessels is fine, you would see ships immediately try and run the, run the straight like that would happen and you would very quickly get. Now I, I, the other problem here is of course like they've degraded command and control sufficiently enough that like we don't know for sure that there can be an order from Tehran to back down and that it'll be followed by all those individual units like probably still. I, I, I think, I think the, the best answer to that at this point is yes it will be but like I don't know.
• 59:43
  [B] So didn't the Iranian foreign minister say yesterday, I think that, that like some military assets are kind of going off of pre planned orders.
• 59:55
  [A] That would have been true for the initial like wave of response at this point you're over a week in and no, they're, they're still supposed to be checking in with home and again I'm not saying oh, oh we've got loose military units in southern Iran. Like I'm just saying that's certainly a possibility and from the perspective of what crude flows through the strait, you know, that's the deal. Now I will say one other thing, like I've tried to be pretty explicit here about where the uncertainties are and how little we do know versus what we would need to know to have a firm forecast here. I, I struggle to see ways that, that you get an optimistic outcome near term so some sort of de escalation near term and there's a bunch of reasons for that which I don't have to badger on about further. But there are huge uncertainties here and you should not take anyone's view that like oh oil is going to go to X dollars or you know, this is going to have y economic effect or this is going to, you know, evolve in Z way. Like anybody saying that doesn't know what they're talking about. I'm sorry, they don't know what they're talking about about because there are too many uncertainties here to be like have really, really strong takes. What I will say is the longer hormone stays closed, the higher oil prices go. That's like just really, really simple math. Like, you know, and for a given oil price, we can be fairly sure how specific users of oil will react. That's fine, but that's all very short run. In the long run, the equilibriums are totally different. And by long run, I mean multiple months. Right. Like, just have really, really low confidence in what happens next because you shouldn't have high confidence because it's complicated.
• 1:01:31
  [C] It. Yeah. And this is why I said when, when you asked me about Montana, if we have a chance there. I'm like, well, if the, the price of a, a barrel of oil in November is $150, we got chance everywhere because like, we haven't had an election like that since 2008, really. But like, and you know, for, for those of you who are blessedly too young to remember that the economy really wasn't freefall and during the 2008 election and Democrats won a route and they won in places they've never won since, though. Though at the same time, I would caution that like, there was still way more cross party voting then than there is now. Like you had a Democratic incumbent in the South Dakota Senate race, for example. The Democratic incumbent in Arkansas ran without Republican opposition. So it's not like you're not going to get 60 seats out of this. But like, if you think about what happens in an election that occurs while the in freefall, a lot of light red places become very win. So like you're, you're, you know, it's like, so it's like it's not just Texas, it's not just Ohio. Like, you know, kind of right now it's like Maine, North Carolina, Texas. Ohio is kind of seen as the top four TRA targets to win it. But it's like when, if it gets really bad, you start thinking Kansas, Nebraska, you know, like. So, yeah, like the economic uncertainties lead to a lot of political uncertainties. So I'm just very wary of, you know, people making very strident election predictions for about the November 2026 elections. You know, they should hold fire for a little bit because we really don't know what the economy would look like and what the politics would look like of $150 barrels of oil.
• 1:03:19
  [A] My only strident take about the November elections is that Roy Cooper is going to romp. Other than that, I don't really have a take.
• 1:03:25
  [C] It seems like it's headed there.
• 1:03:26
  [A] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, for, and also just for the stock market like under $100 a barrel didn't matter. Over $100 a barrel is pain. And you know, right now US indices are down about 2%, give or take. Emerging market stocks just entered correction so down over 10% from their closing high. You know, like there's, there's real pain being felt across global equity markets, but that can all snap back really quickly. Like, like if we do get positive outcomes, stuff's going to rip. So it really like I think if, if you were paying attention to markets during the tariff stuff and a lot of people were, there was a lot of like, oh well how can this be happening? As soon as bad assumptions are priced in, stuff can rally really, really quickly. Really really in your face. Like it way faster than you would think. Because markets are always forward looking. They're always forward looking.
• 1:04:17
  [C] So like how long does it take, you know, now that they're kind of shutting down production, how long does it take to like get, get kind of the $60 barrel production levels back online?
• 1:04:28
  [A] Well, so they have a bunch of stuff in inventory, both floating and land based inventory in the Gulf. So in terms of restarting flows to everyone else, which is what really crushes the price quickly, it takes like less than 24 hours. Honestly is you, you would have enormous numbers of barrels moving out of hormoz after that. Like you know, going out in spot markets you would probably still see disruptions for, for a couple weeks maybe. But futures markets and like out the curve would return back to sort of equilibrium behavior within days. I would be my estimation, you know, assuming that you have something that the market views as like, okay, we really can move barrels through unimpeded at this point, which is a huge if. Of course, yeah.
• 1:05:10
  [C] What if it takes two months to get there? Does it end up taking longer for there to be a recovery if there.
• 1:05:15
  [A] If we just don't know, man.
• 1:05:17
  [C] I mean it's really. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:19
  [A] Like, like in two months. Well, first off, the orgies they'd be having in the streets of West Texas and Alberta would be, I mean they're, they're unseemly. Yeah. Like I can't understate how huge of a handout this is to anybody that's able to pump crude out of the ground right now because they, nothing's changing for them. You know, us production will pick up if you see this for two months. But like that's the most elastic, most responsive to price production in the world. Like we kind of the amount we're taking out the ground, the amount we have for the duration. We have roughly, I mean, OECD commercial inventories are roughly two months of demand is sort of the way to think about it. And that's summed across crude and all liquid products. And, you know, Chinese government inventories add significantly of that. So China has more than three months of consumption on hand, give or take. You know, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is another source of supply in the US but for the typical person, like typical corporation, whoever, anybody that's using oil, whether it's to fill up your tank or to produce plastic or whatever, all that doesn't really matter because price, the way global oil markets work is price just draws crude where it needs to go and where its highest value is. It's very, very fungible across markets. So it's all going to get worked out through price. And that price is going to move very quickly to respond to events. Until Hormoz reopens, it's going to keep marching higher to 150 and then 200 and, and you know, getting to 200 probably requires at least a month of closure, probably more like two to three months, but it's for sure a possibility. Grim.
• 1:07:02
  [B] I'm just really glad that throughout this entire section, we thankfully did not have any breaking news because I really worry about your voice having to read those in all caps.
• 1:07:12
  [A] I mean, I, I, I am willing to translate the all caps into normal, normal text in an audio format. I'm not willing to do it for blue sky.
• 1:07:20
  [B] Yeah, fair.
• 1:07:27
  [A] I don't, I mean, we can also talk, I guess, just bat around a little bit. What y' all think about the possibilities for de escalation? I'm. My thing is you don't. It's not just the US that has to de escalate, It's Israel too.
• 1:07:38
  [C] Yeah.
• 1:07:39
  [A] And how do you get them on side?
• 1:07:40
  [B] Yeah, maybe I can go first. No, you can't. That's the end of the sentence. You are now in this until Israel and Netanyahu are okay with saying we're done. That could be five years from now. Well, practically, of course. No, it can't. They are limited in how much boom they have too. But like, what else are you going to do?
• 1:08:05
  [D] They've got lots of boom in the tank, though.
• 1:08:09
  [B] They have a decent amount. Well, but they've also used a lot of theirs too.
• 1:08:13
  [C] Yeah. And you know, another thing there too is you saw like Al Sistani kind of made vaguely pro Iran statement today, I think. And if you think about kind of what happens if all of a sudden, you know, kind of the, you know, a lot of, you know, not just, you know, if you have militants across the Middle east all of a sudden being, being really kind of like, oh, we're like really going after Israel now. That does become a problem for them. And you know, it's kind of the thing that nobody really wants to talk about here. But it's like, you know, the risk of a really bad terrorist incident is way higher now than it was a few weeks ago.
• 1:08:58
  [B] Yep.
• 1:08:58
  [C] And the, you know, these are all things that again, it's hard to know how they'll play out exactly, but it certainly wouldn't lead. You know, it's, it's kind of hard to see that leading to a de. Escalation. And it's really just like, is it possible for us to eliminate Iran's ability to close the Strait?
• 1:09:14
  [D] I think that the lesson from the Houthi experience is no, that we just did this with the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Their shipping through there is still down something like 80% from what it was four years ago. We threw something like $150 million worth of missiles into the desert trying to, trying to get these guys to back off. And it didn't do any good.
• 1:09:45
  [B] Jobs program.
• 1:09:46
  [D] Yeah. So, you know, like, if I'm Iran at this point, the best strategic asset I have is the ability to close the strait. And I think it's going to be very difficult to get them to give that up.
• 1:10:02
  [C] Well, they wouldn't give it up. It's really kind of just can you stop it by force? And I, you know, it doesn't seem like it, but I mean, you know, and like at what, you know, or at least get it down to a manageable risk level for, you know, like at what point is like, you know, kind of our Qatar and Bahrain and these other countries being like, you know what we are willing to live with like a 95% chance again through the straight just because like we're getting crushed so bad.
• 1:10:28
  [B] There's some like fleet and being aspects to it too. Right. Because like until somebody tries, you kind of probably do need to assume that yes, Iran can project force and yes, can, can your launch people are trying
• 1:10:39
  [A] this week and did not, it did not go well for them.
• 1:10:41
  [C] Right.
• 1:10:42
  [A] Like we, I think, I think two tankers got lost in one container ship or maybe the other way around.
• 1:10:48
  [B] I think you're right.
• 1:10:49
  [D] Yeah. And we're saying but we're going to start doing ship escorts and, and maybe you can, you know, increase the percentage going through that way. But you're taking on other risks that even if things go well, that's, that's an expensive process.
• 1:11:04
  [C] And like, we don't have, like, do we have the kind of naval tonnage volume to like, escort what they need through the straight.
• 1:11:12
  [D] We need a boat on for that one.
• 1:11:15
  [A] I, I think the answer to that is plausibly to at least get something through if you do it, if you do it some sort of convoy style. But, but I mean, yeah, it's a big chance either way. Throughput is significantly lower. So let's say you're able to get hormones back to 10% or 20% of what it was sending through before, which I think is probably a pretty optimistic assumption given naval assets we have in the region. Well, that's still down 80%. That's still a huge hit. And that's where you have oil at 150 as opposed to 200 or maybe 175 as opposed to 200. But that's still still a huge decline in, in throughput.
• 1:11:53
  [C] I will say a really kind of, you know, kind of powerful sounding, but ultimately feudal gesture is exactly the type of thing that Trump would do. So I feel like that's in the
• 1:12:06
  [B] future, that checks out.
• 1:12:08
  [A] Yeah, I mean, there are so many constraints too, on getting your hands on enough tanker capacity to actually run through there. So I, I'm sure people have seen discussions of the insurance market. That's assuming that the ownership of, of these vessels is still. Ownership of the cargoes in the vessels is still like private interest. I could imagine a scenario where the Trump administration decides, well, let's just buy tankers and their cargoes and then we'll collect the money on the other side for them. We'll buy them on the way into the strait and then sell them on the other side. That is in and of itself. I'm sorry if I'm giving them ideas, by the way. That is still in and of itself.
• 1:12:45
  [B] We can edit it out.
• 1:12:48
  [A] Incredibly expensive. And you will lose ships doing that. And like, you have to find crews that are willing to run that risk. Right. I mean, one in 20 chance. Let's. Assuming they're, let's assume they're able to guarantee something like 95% of tankers get through. If it's a 1 in 20 chance that the LNG carrier you're sitting on goes boom, like that's a high chance. Yeah, it's, that's a very high chance for that outcome. There's a lot of downside skew there, there.
• 1:13:17
  [E] I'm going to need a big Payment. And I'm going to need it up front.
• 1:13:22
  [D] The other thing is, you know this is a multimodal attack surface here, right? Like. Like it's not exclusively drones. It's not exclusively missiles that they can throw at things going through the straight. They can launch boats. If we give them the opportunity, they could mine it. I don't know what they could do in terms of like shoulder fired crap from the shore, but that doesn't necessarily seem entirely out of bounds when you're
• 1:13:48
  [A] talking about a target as big as an oil or LNG tanker with as little ablative capacity as those vessels have despite their massive metallic nature. Like, you know, Syriana. By the way, great movie. The. The closing shot to that movie is a like literally literal boat with an outboard motor using a Stinger missile warhead to blow up an LNG carrier. It doesn't take much more than that. I mean like you could. You could plausibly disable some of these ships with a couple RPGs, which is.
• 1:14:22
  [E] Yeah, yeah, they're made out of the same stuff. They're made out of the same stuff as the molasses tanks up in the north.
• 1:14:32
  [B] We fixed that a hundred years ago. I will thank you to not.
• 1:14:57
  [D] So moving on from the oil crisis in the Middle East, Ed is having a transportation crisis of his own.
• 1:15:04
  [B] Not yet, I'm not.
• 1:15:05
  [E] Wait, hang on. So before Ed. Before Ed does this, I believe George. I believe George owes Stellantis an apology as a preface to this, does he not?
• 1:15:15
  [A] I do not. In fact, I don't care how bad the outcomes for Ed's plug in hybrid Ford have been. They are nothing compared to the crimes enacted on the American driver by the Stellantis Corporation.
• 1:15:28
  [B] You mean just by the existence of Jeep or the Over. Okay, good, good.
• 1:15:32
  [A] The Grand Wagoneer on its own is much worse than anything that's happened to you.
• 1:15:36
  [B] You know, that's fair.
• 1:15:37
  [C] Especially the Dodge Charger. To that as well.
• 1:15:42
  [B] Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:15:43
  [A] The EV version of the Dodge Charger is actually worse than the original version of the Dodge Charger, which is. I didn't think was something that was possible, but they managed.
• 1:15:50
  [C] I'm trying to think like who buys an EV Dodge Charger?
• 1:15:54
  [B] They made it.
• 1:15:55
  [D] Nobody.
• 1:15:55
  [A] Literally nobody. And that we've seen that in the sales data.
• 1:16:00
  [B] And then if you type EV charger, Google thinks you want level one, level two, level three.
• 1:16:07
  [A] The answer is level two if you're building one in your garage, by the way.
• 1:16:10
  [B] Yeah, I. I haven't because the. The battery in my now problematic vehicle has decided, well, it wasn't big enough to need to charge that fast. So, yeah,
• 1:16:26
  [C] the.
• 1:16:27
  [B] So Stellantis has been saying troubling things about their electric vehicles, particularly the Jeeps, for a while, such as don't park them inside, which, honestly, is a real. That's a thing to hear. And this week, I got in the mail a letter from the Ford Motor Company saying, by the way, don't charge your batteries above 80%. And I'm like, that sounds foreboding. Then I go look online, and they're the same batteries that are in Stellantis IEDs.
• 1:17:00
  [A] So.
• 1:17:00
  [B] So I'm over here. Like, so should I not park it inside? I don't. But, like, I feel like I should know this. There's. There's a little bit of a gap here between the same batteries getting a. Hey, maybe just don't. Don't do things. Don't car. And these. These fine folks from Dearborn going, I send it. It's fine.
• 1:17:21
  [D] Yeah, like, you know, try to keep your face away from your car's hood if you can.
• 1:17:26
  [B] Yeah, I did Lear thermal venting this
• 1:17:30
  [A] week, which is better to learn about from a book than experience. Trust me on that one.
• 1:17:36
  [B] That's true.
• 1:17:37
  [E] That's a fair point.
• 1:17:39
  [B] So I have. I have been on the phone with those nice folks about, hi, you're buying my car back. Right. And we'll see how that goes. Because I can't sell it. You know, like, have. Like. Like, do I want to be spending $5 a gallon in gasoline when I'm carrying around an inactive battery? These are. These are the questions that we're learning about in 2026. And I'm honestly not. Not a big fan of it or of the Ford Motor Company or of Michigan generally.
• 1:18:13
  [A] I'm actually a huge fan of the Ford Motor Company because I don't care what the gas price is. It literally doesn't impact me in the slightest. So have fun. Fun.
• 1:18:20
  [C] Well, you know, poor Ed's car in a year is going to end up on a little boat in the Gulf headed toward an LNG tanker.
• 1:18:35
  [D] Oh,
• 1:18:37
  [A] and then it won't work.
• 1:18:38
  [B] And then it won't work at that either. It's fine.
• 1:18:45
  [E] His car into the. The Ford factory in Deer War.
• 1:18:50
  [C] Please.
• 1:18:51
  [B] I'm pretty sure my car was either made in Canada or Mexico.
• 1:18:54
  [A] Jim Farley's already got AD on a list.
• 1:18:57
  [E] I am almost certain it was made in Mexico.
• 1:19:00
  [B] Yeah, the. The really wild thing, though, is just that, like, they don't make this car anymore. They stopped making the partial Hybrid plug in, hybrid escapes. Which means they don't make the battery packs anymore. Which means that there are some kind of open questions about how are you intending to fix this? Because they've tried three software fixes so far. All that's happened is they have widened the recall.
• 1:19:28
  [D] So like, so like can you raid a Stellantis factory? You know they've got the same battery pack.
• 1:19:35
  [B] The battery packs are made by Samsung.
• 1:19:37
  [E] Okay that's because Sam's. Because Stellantis actually told you do not charge the battery period. And we're issuing a stop sale whereas Ford is just like we'll see.
• 1:19:49
  [B] They did stop sale the ones that are still on dealer lots.
• 1:19:52
  [E] Yes, yes.
• 1:19:53
  [B] Which is really interesting. You know like follow up questions are numerous at the moment but like they, they just literally don't make the battery packs anymore. And I, that factory is probably. I don't know what, what they're doing with it now but like they're. I don't see how this ends with, with another over the air update on our batteries are so screwy that like the walls between cells are breaking down. That seems like a design flaw. Not something you can really deal with over the air. Which is why I'm talking to the, the nice representatives about their lemon law.
• 1:20:32
  [D] Yeah, Discovery is going to help on this one.
• 1:20:35
  [B] Yeah, I'd like to be out of there before any such things need to happen.
• 1:20:40
  [C] You know what AI is actually really good at doing is writing like a really stern letter that will scare someone.
• 1:20:46
  [B] That's true.
• 1:20:47
  [A] I'll scare someone that doesn't have an attorney lying next to them in bed. Anyways, all of those sternly worded letters our readers keep listening just wind up in my wife's inbox.
• 1:20:56
  [E] Yeah. I mean Ford's been sued a lot of times over the many decades.
• 1:21:01
  [C] Yeah that's true.
• 1:21:04
  [E] Is going to scare them.
• 1:21:08
  [D] I don't feel like Claude would be the right AI to go to if you need a letter from a heavy like that feels like Gemini.
• 1:21:13
  [B] The other alternatives are worse. Like Gemini is going to put random bold like bold case in in in like the first sentence of every paragraph chat GPT is going to say the real answer is and fill it with EM dashes.
• 1:21:28
  [E] Grock is going to appeal to the ghost of Henry Ford's just going to
• 1:21:35
  [B] paste in the half of Mein Kampf. Like you're honestly like at. At some point like if you start you could go. You could go broader. You could head out towards like the, the, the leading edge models from China. At which point it will Most of the time write English. Except when it won't. But the problem is every case it's going to cite is going to be from China, as evidenced by any time you try to do a web search with Deep seq. I've beaten this joke into the ground. But honestly, there is no good answer. Other than Claude. There's a reason that the DoD wants Claude to, to be involved in its target loop. It's the only answer. All right, that is our, that is
• 1:22:18
  [D] our contractual obligation to talk about AI for at least two and a half minutes a.
• 1:22:23
  [B] An episode. Mr. Amade, you can wire to bank account now. That's okay. They wouldn't hire me anyway. It's fine.
• 1:22:35
  [A] Why not? Because you wouldn't join the cult.
• 1:22:38
  [B] I don't know. But when I, when I, when I had a warm recommendation, I didn't even get a phone call. So clearly my record, my reputation proceeded be.
• 1:22:52
  [A] Oh well. Still in the loving embrace of the phone company. It could be worse.
• 1:22:56
  [E] They saw it and they thought this, this feels like a guy who's going to syana the Ford Motor Company.
• 1:23:11
  [A] All right, well, thank you, Aaron, for joining us. Where can people find you?
• 1:23:15
  [C] You can find me on Blue Spot, Sky Blue Spy and the chat. The name of my group chat is going to change to Blue Spy after this. Bluesky Climbing, BSky Social. You can also check out Heartland Signal, heartlandsignal.com. that's where you can find all the fine people I work with, as well as listen to WCPT820 in Chicago. You can subscribe to my newsletter, Radio Free America, the top political newsletter named after an REM song and where you can hear me go at length about how I really wish Jasmine Crockett had won like a real campaign. Or at the very least, James Talrico was really boring. So we really would have gotten an answer as to whether campaigns actually matter.
• 1:23:59
  [B] So this is the first time I have ever interacted with Aaron. So like, this is the first time I've looked at your Blue sky timeline. And honestly, this is like if Rich Lowry had a tbi, might be an Alzheimer.
• 1:24:13
  [C] Talking about Nellie Bowles there. Barry Weiss. I mean like, yeah, don't get. Yeah, my goal, you know, Barry Weiss and I started our jobs on the Same exact day. Two 41 year old Jews in the media space. And let me tell you, I'm gonna, I'm, I, I will end up looking better than she does after her tenure there.
• 1:24:34
  [B] You're winning.
• 1:24:34
  [C] I'm winning. I'm winning. I'm coming. I mean, you know, you can talk about, you know, especially compared to where we started. I'm already ahead, my friends, by doing nothing.
• 1:24:44
  [B] Nothing.
• 1:24:45
  [C] I'm doing nothing.
• 1:24:46
  [B] You can. You can win this one just standing still.
• 1:24:48
  [C] It's great. Yeah, no, I. We have big plans at Heartland, so please check it out. I got a great group of co workers that are all over what's going on. Right now, it's more regionally focused on the Midwest, but I think we are trying to go countrywide and really just get people up to speed on all the insane stuff that's going on in your state capital. And I know that you know that there's some insane stuff going on in that state capital. Capital. We're trying to figure out what exactly it is.
• 1:25:14
  [B] Mine's fine.
• 1:25:17
  [A] Have you seen what's happening in your second frame, everybody?
• 1:25:20
  [B] No, I'm trying not to.
• 1:25:23
  [A] All right, well, for normal men, in Charlotte, I'm George.
• 1:25:26
  [D] In dc, I'm Proctor.
• 1:25:28
  [E] In outer Florida, I'm low tax speedrun enjoyer.
• 1:25:31
  [B] And in Boston, I'm Ed.
• 1:25:33
  [A] Stay normal, y'.
• 1:25:33
  [C] All. Sam.