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We’re Doing Dog Armies Now, Dr. Craig · Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's in Carolina campaigning for GOP candidate Michael Watley, and he finds a way to bring up Houston's ass.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Says it's, quote, like a pile of muscle, then the legs, then the feet.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Tells the crowd he taps Houston on the shoulder once and hurt his hand.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, quote, this guy is a monster.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's not lying.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Houston is guilty as charged.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: The man does not skip a leg day.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's got that level ten guia.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Serving cake like it's a birthday party.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: He's Calopidjan in nature.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Calopidgian, that's quite a He's got a particularly round hinder.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Damn.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Depends on what pants he's wearing.
• 0:39
  unknown: Fuck.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: You got me, Nick.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Nick, we've had some good news this week.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Flavio Bolsonaro has lost the runoff to the Brazilian presidency.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is the first time in Brazilian history that the person who won the first round of the presidential election has lost the second round, and he has been defeated by fourth-term president Lula, which that by itself isn't good, but we gotta we gotta take him where we can get him.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So my my autocratic despair is all the way down to a five.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Also, the authoritarian guy in Serbia, he lost.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's good.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's good.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't really aware what the dangers were in Serbia.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, it's still around?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that is all Czechoslovakia now.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: They did it, they did it the other way.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they did it the other way?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my bad, my bad.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Whoops.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, yeah, you know, their student list, which was like co-opted student protests from a couple years ago, and it got co-opted by the mainstream or whatever, you know, but still, he's gone.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the big news is that Lula is president of Brazil.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not good that Lula is gonna serve a fourth term as president.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you in the United States, the situation here would be like imagine if Trump won in 2016, and then in 2020, the Democrats changed the constitution to allow Obama to run, and he did, and then he beat Trump in 2020, and then in 2024 beat a Trump Jr., basically.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: That wouldn't represent something good about American politics, but it would be strictly better than if Eric Trump became the president.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's basically what's going on in Brazil.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, Bolsonaristas, the right wing in Brazil, won big pretty much in both houses of Congress in Brazil.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Brazil has a bicameral legislature just like the United States.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a Senate and a House of Representatives equivalent, the Chamber of Deputies.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The right wing basically controls both of those chambers, but they don't got the presidency, and that's just good.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can take it from this podcast, boy.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's some clouds on that silver lining, but you can still look at the silver lining.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's got you out of five, which is a full reset.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's a full reset for me.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think you've ever been below a five.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think I've ever been below a five.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it would take for me to get below a five.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, no, I know exactly what it would take.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump would have to go to jail.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: The sneaky good thing about Lula winning again is this really vaults Flavio Balconero up the fail sun list.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't even top five.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And now he's number one with a bullet.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's really good, especially because after his first round victory, everybody expected him to win.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: People were treating him like he was the president already.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: He snatched defeat out of the hands of victory.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, he absolutely did.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Which is what a great fail son does.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: He and Lula had a debate last week, which went well for Lula.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lula is famously an incredible political operative.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite bit from that.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So Flavio Bolsonaro, son of J.R.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Bolsonaro, who is in jail, under house arrest for having staged a coup.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Flavio Bolsonaro turns to Lula and is trying to get him, and he's like, criminals support your regime.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: All the criminals in jail vote for you.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Lula says, Yeah, like your dad.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oof.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then he turns and barrels the camera, just like stares directly at the camera and says, vote for me, Jair.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even you know I'm better than your son.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oof.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Fucking hilarious.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hilarious.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I listened to about a minute of him on TV yesterday where he insisted that he get his minute to fuck with the guy that he beat for calling him nine fingers.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: He was so angry about Bolsonaro calling him Nine Fingers that he made it a big deal.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he really did kind of make it a speech for the ages.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: He said, hey man, I lost this finger because I was working two shifts and it was in unsafe conditions.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And for all the men out there, it was like, oh hell yeah, buddy.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I mean, Lula is the real fucking deal.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Lula didn't learn how to read until he was over 10 years old because he couldn't go to school because he was working in steel press mills, which is where he lost his finger.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: He got his political start organizing a union of metal workers because of shit like that, because children were losing limbs.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So he taught himself how to read so that he could become a politician and ran for president several times during a military dictatorship.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's got bona fides that people in the United States could only dream of.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, he's so fucking cool.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: He wears Panama hats.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's awesome.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: What does the bench look like in Brazil?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Is this just delaying the inevitable with Bolsonaro?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's the real question.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Lula has this as vice president, a sort of moderate nambi-pambi guy who's not going to be able to win against the right wing next time around.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Lula's original intended successor, a guy named Adaji, who is uh descended partly from Middle Eastern immigrants to Brazil, he was the person that ran against Jared Bolsonaro when Jared Bolsonaro won first time around.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Adaji is definitely not a successor to Lula.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lula's other original intended successor, a woman named Jilmo Hussef, did win, but she was ousted in a coup, a sort of like parliamentary procedural coup.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: There really isn't a like clear next guy in the Brazilian left, which is the problem.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Who can pull it off the way that Lula has?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have to find out.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is the cloud around the silver lining.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we're recording this the day after the Brazilian election got called, and so uncharacteristically, I'm trying to bask in some relative joy.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think that this is a nice moment.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think that we all deserve it.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: If we were looking for something to rally around between Magyar winning in Hungary and this, it's a pretty big deal.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's preventing Latin America and especially South America from being pretty universally governed by the right wing, because the right wing has Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the biggest and most important countries in South America, especially in Venezuela.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is it's good.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Brazil being the biggest, most powerful country of South America.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's certainly also just a blow for Trump, because Trump and the Bolsonaros are probably the most similar political family in the Americas right now.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're right-wing authoritarian populists who have now, as you know, Nick, both of them prominent fail sons.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's just really lovely to see.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: The great thing about Lula winning, for all of us that don't really follow South America that close, it is denial of the first lie of fascism, which is that it is inevitable.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Balzinero felt inevitable.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: He did.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: A month ago, we were talking about this, and you were choking up because this seemed likely to occur.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: The numbers were all there.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: The numbers were all there.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's another one of the things that this is showing us is ahead of the first round, the polls were showing that Lula was gonna win the first round of the election, and he lost.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And ahead of this, the numbers were showing that Lula was gonna lose and he won.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: People have been screaming this as much as possible since 2012, 2014.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: The polls are just not that good at predicting some of these things in the way that it seemed like they were for at least a brief shining decade between 1996 and 2006 or whatever.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's just reminding us, yeah, if you work, you can win.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: You might not, but you can.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's good news.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Where's your autocratic despair this week, Nick?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm at a six and it's driven by a joke, specifically by Senator John Houston's ass.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: John Houston, he's the incumbent Republican senator from Ohio.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: He's in a tight race right now.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to a rally for Housted starring Trump in Dayton, Ohio in early October, former NFL coach John Gruden drummed out of the league for his racism.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Clues Trump into the fact that he and Houston go way back.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: They played college football together, defensive backs, University of Dayton.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Gruden tells Trump Houston was the best player on that team.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's new information for Trump.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Must have surprised him a bit.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because a week later he's stumping for Houston in Youngstown, Ohio.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: He tells the story of finding out what a spectacular athlete Houston was in college.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: He mentions how this new information was caused for him to really give Houston an in-depth once over.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Tells the crowd, quote, I'm standing there, and I don't do this with men very often.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: I started examining Houston's body because I didn't know he was a great athlete.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I looked and I watched up and down and I looked at that ass.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Unquote.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think he knew that sounded odd because he immediately shifted to discussing Houston's hands.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Mentions that he's never studied the body of a man before, but there's nothing wrong with it.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's getting a real rise out of the crowd at that point, so he knows he's got something.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Trump instantly adds the bit to his touring arsenal.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Houston is running for senator in Ohio.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the next day, Trump truts this bit out at a rally in North Carolina, a state that is definitely not Ohio.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's in Carolina campaigning for GOP candidate Michael Watley, and he finds a way to bring up Houston's ass.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Says it's, quote, like a pile of muscle, then the legs, then the feet.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Tells the crowd he taps Houston on the shoulder once and hurt his hand.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, quote, this guy is a monster.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's not lying.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Houston is guilty as charged.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: The man does not skip a leg day.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's got that level 10 Gia.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Serving cake like it's a birthday party.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Or it's five more minutes until the pinata comes in.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's double cheeked up on a Wednesday afternoon.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's Calopygian in nature.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Calopidgian, that's quite a he's got a particularly round hinder.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Damn.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Depends on what pants he's wearing.
• 10:28
  unknown: Fuck.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: You got me, Nick.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: The whole take a sphere immediately grabs onto the bait, riffing on some variation of the question: Is Donald Trump the first gay president?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like it matters.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hack.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody's doing anything new with the premise.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And these people can't help themselves.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Here's my actual problem with it.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Calling Trump gay gives him a normal sexuality that millions of adults also have.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And Trump has anything but a normal sexuality.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: He's not too big on consent.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: A jury found him liable for sexual abuse.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: The judge said in plain English, that's what most people call rape.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: He once bragged on Howard Stern about walking into Miss Teen USA's pageant dressing rooms.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Teenage contestants said he did it all the time.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Trump denies it.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: In 2016, an anonymous woman using the name Katie Johnson for fear of being doxxed tried to sue Jeffrey Epstein and Trump, alleging that they had both sexually assaulted her when she was 13 years old.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: After being brought to parties at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse with promises of a modeling career.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: She was using the name Katie Johnson because she alleged that Trump had made threats against her life and the lives of her family if she ever spoke of that evening.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Katie Johnson, a real person, signed and submitted real affidavits saying that these awful things happened.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: A second declarate, also anonymous, described as having had worked for Epstein recruiting girls for his parties, filed a statement supporting Katie Johnson's account.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to the election in 2016, Katie Johnson withdrew her case.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing went to court, but there's still a public record that it happened.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Trump, of course, denies all the allegations.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Even today, as we tape, news has broken that a House Judiciary Committee Democrats report contains an accusation that model and former Miss Switzerland Beatrice Kuhl told House investigators Trump raped her in 1993 when she was 24 after an evening with Jeffrey Epstein.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: The committee says it hasn't verified.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: The White House denied it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Spokeswoman Lauren Biss called it a politically motivated attack and said Trump had been fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein, which is untrue.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Trump, of course, hasn't been charged.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's merely been accused.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Not an unfamiliar circumstance for Trump.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's happened upwards of 25 times previously.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whether any of those things are true or not, he was close friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the most prolific sex trafficker in recent United States history.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: He once told a magazine he was good friends with Epstein, and that his pal Jeff liked him on the younger side.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Wink wink, nudge nudge.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's the reality we live in right now.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Every time somebody goes for the gay president bit, that's the record it pushes off the page.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's the price they gotta pay to have this ridiculous argument.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's not straight, he's gay.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: No way, he's not gay, he's straight.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're both wrong.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're not disagreeing enough.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's an ephiophile, if not a pedophile.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you saddling him with a legal, normal, adult sexuality chips away at the reality what our president really is.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in addition, it also connects longstanding prejudices and ideas that gay men are pedophiles.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is a long-standing prejudice in bigotry against specifically gay men, as a subset of queer people in general, that gay men prey on underage people, or that they recruit, or even that homosexuality itself is an attraction to prebubescent girls, and that that is why gay men are attracted to men.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like those are old theories about homosexuality, like from the 19th century or the 18th century.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, this is old-time religion stuff masquerading as a fun, goofy thing to say about the president.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, as Nick is pointing out, it's anything but that.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's more insidious.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: That weak tit, he's gay, he likes ballrooms nonsense, renders him a punchline when he ought to be a defendant.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And every single resistance lib influencer you see, Brian Tyler Cohen, Jojo from Jurs, the Midas Touch folks, the Bulwark, the Daily Show, just had to work the broadest possible premise here, missing all the nuances of one top caliber athlete admiring the physique of another top caliber athlete.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing gay about that is the lazy riffs the entire Takosphere treated us to all of last week.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Calling Trump gay as if it's an insult, even if your ostensible premise is that being gay shouldn't be an insult, but I know that he would be insulted by it.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, Donald Trump claims to not care about that, and he has gay people in his entourage and works with them.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like he pretty clearly doesn't give a shit.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: So you're just playing into that narrative.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Second of all, the idea that a person's personal life or whether or not he's closeted or something like that, all that does is humanize him.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't need your help for that.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Stop playing his game.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is just another flood the zone with shit.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's saying weird stuff so that that's what ends up on TV.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's what he's been doing for over 10 years, and he's really good at it.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're following that, then you're just playing into his game.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: This week's new low comes to us from Ohio, the governor's race.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Republican Vivek Rama Sawami against Democrat Dr.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Amy Acton.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Acton was Ohio's public health director at the start of COVID.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: She's talked for years about her childhood in Youngstown, neglect, abuse, homelessness.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: She spent a winter living in a tent with her stepbrother.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: She was removed from her mother's custody.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: She says that was the last time she spoke to her mother, 1978.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Last Monday night, an ad shows up online.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: No disclaimer, no paid-for-bye, which is legally required to air an ad on TV.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: And in the ad, it's Acton's mother, Donna Arthur.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: She says Amy has a serious problem.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: She calls her daughter a liar.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: It suggests Dr.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Amy Acton has mental health issues.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Tuesday, the Ramaswamy campaign admits it made the ad.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Wednesday, they announced they're putting$4 million behind it so they can run it around the clock.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: The ad's claim is that Acton made her childhood up.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: So a Toledo TV station went and checked.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: In July of 1978, police arrest her stepfather on rape charges.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's in the record.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: He was charged and then he left the state with Acton's mother before he could ever be tried.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: The rating on the ad false.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: The police and court records directly contradict it.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Ramaswamy's been in a little bit of trouble for this.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: He defended himself last Friday by saying, quote, the irony is they're lying about an ad that is about lying.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the response from Ramaswamy's own party, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, the guy Ramaswamy's trying to replace, told him to take it down immediately.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: J.D.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Vance went to Ohio and defended it.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Said Ramaswamy was right to run an ad that calls acting a liar.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: The president said Vivek Ramaswamy called him for advice and that the ad was like hitting patern.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's the new low.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Not that a campaign went negative, campaigns go negative.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's that the campaign found the mother who stayed with the man charged with raping her daughter, put her on camera, and spent$4 million telling the people of Ohio that her daughter's lying.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when the Republican governor of the state said stop, the president and the vice president said, keep it going.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Acton's response is the line I want people to remember.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: She said that, quote, my birth mother did nothing to protect me.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Grandmaswami had treated her childhood as just something she's complaining about.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, the ad doesn't just say she's lying, it says that she's not well.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: A woman's account of her own abuse recast as a mental health problem.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: We did a whole episode on Soviets calling dissidents mentally ill.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is this the same move?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that experiencing the kind of gendered violence that Acton has experienced disqualifies her from public life is about as sexist as you can possibly get.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: There is a phrase for this and for things like this in the academic world and also in the activist world.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is victim blaming.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is saying that somebody did something to Acton when she was a child.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that that man did to her, she is now responsible for.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's something wrong with her, as opposed to something that someone did to her that she did a lot of work to overcome and live through and build a better life in spite of, which is an amazing feat.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And something that, if anything, would make her imminently qualified for public life.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: But Ramaswamy and the Republicans seem to think that having been raped is a disqualifying thing for her.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: It also brings to mind the Epstein cases, that it's more important to Republicans, the women and children who were raped by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates like Donald Trump.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's more important those victims be quiet than it is for them to tell their stories and for us to listen to them.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is the pedophilia party.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's plain and simple.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's just disturbing.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you paid me a million dollars, I wouldn't come up with them doing this.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly wouldn't.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Congratulations to Vivek Ramaswamy.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a new fucking low.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I find interesting, Craig, about this whole thing the last few months?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Most mainstream people and most square people have just accepted that Trump is a child molester.
• 19:19
  unknown: Yeah.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: For a while, they wouldn't talk about it.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, there's no evidence.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: But now the conventional wisdom is, yeah, this did happen.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he did it.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he's the president anyway.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying really hard to think about other presidents who have done things like that that were universally condemned at the time that they were president.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: For example, you know, like everybody knows, everybody knew when there were presidents who were slaveholders.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knew that they raped people.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: We know that.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: But that was socially acceptable at the time.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that everybody knows that Donald Trump did these things and he just gets to be on fucking TV.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: I just thought there'd be a longer period of doubt, you know?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like there'd be, ah, we don't have any concrete.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's possible that these 38 women could be making something up or they could be mistaken.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's no video proof.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there was never a moment of acquiescence by the media.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh yeah, we do know that he did this.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's just uh seen as something that happened now.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we've already decided that he's gonna get away with it.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the point of bringing it up anymore?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like an indication that they knew the whole time, and you know, they can't act surprised.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, you know I'm an investor, mostly tied up in precious metals, equities, mutual funds, which is essentially a bet against the petrodollar remaining the world's reserve currency.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a shockingly profitable investment.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's doubled since Trump was re-elected in 2024.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: 100% returns in two years.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Not bad.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I just wanted to let you know about this startup that I've heard about, in case you're looking for some investment advice.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: This startup just came out of stealth mode last week in Silicon Valley.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna take the best military dogs in America: Belgian Malinoia, German Shepherd's Labs, clone them, edit their genes, find the ones with better endurance, better strength, wetter noses, presumably.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then they're gonna put them in body armor wired into an AI battlefield system for the old red, white, and blue, as promised by our Secretary of Defense.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: $200 million in funding.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: The company's valued at$1.2 billion.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: One of the investors in this company is the CIA's own venture fund.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Our CIA would love to see this dog startup work out.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: The co-founder's quote is this is the sci-fi future we were promised.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Promised by what?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Judge Dredd?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're doing dog armies now, Dr.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Craig.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're calling it the most unapologetically bribable army in decades.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Can be defeated with a big block of cheese.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Dogs are always a part of the war machine, are they not?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's true.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Dogs have been trained in militaries since ancient times.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Romans had war dogs, the Chinese Empire had war dogs.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, anybody that can train a dog and dogs.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Dogs have been part of basically every human civilization.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Even before Columbus, there were domesticated dogs in the Americas.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: People have always had them.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, dogs have been part of the military for a long time.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: They used them to sniff shit out and detect bombs and get spies and crap like that, for sure.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: But this sci-fi judge dread terminator Castle Wolfenstein stuff.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like it.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: You may ask who's behind this.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Two guys.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: One is Ben Lamb.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: He runs Colossal Biosciences.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's the company that's trying to bring back the woolly mammoth and the dodo bird.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's the waz of the operation.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: He's the substance.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's mostly his company.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where there's a waz, there's gotta be a joke.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Face.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Someone with a little razzle-dazzle, someone who can get all the right people in the room, but someone who is surprisingly chill for a military contractor.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that guy's name is Palmer Lucky, who we are legally obligated to say is the worst.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: He is just the worst.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't know Palmer Lucky, Dr.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, I believe that you ought to.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because two weeks before he announced the dogs, the Secretary of Defense put him in charge of imagining the future of war.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the thing about Palmer Lockheed.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Every big thing he's ever done, he got from a story.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Science fiction promised VR, Palmer Lucky built it in his parents' garage in Long Beach, the Oculus.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: In 2014, he's 21, sells Oculus to Facebook for a cool$2 billion.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: And Zuckerberg makes a commitment to let Oculus operate with substantial autonomy within the Facebook company.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Virtually unlimited RD resources.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Lucky's investors closed the deal with Facebook in just a matter of days.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook keeps Palmer Lucky on as the primary spokesperson and ambassador for the virtual reality medium.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky headlined Facebook and Oculus developer conferences, sat on panels secured on a couple magazine covers, said rad shit about the future of gaming, gave keynotes at workday conferences that people actually go to.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: At 22 years old, Palmer Lucky was hosting parties at gaming conventions all around the world, pulling down seven figures a year to party.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And party Palmer Lucky did.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky had been cultivating the image of a dude who parties for years.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: In his early teens as a troll, he got a mullet and began wearing a combination of Hawaiian shirts, cargo shorts, and flip-flops everywhere and at all times.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Just as soon as he could, he added a soul patch.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: He's still doing it to this day, although the mullet comes and goes and the soul patch widens from time to time to become more what you'd call a chin beard.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky wears this outfit everywhere.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: He's just walking into meetings with the president, looking like at the drop of any given fedora, he could whip out some shades and bang out the solo from careless whisper on a saxophone.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Looking like a guy at the beach that you stay at least 10 feet away from.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Ideally more.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Do not let that man buy you a snow cone.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: What do you make of this ridiculous proposition, Craig, that the most powerful arms dealer of this generation has a sizable personality quirk where you're certain she's a fucking dork?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is one of the weird things about the right wing today, and it's it's something that we see not just in the US but all over the place.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's affect is partly built on his quirkiness.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: He has the weird tie that goes all the way past his belt buckle.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's got the weird hair, he's got the weird tan.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the UK, there was Boris Johnson who would mess up his hair, make it look bad before he got on TV.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: We have in Argentina, Javier Millet does a duck face, like he's in a sorority picture from the 2010s, every time that you take a picture with him.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Weird personal affects is just like part of the brand.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: How and why that works.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Part of it is just that it's newsworthy, it's noteworthy.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's fun and weird to talk about them, but I think that it's also sort of constitutive of how they work, because it makes it hard to take them serious, and then they can do seriously heinous stuff.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: But if you show a picture of Palmer Lucky and say, this man wants to create a bioengineered army of robot dogs, it reads like an onion article instead of it being something that's literally true and getting billions of dollars from the federal government.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky is a vexing individual, Dr.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Craig.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: He cannot possibly be cool, but you can't rule it out fully.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's literally a parrot on his shoulder away from mimicking all the signals anyone could possibly need to determine that he's cool.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's a problem.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: We should at least hold space for the possibility he doesn't actually suck as much as we'd assume.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Acknowledge the doubt, but no need to extend him the benefit of it.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's reasonable.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's possible.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's possible.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: 2016, Pomerlucky's the face of VR, 24 years old.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: September.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: The Daily Beast reports he's been funding a pro-Trump group called Nimble America.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is in the way back.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is when we all thought Hillary was gonna win.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: This group, Nimble America, that he's been funding, came out of a subreddit called R.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: The Donald.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Trump subreddit.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Trump subreddit from before.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: They were just fans of Trump as a celebrity for a long time.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: At that moment, this was a sarcastic, like an ironic pro-Trump.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Nimble America's thing was taking memes off the internet and putting them on billboards, physical outdoor media.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Their big one was Hillary Clinton's face with the words too big to jail.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: One of their guys posted, quote, We've proven that shit posting is powerful and meme magic is real.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Ridiculous thing to say at the time.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Ten years later, he was very much right.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: The Daily Beast also tied Palmer Lucky to a Reddit account posting for the group, you nimble rich man.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky denies he wrote any of the posts under that name, and he should, because whoever wrote the post looks like an asshole.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he was working for Facebook at the time.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: So Palmer Lucky goes into full PR crisis mode, posts an apology, and in that apology, he says he's a libertarian and he's voting for Gary Johnson.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: He's not pro-Trump, he's not anti-Hillary, he's pro-Gary Johnson, the other candidate in the race.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook employees are furious.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: A month later, Oculus holds its big annual conference.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: The keynote, the one Palmer Lucky always did?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Zuckerberg.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky isn't even at the conference at all.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: By March of 2017, Palmer Lucky is gone from Facebook.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Out the door.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook says he'll be dearly missed.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: A couple months later, at a hearing, Ted Cruz asks Zuckerberg under oath in the Senate why was Palmer Lucky fired?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Zuckerberg says it wasn't because of his political views.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then the Wall Street Journal gets leaked the internal email.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: The journal reports that Facebook executives, Zuckerberg included, pressured Palmer to publicly back Ari Johnson rather than take a position on either candidate in his apology.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the journal reports that Palmer Lucky and an employment lawyer negotiated a payout of at least$100 million from Facebook.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big number.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: To recap, Palmer Lucky funds a Trump meme billboard.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook makes him apologize and say that he's neutral, then they stuff his pockets with$100 million to leave.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Goodbye and good day, Mr.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Lucky.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: In 2016,$10,000 for a meme billboard was enough to get him pushed out of Facebook.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: In 2026, he's doing pretty well from himself.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think has changed, Craig?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hammer on.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the big thing that listeners to this segment might be a little befuddled by, but this is one of those things where we gotta turn back the clock all the way to that bizarre year of 2017, back when the tech industry was not openly pro-Trump.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is back in a time when the tech industry was still pretty embedded in what I would say is normative Northern California culture, which is extremely multicultural, very queer-friendly, pro-trans, clearly a Democrat.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Every single person that you meet, if you meet a Republican, you're just sort of like, what?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: How did you get here?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you need to get back to the cruise?
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Are you late for your plane to like Dallas or something?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually confounding.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas today, we live in a world where the big tech executives were all there at Trump's inauguration in 2024.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: They were guests of honor.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what's changed him or us?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's us.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: He might have changed too, but the world has moved along in the direction that he was part of putting us on.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that meme magic is real, and it's really changed the world.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: In 2017, Pomerlucky takes the$100 million payoff from Facebook and does what any laid-back party bro would do.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Starts a weapons company, names it Endural.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, is our resident expert in Tolkien on this show?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Could you please explain that name?
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh goddamn.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Much like a lot of the other tech bros, Peter Thiel among them, Pongalucky is a part of a movement of tech people who use Tolkien words in order to refer to real-life technological things, right?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: So Peter Thiel makes Palantir, which is a technology that allows you to spy on people, right?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: Named after the Palantir, which is a seeing stone, a stone that would allow you to see anything that you want, right?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Andreil is named after the sword that defeats Sauron before the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that happens at the end of the first age before the second age, which is the age that comes before the third age, which is the one that the Lord of the Rings takes place at the end of.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, this is the sword that breaks and it gets reforged and it is made into Andorril, the sword that Aragon wields throughout the war.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, it's a Tolkien reference.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's stick up your ass, like taking what might be the best piece of fundamentally conservative art, the Lord of the Rings, and making it the namesake of your tech bro 21st century surveillance state hellhole.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Ugh.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: These Tolkien references are very much in-group signaling within Silicon Valley at this point.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Tech houses are named Rivendell or whatever, you know, they're all Lothlorian and shit.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're all named after crap like that.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Andoral pitch in plain English big defense companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, Bowling take 10 years and 10 million dollars to build one thing.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: The Pentagon pays them whether it works or not.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Cost plus.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: The longer it takes, the more the defense contractors make.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Andoral's value proposition, they'll build it with their own money.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Fast, cheap, mostly software, mostly robots.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: If the government likes it, they pay for it.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Pentagon really does buy things slowly and badly, and a lot of smart people think that he's right about that part.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a crazy pitch at all.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a crazy proposition.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, undercutting the whole military industrial complex used to be something that got you killed in this country.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: Are we getting soft?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is the military industrial complex becoming obsolete?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good question.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: Part of this is a result of the end of the Cold War.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: The United States' military industrial complex was built to fight World War II again.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're probably not going to be doing that anytime soon.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, fighting a number of small insurgencies that are roiling across the entire planet.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: That is probably more like what we're going to be doing for the rest of time, at least for the 21st century.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a way in which, like you're saying, this ain't a bad pitch.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually more in keeping with what the United States military is going to be doing.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what Andreel actually makes: they have a piece of software called Lattice, which is the brain.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Think of it as an operating system for war.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: It takes in everything that every sensor sees drones, towers, satellites, and it puts it on one screen and then tells the machines what to do about it.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then it has a body, those are the robots.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew's first big client was customs and border protection.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Andreil supplies mainly drones, little ones, big ones, drones that hunt other drones.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is called Roadrunner.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's a jet-powered interceptor that flies out, and if it doesn't need to blow something up, it comes back and lands.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Loitering munition.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Good to have at the ready at all times, I suppose.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew is also involved in robot submarine drones.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sold those to Australia.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: One's called the Ghost Shark.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: An uncrewed plane that flies next to a human pilot as a wingman.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: The Air Force bought that.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And Andrew is building a giant factory outside of Columbus, Ohio to mass produce all of it, which they're calling Arsenal One.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: Andural is in good with the Pentagon, presenting sponsor for the Freedom 250 MMA event on the White House front lawn.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Recently, he was awarded contracts for long-range missiles, the semi-autonomous fighter jets, and hardware for the Army's mobile intelligence system.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: They sell to other government agencies as well, Australia, the UK.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: They sell to Meta.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're cool now.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Business does that.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: They partnered up with Meta on VR headsets for the Army.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: They work with OpenAR, they work with Palantir, same Lord of the Rings family.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the investors in Andrew are a huge hoo of Silicon Valley money.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel, Bax Lucky.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thiel's founders' fund wrote Andrew a$1 billion check last year.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Biggest check that fund has ever written.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: This year's round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thrive is Josh Kushner's fund.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Jared's brother.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's how it works now.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: The investors are Peter Thiel and Jared Kushner's brother.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the customer is the government, Jared's father-in-law runs.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Craig, is there a word for when the same handful of families own the government and its suppliers?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple of words for this one.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: One word might be kleptocracy, government by the takers, government by people who are getting one over on us, taking stuff from us.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: But there is an older word for this one.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is a government by a small, dedicated group of people.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is an oligarchy.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is a government by a couple well-connected families who are invested in entrenching their own power.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: The United States has had something like an oligarchy before, and this is our new one in the early 21st century.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the part that should make your eyebrows go up about Palmer Lucky's company, Andural, the one that he started less than a decade ago.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're growing rapidly.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: In 2023, Andural did about a half billion dollars in revenue.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: 2024, just short of a billion.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: 2025, Andural more than doubled their revenue thanks to some strategic partnership.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: 2.2 billion in revenue.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: Doubled their headcount, too.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: In 2026, they're telling investors$4.3 billion in revenue.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're growing like a tech company.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Enduro has yet to IPO, so the company valuation is based on what they can sell small chunks of it during funding rounds for.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Here is what investors think this company is worth.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: A funding round for June 2025 gave them a valuation of 30.5 billion.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Another funding round this past May came at a valuation of 61 billion.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Company valuation doubled in under a year.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: For scale, Lockheed Martin does something like 70 billion a year in revenue.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Andural is still small next to the old giants, but it's gaining.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's growing like a weed while the president's people are writing the shopping list.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's Andural, Palmer Lucky's defense contractor.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: The US just keeps on buying and buying from him because he's a valued provider for our war machine.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: So valued, in fact, that in September, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he's picked Palmer Lucky to co-lead, along with Newt Gingrich and Elon Musk, Project Meridian, a 120-day study on the future of war.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's terrifying.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: Nightmare blunt rotation, if there ever was one.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta jump out of a moving car to get out of that one.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: These guys together, in Heggseth's words, will identify the domains that we must conquer and the capabilities we must master as a military.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Three of our nation's best minds, seizing the space and running the place, pinning the maps and closing the gaps.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Two of these three guys head up outfits that sell the Pentagon exactly the kind of stuff a study like this would recommend.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what 83-year-old Newt Gingrich is there for, to keep him on their toes.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: A forward thinker, if there ever was one, somebody constantly reliving his successes from over 30 years ago.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Without Newt Gingrich, there'd probably be some conflict of interest.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: To get back to the dogs, the company's called Warhound, a billion to valuation.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's Ben Lamb's company, Palmer Lucky's gear.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: In truth, military dogs are in high demand and very valued.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Most military working dogs don't make it through training.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Bad eyes, bad hips, cancer risk.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Breeding better working dogs designed for the military is a real problem with a real answer.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I got some questions and possible concerns.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: One, I thought we were getting pretty good at robots, Craig.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: We have robot dogs.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: The military's been testing them for years now.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe now's not a great time to be taking our eyes off the ball on robots so we can build a dog army.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a weird thing to be doing at the same time.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is a quick plug for my stream.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: I stream video games as Professor Craig on YouTube.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I've been streaming is a game called Wolfenstein.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is a game where you fight Nazis, where one of the things that the Nazis do in that game is that they have both robot dogs and robot dogs.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: They have cyborg dogs and also robots that they have built to the shape of dogs.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: While I was playing that game, which is from 10 years ago, last week, I found myself being like, why did they build robot dogs and cyborg dogs?
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: I guess he saw that game, and just like he stole every fucking other idea that he's ever had and tried to make it real, he was just like, Yeah, robot dogs and robot dogs.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: I would like to die at the hands of one of our robot overlords, not some AI making a business decision about what value I bring to the population.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's something a little bit more comprehensible about a dog killing me than an AI starving me.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's the future I was promised.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's what I've earned.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: We all watch those robots get bullied and never once stepped up to defend them.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's what we've all earned.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: My second concern is that we've already got dog armies.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: They're called wolf packs, and they're more like militias, which makes them even scarier when you think about it.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: Leave it to the geniuses in Silicon Valley to reinvent the wolf pack from first principle.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Ben Lamb, Pomerlocky's partner in Warhounds, he knows that because his company already made was.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Last year, Colossal said it brought back the dire wolf.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, that's right.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was a gray wolf with some addicts.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: They named one Khaleesi, the guy who made the Game of Thrones Wolf is now making dogs for the army with the Lord of the Rings guy.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Nerd.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Palmer Lucky has built every big thing in his life out of a story.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: VR from science fiction, a weapons company named after a magic sword, super soldier dogs from Captain America?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: His partner calls it the sci-fi future we were promised, but every one of those stories was a warning.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody reads The Lord of the Rings and Roots for the Seeing Stones.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: And for the next 120 days, the dork who's obsessed with building the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus is consulting about the future of war?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's terrifying.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: As also a fan of classic 20th century American sci-fi, a lot of that comes from classic counterculture, beatnik hippie shit.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: And to read these books and not come away, feeling that fear or that warning, it's crazy.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: These are the same people who watched the movie Starship Troopers and were like, yeah, that looks like a real community of go-getters.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Craig Johnson.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: And don't forget Dr.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, available wherever you get your podcast.