Latest / Normal Men / Episode 53 - JD and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

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Episode 53 - JD and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week · Normal Men

• 0:00
  [A] Do we have an intro? It'd be nice to do an intro skit. I know we just vamped for a bit there, but we haven't done an intro skit in a while.
• 0:08
  [B] Jorkin to Penis Vance. What a guy.
• 0:15
  [C] Just gonna. Just gonna step right up to the plate and grab it with both hands there, huh?
• 0:19
  [D] Just gonna throw that out there.
• 0:21
  [A] Oh, God. Okay.
• 0:24
  [D] It's gonna be another one of those weeks, isn't it?
• 0:25
  [B] My man just loves killing stuff. I need that. That meme of the Grim Reaper walking down, knocking on the doors. But it's just J.D. vance, and it's like Pope Francis, the Orban government, the Iranian peace agreement. What. What's the. The shitty fascist German party. AfD.
• 0:46
  [C] The first. The first three of those. I saw somebody. Somebody made that meme verbatim. I saw that on Blue sky. So.
• 0:51
  [B] Okay, so I. I figured somebody had to have done it. I don't have the Photoshop skills to
• 0:56
  [C] do it, but the Internet provides.
• 0:59
  [A] I actually can do that meme. And the way I make those memes is I make them in Excel. I have. I have an Excel for a file called Meme Templates, and it's.
• 1:12
  [B] That is some pervert shit right there.
• 1:15
  [A] It's the meme template with text boxes over top to be edited for the various memes. So not every meme I make is that way. But that's. That's the fastest and easiest.
• 1:27
  [C] That's amazing. I mean, that had not occurred to me, and it's a really elegant solution. I may ask you to throw that up on GitHub or something.
• 1:37
  [A] I can just email it to you.
• 1:38
  [C] Yeah, that's an option.
• 1:42
  [A] There's no code involved. It's just a gui. It's great. Yeah, but I mean, just absolutely horrible week for our boy J.D. which, I mean, just. We've talked about this before, but I think it's important to remember that the defining characteristic of J.D. vance, and I am blatantly stealing this line from the Trillbillies, which is a podcast from a bunch of leftists in Kentucky. They're hit or miss, but they had a good line about J.D. vance in their first ever episode, and that is that J.D. vance is a snitch. Like, this is a man who made his whole bones in the world by snitching out his dysfunctional extended family. And I. That sort of person is just going to occasionally stick their foot in it. And he really has had quite a week.
• 2:33
  [B] The man has no juice whatsoever. I. I think it's because he's Scots Irish. And converted to Catholicism. Like, God is just going. That is absolutely haram. You will not do that.
• 2:51
  [A] What can we. What sort of awful outcomes can we lay on this guy for that particular offense?
• 2:56
  [B] Yeah, yeah. So it's gonna follow him around the rest of his life. I mean, he's gonna lose to us off by like 15 points, so.
• 3:07
  [A] Well, I think he's actually gonna be the nominee. I mean, what. OSA for Vance out of Vance.
• 3:16
  [C] If he's the president. Yes, yes. If he's not the president, I think it's rfk.
• 3:29
  [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 much.
• 3:35
  [C] I'm George in Charlotte in D.C. i'm
• 3:37
  [B] Proctor Malone in Outer Florida. I'm low tax speedrun enjoyer.
• 3:41
  [D] And I'm Ed in Boston.
• 3:44
  [C] Foreign. Let's.
• 3:48
  [A] Let's stipulate he's not the president.
• 3:55
  [D] I am not on mute. I am just incredulous. RFK is going to be dead of an exploded heart before then.
• 4:05
  [A] It's not. It's not just gonna be his heart exploding, buddy. Other stuff is gonna go up in the process.
• 4:10
  [B] Yeah.
• 4:10
  [D] George, this is a family podcast. All right.
• 4:14
  [B] No, it'.
• 4:16
  [D] It is for the purposes of that joke.
• 4:18
  [A] Vaguely. It's aspirational.
• 4:20
  [C] Well, whatever. Whatever kind of harvest we're looking forward to from rfk, it's going to be
• 4:24
  [D] Vance or Rubio, and it's going to be really sad because we both lose. We all lose no matter who wins.
• 4:31
  [C] Okay, here's my. Here's my argument for the proposition that RFK should be viewed as one of the frontrunners to win the Republican nomination in 2028.
• 4:37
  [D] I don't have enough alcohol for this going out.
• 4:40
  [C] Of the people who are in good standing with Trump, there are currently maybe two plausible contenders, depending on what happens with the AG slot. I would say Zeldin is the other one who do not have Iran stink all over them. It looks right now like Iran is not going to be a solvable problem in the short term. This is something that is going to stick around. This is something that is going to adhere to the people who pushed for it. This is something where you already have demonstrated interest by everybody involved in throwing each other under the bus. So if you are plausibly linkable to Iran, I think that's going to be a major issue for you in 2028. I don't think America has appetite to continue to prosecute this war. I don't even think the Republican Party has appetite to continue to prosecute this war. It's been what, it's been six weeks now and everybody is sick of this shit. And there is not an obvious path out of this. And you know, maybe, maybe this turns out to not be that big a deal if it's over in two months and we never think about it again. But there are a lot of futures where Iran continues to be a major issue for a long time. And being able to be a Republican who can credibly claim you had nothing to do with this set of terrible decisions while still being in the relatively good graces of Trump and company is going to be an extremely valuable thing. RFK is the foremost person in that way.
• 6:08
  [A] But doesn't that make just about anybody in Congress more likely? There's a lot of people in Congress that were at best sort of like, whatever about it, and they certainly didn't have the briefings to, you know, make the decision. And there isn't a TikTok of for Maggie Haberman of them being like, yes, sir, this is an excellent idea. You're such a genius.
• 6:28
  [C] It, it definitely helps them. None of them have a built in constituency the way that RFK does. Like, like how big, how big is
• 6:35
  [A] RFK is built in constituency? I mean, like, it was important to a point in the last election, I think, but at the margin is not the same thing as in total. Right. And when you're, I think you're also
• 6:44
  [B] neglecting that RFK used to be a
• 6:46
  [A] Democrat also that that's fine.
• 6:48
  [C] They don't care. Trump used to be a Democrat.
• 6:52
  [A] Well, I mean, if the big guy's on board with rfk, sure.
• 6:56
  [B] Assuming he's, you know, vertical, we're going to support rfk. They told me the JD stood for jocking the penis.
• 7:05
  [C] I think, I think RFK has probably got a 4 of somewhere between 15 and 20% in a Republican primary just for Maha voters who would be not exclusively, but heavily new entrants to the GOP primary.
• 7:18
  [D] If you're asserting that about 20% of the GOP is clinically insane, I agree with you. But like, there's going to be a little bit more spray than that. Right? Like they're, you, you can't guarantee that, that this particular level of derangement is all going to rfk.
• 7:33
  [C] I mean, like, I think that, I think that there's MTG's gonna run 3 to 5%. Yeah, that's true. MTG. MTG does, does, does encroach on that lane and she is going to run so maybe. Maybe I should. Maybe I should value that higher.
• 7:47
  [A] Get ready for Jewish space laser talk, folks. Brought to you from the rolling hills of North Georgia.
• 7:56
  [B] God, imagine if it's Ossoff vs. MTG.
• 8:00
  [A] Too much Georgia. We can't. That can't be permitted to happen.
• 8:03
  [B] I know, but you get the space lasers thing against a Jewish guy.
• 8:07
  [C] Yeah, that's a Georgia off too. I like that.
• 8:11
  [A] Can you imagine how insane that primary would make the New York Times editorial board if the Democratic base to be like, fully anti Israel, which I think is pretty much baked in at this point. And on the other hand, you've got space laser.
• 8:28
  [D] Marge, I was really worried for a second you were going to be saying that Ossoff would be leaning into the space lasers because I don't know where that goes.
• 8:39
  [A] No, just Marge doing really bad kipping pull ups and screaming about all sorts of anti Semitic tropes and leaving the fine folks at the Gray lady completely unable to make a decision.
• 8:51
  [D] I've never. I've never seen somebody say parentheses out loud like that.
• 8:55
  [B] Ossoff does have pretty good comedy and comedic timing, so I could see him really having a blast with the space lasers thing.
• 9:03
  [C] I just want to be clear that the space lasers are not like a historical anti Semitic trope. That's. That's innovation and antisemitism.
• 9:10
  [D] That's.
• 9:11
  [C] That's new.
• 9:15
  [D] Yeah, usually it's the lizard people.
• 9:16
  [A] Yeah, the lizard people have the space lasers. Anyhow. Sorry, you were saying?
• 9:20
  [B] Proctor, Proctor, let's back up a second here, so you may know this.
• 9:26
  [A] Here it comes.
• 9:27
  [B] No, no, this. This is a real question. When was the last time an incumbent vice president seeking to take over for a retiring president did not get the nomination if they sought it?
• 9:39
  [C] That's a good question.
• 9:42
  [A] Define sought. Because Joe Biden in 2016 is your obvious example.
• 9:47
  [B] No, no, no.
• 9:48
  [A] Actually ran, like, actually like was on primary ballots.
• 9:52
  [B] Yes. Yeah,
• 9:55
  [C] I'm, I'm, I'm going back election by election here, trying to figure out. Trying to figure out when.
• 9:59
  [A] 60s, I think. Right. Who was. Who was LBJ's vice president?
• 10:05
  [C] It was Hubert Humphrey. Yeah. So who ran? Yeah.
• 10:11
  [B] And was the nominee.
• 10:12
  [C] Yeah. So that doesn't count. And it can't be 60 because that was. That was Nixon.
• 10:19
  [A] Yeah,
• 10:21
  [C] Yeah. I mean, we're back. We're back in.
• 10:24
  [B] Who was Truman's vp?
• 10:26
  [C] I don't.
• 10:27
  [B] Wasn't Steven, remember?
• 10:29
  [C] Yeah, but I think it was somebody old. Yeah, that could be Alvin Barkley. So might I. I don't know if Barclay ran in. In 52 or not. Oh, no, he did. Yeah. So it's Barclay. Good call.
• 10:47
  [B] Okay, so it's been a minute.
• 10:50
  [C] Yeah.
• 10:51
  [B] So, I mean, Generally speaking, incumbent VPs, if they seek the nomination, they get the nomination.
• 10:57
  [C] Yeah. This is a little bit of a weird situation because of Trump doing the split term thing. So there may be less appetite and,
• 11:05
  [D] you know, trying to get his last VP murdered.
• 11:08
  [C] Yeah, there's that. You're right. That it's a, that it's a big advantage, for sure. Vance. Vance is going to have just a huge advantage in terms of, in terms of name recognition. He's probably going to have significant fundraising advantage. And also, I think by the end of the term, assuming Trump is still alive, people will have been kind of playing up to Vance as, as the heir apparent in case Trump bites it for some time. So it may be that that's a set of advantages that cannot be overcome by another candidate. On the other hand, Vance is personally unappealing. He is sinking farther and farther into the uncanny valley with each additional month of whatever the hell stack he's on. Did you guys see pictures of him? I mean, he looks terrible. He's definitely on a GOP or something. He's lost significant weight, but he looks odd.
• 11:57
  [B] I mean, he wasn't Brad Pitt to start with.
• 11:59
  [A] His whole thing where it looks like he's wearing eyeshadow, which, by the way, I don't have any problem with anyone wearing eyeshadow when he definitely isn't intentionally wearing eyeshadow is definitely disconcerting. I don't. Not. Not a fan.
• 12:12
  [C] Yeah, I don't think he has, like, it was. It was who? It was David Carr or somebody. Some. Some lesser NFL quarterback a few years ago had had some medical eyelash condition. Yeah, that made me feel bad about it, but I don't think Vance has that.
• 12:27
  [A] Does Vance have that condition? In which case I rescind my comment, of course. Yeah, I don't think he does. I think it's just a really goofy peptide stack.
• 12:36
  [C] Yeah. To be clear, if. If you can't help being funny looking, we think it's bad to make fun of you for it. But if you can and you lean into it, that is your fault and you should be mocked. So.
• 12:46
  [A] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that's right.
• 12:48
  [C] Maybe you're right. I think that Vance has. Is going to have significant stink on him from the various things that Trump just kind of keeps throwing him at and he keeps failing at.
• 12:58
  [D] That's. That's true for Rubio too, though.
• 13:01
  [C] Well, I don't think it's going to be a Rubio either. I think Rubio's screwed.
• 13:04
  [D] I, I would put money on like the final two being Rubio and Vance and like throw them knives.
• 13:12
  [A] I will bet a significant sum of money the final two are not Rubio and Advance. I would take either of those two answers as a possible final two candidate, but not both. Both of them. No.
• 13:21
  [C] I know you want, you want an outsider.
• 13:24
  [D] They're going to be the ones who get the money though.
• 13:26
  [A] Doesn't matter.
• 13:27
  [D] Dude.
• 13:28
  [A] If we have a midterms that's looking anywhere close to like we think it's going to play out, which is really genuinely apocalyptic for them. That is going to put enormous institutional pressure on the people that are in charge of all this. And both of those guys are solidly in that category. And there is just no way that Republican primary voters go oh yeah, like, like Vance is, is the guy. And also another person that was at the top branch is, is right there with them. I don't believe it. There is going to be some insurgent force coming out of Congress or a governor somewhere who's like, there is discontent. We've gotten slaughtered in every election since 2024. And you know, I can pitch this on breaking with Trumpism and they will do fine. They might not win, but they will. They will be. There will be a boat that consolidates
• 14:16
  [C] around them or a self funder. I mean, you know, you might get, you might get somebody, you know, kind of in the parole mold who wants to come in and spout vaguely Republican platitudes while throwing a bunch of, a bunch of money at the race who I, I think will have a shot if there's significant anti Trump backlash within the party.
• 14:35
  [B] I could see Brian Kemp sort of trying to run on that lane for sure.
• 14:39
  [C] Yeah.
• 14:41
  [D] Why so much Georgia? God damn it.
• 14:46
  [A] Entirely too much Georgia.
• 14:48
  [B] This is your penalty ed for weak after week of Maine bullshit.
• 14:53
  [D] Look, I'm, I have completely switched sides and I am pro like reabsorption of Maine into Massachusetts so they can have some adult supervision. I've, I've been on record about this. They, they can't be trusted to handle their own affairs. They need to have the sober and well educated and generally more attractive people of Massachusetts helped him with this.
• 15:21
  [A] The, the generally more what now?
• 15:24
  [D] Have you ever been to Maine?
• 15:28
  [A] Maine's got the like whole higgy thing or hege. How do you say that? I don't speak Danish. H Y G G neither.
• 15:35
  [C] I don't know how to say it, but it Means. It means cozy.
• 15:37
  [A] Right?
• 15:37
  [C] Like that's the.
• 15:38
  [A] Right. They tried to. I. So I went to Frozen, the musical last night and they had a number about.
• 15:45
  [D] So now you're a main expert.
• 15:46
  [A] Well, no. And so they were trying. They did a number where they pronounced it hygie, which felt wrong. But I don't. Again, I don't speak Danish. So maybe we could get guan on here. Guan.dk on blue sky, if you're interested in Denmark anyhow.
• 16:06
  [D] I think that's right.
• 16:06
  [A] Like, I'm on a tangent here, but the main does have the whole Hygge Higgy, whatever thing going. And lumberjacks. So there's got to be something going on there. Whereas Massachusetts has the spawn of Puritans and people who live in Boston.
• 16:21
  [B] Neither has Maine had lumberjacks in the last like 80 years.
• 16:25
  [D] Have you met someone who works in like the lumber industry in Maine?
• 16:29
  [A] Because I have really got a campaign for Senate built around psychosexual stuff going on with lobster in Maine. But so that, that, sorry, coast, whatever
• 16:40
  [D] that is, that is coastal Maine. There's a difference. It's also wrong, but there's a difference. The median person working up in paper country is about 50 years old, weighs about 135 pounds and could kill you, like by squeezing thumb and forefinger together. Because they are all preternaturally muscular people, but they are all also, like, they're not lookers.
• 17:04
  [A] 135 pound, preternaturally muscular people sounds like a pretty conventional definition of attractive for the, the, the male side of things. So I'm not.
• 17:15
  [D] I didn't mention dental records.
• 17:17
  [B] George, he's got you there.
• 17:19
  [A] You got a little thing going on
• 17:20
  [D] there I didn't mention. Well, there's, there's. There's a. Sorry, I'm not going to friendly fire on low tax.
• 17:27
  [A] No, feel free. It's.
• 17:31
  [D] I mean, like, smoking is no longer attractive. And you know, the chimneys.
• 17:40
  [A] Lotax is looking at this camera like he's gonna smash ed like a little bug.
• 17:44
  [B] No, I mean, smoking's not attractive. I mean, yes, it is because it's like they make you look cool and they kill you. It's really a wonder that we keep trying to make people stop.
• 18:00
  [D] Also far too much Carhartt. And we're not talking about, like, fashion Carhartt, we're talking about, like working Carhartt.
• 18:06
  [B] The. This.
• 18:08
  [D] Yeah.
• 18:08
  [A] When I was in Lisbon last fall, the amount of Carhartt I saw was staggering. I have seen less Carhartt at construction websites or Construction? Yeah, websites at construction sites, very specific websites. Then I saw in like 20 neighborhoods in Lisbon. And I don't know, I don't know what's going on there, but nothing against.
• 18:36
  [B] It's all Brooklyn, always has been.
• 18:39
  [C] Yeah, we're still exporting that New Yorker
• 18:42
  [A] cover, but instead of, instead of like looking west, it's Brooklyn. It's like looking east and it's like Brooklyn, a little pond and then like various parts of Europe. It's all the same thing.
• 18:52
  [B] Yes.
• 18:52
  [C] Do you guys do Lumberjack Olympics up in Maine? Is that, Is that a thing?
• 18:56
  [D] I have no idea.
• 18:57
  [C] Oh man, those are fun as hell. If you ever get the chance to go to a. To go to a Lumberjack Games event, do it. You won't regret it. They get up to some weird shit and you very much do have like the Nibelung shaped people that Ed has just described as lumberjacks out there doing their thing. But it's really impressive.
• 19:17
  [A] Can you repeat that adjective for me?
• 19:19
  [C] Nibelung. The dwarves of Wagnerian legend.
• 19:23
  [A] Ah, okay, good.
• 19:25
  [C] The kind of dark, twisted. No, let's not investigate whether or not they're direct proxies for Jews. Proxy dwarves of the Wagnerian imagination.
• 19:37
  [A] Huh? Yeah, let's. Let's not investigate that there's not a
• 19:41
  [C] lot of Jewish lumberjacks. Where.
• 19:42
  [A] Where would. Yeah, if you, if you had to pick like where. Where's the most likely place to find a Jewish lumberjack? Like if you had to go anywhere in history, anywhere in the world and say there, where would you be most likely to find a Jewish lumberjack?
• 19:54
  [C] It's got to be Eastern Europe, right? Like.
• 19:57
  [D] Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:58
  [A] Yeah.
• 19:59
  [B] Yeah, I think so.
• 20:00
  [A] The Carpathians.
• 20:01
  [C] Yeah, maybe. I mean like, did they have a big.
• 20:04
  [A] They must have had a big lumber trade.
• 20:05
  [B] Yeah.
• 20:07
  [C] Poland's. Poland's got trees, right?
• 20:10
  [A] I mean, well, it used at one point. Well, maybe that's on. On account of the Jewish lumberjacks.
• 20:15
  [D] I don't know.
• 20:16
  [A] Now I'm. I think less. But anyhow, speaking of Eastern Europe, I mentioned earlier. Wow. That J.D. vance had a bad week. And one of the things that was so hilarious is his attempt to stump for outgoing now Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, who went down tonight in what can only be described as a historic loss for the far right after four.
• 20:38
  [D] I think you mean hilarious, George.
• 20:41
  [A] That works too.
• 20:41
  [C] It can be both.
• 20:42
  [A] For four consecutive governments, he was dealt really quite embarrassing loss to the point where the center right candidate who was in charge of the popular front appointed opposing Orban got enough seats to rewrite the constitution if they so choose, and probably lock the far right out of power in Hungary as a consequence for the foreseeable future. So we haven't talked a lot about non American elections and politics on this show. Probably not as much as we should have, but that is a landmark moment. That is a really big deal. And it's not just a really big deal for Hungary and for, you know, the impact on Trump's standing and all the American stuff, but it's also a big deal because Hungary was really the holdout for a lot of stuff happening in the eu. They had to be either bought off or muscled into acceding to a bunch of EU priorities that are now going to become a lot more easy to put into effect. And, you know, in May, we'll see how Magyar, the hilariously named center right candidate at the head of Hungary's new government, actually goes about day to day politics. But there is a very realistic chance that Hungary goes from the most anti EU member to more pro EU than the median or mode, which is a huge deal for what the EU is going to be able to pull off.
• 22:08
  [C] And certainly they're going to go from being probably the most pro Russia EU member to being the most explicitly anti Russia EU member. The big slogan you hear everybody chanting as Russians go home.
• 22:20
  [A] I think Poland would like a word on that one.
• 22:21
  [C] Yeah, that's fair, that's fair, that's fair.
• 22:23
  [A] I forgot also the Baltic countries, but either way, they're in that neighborhood for sure.
• 22:29
  [B] Yeah, Poland is biggest Russia hater emeritus, I think.
• 22:34
  [C] Yeah, it's a title for life.
• 22:36
  [D] You, you can't. I mean, look at how much stuff they just trucked over that border as soon as Putin started. Shit,
• 22:46
  [B] I feel really bad for Rod Dreher. They did our boy like this. He's going to Austria.
• 22:55
  [D] I mean, what, did they throw him out?
• 22:58
  [B] No, he's, he's fleeing.
• 22:59
  [C] Yeah, he's anticipating being thrown out.
• 23:01
  [B] So, yes, he's, he's anticipating that the, what is it, the Danube Institute? Yes, that's the, the right wing grifter welfare fund that Orban set up that'll get shut down by Peter Hungarian.
• 23:15
  [A] And then he's anticipating the fact that the hairy Hungarian men sucking on pig knuckles at the pool or whatever that one insane blog post was talking about will soon be replaced by EU mandated twinks eating celery. And he doesn't like that one bit.
• 23:31
  [C] Yeah, George.
• 23:32
  [D] George did.
• 23:32
  [C] George did not quite get that verbatim, but he's very close. Look, we'll look the quote up if you want.
• 23:38
  [A] I am sitting on a back patio in deepest Budapest watching fat Magyar men gnaw pork knuckles and pound tankards of Czech beer, and I know I am in paradise.
• 23:54
  [C] I mean, it sounds like a good time, I'm not gonna lie.
• 23:58
  [A] Look, if that's what you're into, whether your name is Rod or anyone else, you knock yourself out, buddy. You're not hurting anyone with that particular enthusiasm.
• 24:07
  [C] But question.
• 24:10
  [D] Maybe, just maybe, just don't tweet it.
• 24:15
  [C] One of the most carnal things I can recall reading on Twitter that was not directly intended to be sexual.
• 24:22
  [A] Well, well, well, let's, you know, like, let's not jump to conclusions there. Directly intended to be sexual is.
• 24:32
  [B] I mean, a lot of Rod content could go either way.
• 24:38
  [A] Huge number.
• 24:38
  [D] Halo tax. Buddy, could you never say the words Rod content again?
• 24:47
  [B] We love Rod. He's our weird little boy.
• 24:52
  [C] I will say that I don't, I don't understand Hungarian politics, but I don't understand figure skating and I cheer at the Olympics. Anyway, so, like, this has been. This is, this is a good day. This is a good day for the forces of democracy. This is a bad day for the global right wing reactionary fascist movement. And it's nice to win a round. We've won a few rounds recently. We had good results in elections in Canada, good results in elections in Australia, good results in elections in the Republic of Korea. But this is somebody who had power for a long time who no longer has power. Hungary will be better off as a result. Europe will be better off as a result, and the world will be better off as a result.
• 25:32
  [B] I appreciate that you did not include Keir Starmer in your labor win.
• 25:40
  [D] One thing that is, I mean, like people in, in our fetid pools of the Internet talk about this a lot, but like, one thing that is not often sort of talked about publicly is just how much of the global right wing movement is being bankrolled by this. Right. Like, yeah, Orban, the amount of money coming out of there to no account right wing influencers is just huge. And I don't think he's going to really have the money for that anymore, especially as he's running from crimes.
• 26:17
  [B] Yeah, yeah. Budapest is like Dubai for ugly people in the conservative movement.
• 26:25
  [C] Yeah. I mean, George might be able to speak to this better than I can, but like one of the major issues in money laundering, right, is getting stuff into the EU that, that's, that's one of the points of entry and that I have to think that Hungary has been one of the major entry points into the EU for Russian money over the last decade and a half. Not the only entry point by any
• 26:43
  [A] means, but I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on illicit flows like that. But I will say there are a lot of ways to get money into the eu. Having a friendly head of state definitely makes things more convenient. And yes, for sure that that door has been closed. But I do think the ability for Hungary to veto or at least kick up a fuss over just about anything the EU wants to do to deepen European ties between the various sovereign states and actually move towards something that looks more like a federal Europe is just massive, massive shift. I think that's the biggest thing from an economic perspective because it opens up, you know, a sort of a best alternative to a negotiated agreement where that looks like a lot more integrated than it would have with this one veto hanging over you.
• 27:40
  [C] Yeah.
• 28:00
  [A] Iran negotiations would be the next one, I guess, right?
• 28:03
  [B] Yes.
• 28:06
  [C] Yeah.
• 28:06
  [D] Yeah. That's probably a, a good whistle stop on this tour of humiliation.
• 28:12
  [C] Yeah.
• 28:13
  [A] How do we want to intro that?
• 28:15
  [D] I think we just did.
• 28:17
  [C] Yeah. To continue the JD Vance Spring 2026 Tour, the next stop is Islamabad where showed up with Kushner and who was, who was our third guy?
• 28:29
  [A] Was it Witoff Witkoff?
• 28:31
  [D] Did they let him in the room?
• 28:34
  [A] The three amigos Iran showed up with.
• 28:37
  [B] What was it, four PhDs or something?
• 28:42
  [A] Really?
• 28:43
  [B] Yeah.
• 28:44
  [A] Amazing.
• 28:45
  [C] I don't know if you guys had seen the coverage on this, that apparently the physical situation for this negotiation is that the US Negotiators were in. Were in one room, the Iranian negotiators were in a different room and there was a Pakistani runner going back and forth between the two, I guess just passing notes back and forth like, like, like at no point was there. Was there a face to face, is my understanding. I don't know who insisted on that, whether that was an American idea or whether that was an Iranian idea.
• 29:11
  [B] That's, that's about, that's about right for our relationship with Iran. Historically.
• 29:15
  [C] I mean. Yeah, like I've been joking about this on Bluesky for a couple days, that this was a short straw situation for who gets to go be the negotiator for Iran. Because there has been an extremely limited tenure for the last several rounds of negotiation that if you're trying to figure out a peace settlement with the United States, then somebody's going to kill you. I think usually that's been Israel. I think sometimes it's been Israel after other Iranian factions point out your location to Israel. I think sometimes it's been America after somebody points out your location to America. But like, we've gone through a significant fraction of the senior Iranian diplomatic corps, and it's, it's a problem. Like, you can't build the kind of rapport that leads to an agreement if you keep switching negotiators. And killing those negotiators is a particularly final form of switching negotiators. So insofar as it also makes people
• 30:18
  [B] really willing to negotiate with you and assume you're operating in good faith, I would imagine.
• 30:23
  [C] Yeah. I mean, again, I think that who exactly is doing the killing on some of this is a little bit opaque. There's some factional stuff that's happening, I think, within Iran that we don't have a whole lot of visibility into that there's some amount of jockeying for power in the wake of disruption of the Iranian power structure that is probably being exercised in part through lethal methods. But we, broadly, the non Iranian side of the war, have been killing an awful lot of negotiators. Now we're recording this on Sunday. Yeah, that's bad. No, I mean, it's extraordinarily bad diplomatic manners. It is. It is something that is that there are international laws against and have been international laws against for so long as there have been nations. Like, this is weird. This is a big no, no. So we should probably stop doing that. We're recording this on Sunday night. The negotiation broke down yesterday, and as far as I know, all of the Iranian negotiators are still alive. So we're rooting for them.
• 31:21
  [A] They're finding Islamabad. Right. Like, it's the. It's what happens next that's the issue. Is Israel really going to bomb Islamabad? I mean, I wouldn't put it past him, but I mean,
• 31:32
  [C] probably not.
• 31:35
  [D] I mean, not today. Tomorrow is an entirely different day.
• 31:38
  [B] Tomorrow is another day.
• 31:40
  [A] I need to return for a second to this. Like, it's almost like we're seeing the second Trump administration as an Iannucci film. This idea of this Pakistani running back and forth between the two rooms. And like, I can just imagine the series of cuts where it's like, pitter, pitter, pitter, pitter, slam, pitter, pitter, pitter, pitter, slam, pitter, pitter, pitter, pitter, slam, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
• 32:04
  [D] I mean, I've heard worse. Yeah, not recently, but I have.
• 32:10
  [C] Anyway, negotiations broke down. The reporting is still a little bit sketch on what exactly we were asking for versus what neuronians were asking for, but it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of meeting of the minds on especially the nuclear stuff, but also maybe on the other major issues such as what happens in Lebanon, what happens in the Strait of Hormuz and whether or not we stop bombing Iran.
• 32:32
  [B] Also, can we even open the straight of Hormuz?
• 32:35
  [A] We cannot.
• 32:36
  [B] Yeah, well no, I mean that apparently Iran lost a bunch of mines in it.
• 32:42
  [A] As I said, we cannot. So can anyone open Hormuz? More interesting question. We, we cannot.
• 32:50
  [B] Yeah.
• 32:51
  [C] I'm going to take the optimistic take on the mines.
• 32:53
  [B] That was awesome. I, that was, it was no notes.
• 32:59
  [C] I am, I am a glass half full guy on the mines, which is that this is a lie that is free for Iran to tell. So that if they say, yeah, there's a bunch of mines there, we don't, we don't remember where they are. We can't do anything about them.
• 33:12
  [D] But all mine.
• 33:13
  [C] Yeah, but like we know they're on crazy guys.
• 33:16
  [A] So, losing minds.
• 33:17
  [C] The specific claim that Iran has made is that they mind the side of the strait that is further away from Iran's coastline. So like if you want to sail safely through the Strait of Hormuz, you need to pass very close by the Iranian coastline.
• 33:31
  [A] Gosh.
• 33:31
  [C] Which, you know, it's totally plausible that it's true. I'm not saying that it's necessarily false. I'm saying that it is a free lie for Iran to tell and it is very, very self serving for them. Like, like, like it's great if people believe it, it's great if it's true, it's great if it's not true.
• 33:49
  [B] And anyway, I agree it is probably a lie, but would you agree that it is so stupid and so in keeping with the incredibly stupid era we live in that it could well be true?
• 34:05
  [C] Oh, it could absolutely be true.
• 34:07
  [A] Absolutely. There's no reason to assume it's, it's a lie. Yeah, it's probably a lie, but you can't assume it's a lie.
• 34:13
  [B] Yeah.
• 34:13
  [C] And, and to be clear, I'm not volunteering to go minesweep the south side of the Strait of Hormuz. Like, like, like, like I don't have any, anything like that level of confidence. I'm just saying that it's a null tell. Like this is, this is, this is the specific lie told in the specific way that they would tell whether or not it was true.
• 34:30
  [D] After the last week, there's only one guy for this job.
• 34:38
  [A] The pride of Southeast Ohio, bobbing around in the Strait of Hormuz on the south side of the shipping channel in a Zodiac and just hoping he can find, find a way to his way
• 34:47
  [C] out of this one. We'll have to try to get a Semind person on here to talk about, you know, the mechanics of Semins, because they're kind of interesting. I've learned a lot about that in the last week.
• 35:00
  [D] I really wish we could learn other things.
• 35:02
  [C] Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, it, it turns out sea mines are, are really difficult to diffuse without, you know, kaboom.
• 35:12
  [D] So especially when you forget where they are.
• 35:14
  [C] Right.
• 35:15
  [A] That really raises the degree of difficulty a little bit. And the thing is too, when you're Talking about a 2 million barrel per day VLCC or 2 million barrel per voyage VLCC like that is the sort of thing we've talked previously about how enormous these things are. That ship does not either slow down or turn in any real sense of the terms. Slow down or turn.
• 35:41
  [D] Wouldn't call them graceful.
• 35:43
  [A] They're not. It's the big head of steam. Big head of steam on that diesel. But whatever. Big head of steam on those bad boys and I, they're just not going to chance it. There's just no reason to. If there's an open way where you pay a buck more per barrel with crude at $100 a barrel, who.1% does not wreck anyone's day. And that's. You're done. So I think Procter's analysis is exactly right though. And if they were lying, they'd say this exact same thing. So, yeah, no way to tell.
• 36:17
  [C] Anyway, as it stands right now, in addition to the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, there is now also an American blockade at the Strait of Hormuz affecting ships sailing out of the Iranian ports.
• 36:31
  [A] Actually, it's actually an, an American blockade of Iranian ports, not an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. These are different things. Now how do you blockade Iranian ports with ships that are not currently in the Persian Gulf without blockading the Strait of Hormuz? Good question. I defer to the US Navy on that one.
• 36:53
  [D] So there are some really, really loud blockade.
• 36:59
  [A] It's going to be really interesting because China has been moving, actually VLCCs like they, they have moved ships through with million plus barrel cargoes. It is going to be really interesting to see what happens the first time a Chinese flagged tanker gets a US Navy's destroyer hauling up beside it. Because I don't know the answer to that one. I genuinely don't know what would happen in that situation. And it's very likely going to happen at some point. So fun. We have that to look forward to. I got to say though, it is kind of innovative writing that the invasion of Taiwan might begin in the Persian Gulf.
• 37:44
  [D] Oh man. My friends are never buying a gaming PC again.
• 37:50
  [A] No, they're not. Nor you.
• 37:52
  [D] Look, I'm, I can wait this out at least five or six years.
• 37:56
  [C] So I just, I just want to take a second to talk through the sizes of oil tankers because it's really kind of a beautiful, beautiful naming scheme. Here they go from a handy size at the low end to panamax, which is the, I believe the maximum size you can fit through the Panama Canal at one point.
• 38:16
  [D] I think there are a few different Panamax sizes now, aren't there?
• 38:19
  [C] Yes, there is new Panamax in addition to Panamax. You're right. There is the afromax which I don't think has anything to do with Africa. I think that that's afraid there is itself an initialism.
• 38:31
  [A] The afromax stands for average Freight Rate Assessment which is a system that Shell came up with in the 1950s to standardize things a bit. 600,000 barrels oil, nothing to do with Africa.
• 38:42
  [C] Gotcha. Okay, excellent. There is the Suez Max and then above that there is the VLCC which stands for very Large Crude carrier and the ULCC which stands for, which stands for Ultra Large Crude carrier. So this is a naming convention that has been built on over the years as you know, new sizes became necessary and useful.
• 39:04
  [D] They should have just used dates.
• 39:07
  [C] Now we're all squared away on, on tanker sizes and we can appreciate that the VLCC that they're trying to get through the straight of horn moves are indeed very large crude carriers.
• 39:19
  [B] Okay, I think that's fair.
• 39:21
  [C] I mostly wanted to say handy size.
• 39:27
  [A] Oh God.
• 39:28
  [D] Oh, we're having another one of these
• 39:30
  [B] in mind that you were just looking to do that.
• 39:32
  [C] But I feel like we've said this every week for the last like month and a half but there's no obvious resolution to what's happening in Iran. There's maybe not a lot of non obvious resolutions. I think I'm for the first time made me more optimistic than the median that things are going to resolve. But that's not because I've become significantly more optimistic. That's because median opinion has declined in terms of the likelihood of things improving and goods starting to move and us not going to war.
• 40:05
  [D] I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of you not being the most Optimistic person about a topic.
• 40:10
  [C] I've been very pessimistic on Iran. I think I've said from the start that this, this is an awful situation and nobody has any incentives to disengage. And like, all of the players here are like specifically the worst people in the world.
• 40:27
  [D] You just called yourself optimistic on two separate topics in a row. Did you think I was going to be able to leave that?
• 40:33
  [B] I mean, I think there, there probably is some cause for optimism because I think it's fairly clear that Trump knows that he's really shit the bed here.
• 40:41
  [C] Yeah.
• 40:43
  [B] And Iran could be driving, I think, a much harder bargain than they seem to be from the reporting. But it seems like they actually are willing to sit down and negotiate some sort of settlement here.
• 40:56
  [A] Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter. Petter. Slam.
• 41:01
  [B] Yeah, so, I mean, there's, there's a willingness, I think on both sides to talk and that probably gets you somewhere eventually, but just.
• 41:11
  [A] Yes, I totally agree with that. However, we're on a ticking clock here. Like this is the thing, Trump is on a clock that the Iranians are not on. And their leverage goes up every single day, monotonously. A $1, $50, maybe $2 a barrel, depending on what's going on. But it's between a buck and two bucks a barrel and it happens every day. And you trace the line out and eventually the line says, oh God, we're all totally screwed. And maybe they figure out a way to walk it back, but even then you have two months of petroleum supply to digest. Like you're talking, we're already probably 550, 580 million barrels short. That is a lot of crude. That's, I mean, man. Because these systems are not designed to operate with a 20% variance. They are designed to operate with a million barrel variants over a period of a year or something like that. Like, that's a pretty big being a million barrels in a year. So 365 million barrels too much production or not enough production is a huge deal for the oil market. That's a huge deal. We are already 2x that short or close to 2x that short. And every day that short gets bigger and every day the downstream consequences get more extreme. We've talked about this before, but it's a ticking clock that for Iran doesn't really exist. Their life doesn't really get that much worse each day. Trump's sure does. And I mean, obviously the people who actually go through the fuel shortages that they will go through in the developing world and in the, in frontier Markets and in economies that can't pay for crude at the prices or for refined products at the prices that they're going to have to pay to get supply. They have it worst by far, but it's only getting worse every single day and it will only get worse on a linear basis.
• 42:58
  [B] So. But there, and those countries are also going to be in Iran's ear though, right?
• 43:02
  [A] Yeah, but Iran does not care what Mozambique thinks.
• 43:07
  [B] No, but they do care what China thinks.
• 43:09
  [A] China is not one of those countries, man, China's fine. China has huge of reserves. They have already banned exports of certain fuels. They have one of the most decarbonized private transportation fleets in the world. They have ample supply of energy in terms of wind, solar, coal and nuclear. Domestically, they're, they're good. I mean like it's inconvenient for them. It's going to drive up inflation and raise costs for manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera. Sure, but it's, it's not a life or death thing like it is for the really, really low income countries.
• 43:44
  [C] And China's also the direct beneficiary of any acceleration that happens on, on move to solar over, over Petro.
• 43:51
  [B] Yes, absolutely. To be clear, I don't mean, I don't mean I just threw China out there as a country name that jumped apart.
• 43:58
  [A] India and Pakistan are the two best examples.
• 44:00
  [B] India, Pakistan.
• 44:02
  [A] Of big countries close to Iran. And you know, I mean we may get Pakistan invading Iran. That's, that's like not entirely outside the realm of possibility if this gets really bad in terms of energy shortages.
• 44:14
  [D] Oh man. Like the, the thing I keep coming back to though is that like you said something interesting there George. And I think in like an objective world, parentheses, not this one, it's true but like actually realize he is on a clock. Like the way that they're acting is
• 44:34
  [A] no, he 100% realizes and he, and you know, you know this by how he tries to jawbone oil around. It's like they absolutely know.
• 44:40
  [D] I, I don't mean in terms of like obviously number go up is bad. That's a technical term. But like it really doesn't seem like maybe it's just their complete lack of strategy. I don't know. But like it doesn't seem like they are particularly incentivized to unscrew the situation that they have just by a war of choice created. Like they're, they're trying to like it.
• 45:08
  [A] But they didn't know the Trump people did not think through the economic ramifications of this war at all. And we know this and Besant weren't even briefed. Like, they didn't even know was in the cars. Now they know, and I guarantee you those two are kicking up on unholy racket in the Oval Office about this. I just. I don't believe that they are so blind that they. I mean, obviously, it's the Trump administration, so an unholy racket is phrased in a very particular way to reach the big guy in the friendliest possible terms. But they're, I am positive, being very clear about the implications here. And I mean, all he has to do is look at gas prices. Trump's been obsessed with oil prices for, like, 40 years, man.
• 45:49
  [D] Like, yeah, no, I get that. But, like, I'm. I am phrasing this poorly. The way that they're acting is indistinct from them not wanting to end this, which, to be fair, they're stupid.
• 46:03
  [A] I'm not sure I agree with that, though, because they. They did unilaterally cave to Iran's asks, right? Like, that was the first communication we got from the White House about this. The White House and Iran's foreign minister both being like, yeah, the 10 points from Iran are the basis for an agreement.
• 46:20
  [C] Right.
• 46:20
  [A] That was a huge, massive cave. And they did that because Brent had just traded up to 146 in spot markets.
• 46:27
  [D] Right? But then they immediately throw, you know, turn around and go, no, no, no, we didn't mean it.
• 46:31
  [A] Just wait for Brent to go back to 146, buddy.
• 46:34
  [D] Yeah, fair enough.
• 46:34
  [C] It's gonna happen. Just a reminder of how fast this is, this is all moving and the kind of pressure that's on. It was literally Tuesday that all of us were sitting here wondering if we were about to nuke Iran. Like, that was. That was less than a week ago.
• 46:48
  [A] Right?
• 46:48
  [C] I mean, the. That.
• 46:50
  [A] That.
• 46:51
  [C] That was the big Trump ultimatum that ultimately he. Do I have. Was. Was that two weeks ago? Have I completely lost my sense of time?
• 46:58
  [A] No, no, no, it was last week.
• 46:59
  [C] Yeah, but, like, that was when we went through this whole rigor rigam roll and Trump decided that he would rather declare victory on this concession to the Iranian framework that resulted in a ceasefire that doesn't appear to be really taking place. And also, nobody can agree on the terms of.
• 47:17
  [A] I just want to make really clear here that the reason that Proctor just sort of said wait, was that two weeks ago is because low tax was desperately gesticulating and pointing himself and shaking his head while Proctor was saying that because low tax did not think that we would nuke her on to our boy for.
• 47:31
  [B] That's right. Thank you, George.
• 47:33
  [D] God, that was. This week was all right.
• 47:36
  [C] The rest of us, besides wotax, were very worried about nuclear fire.
• 47:39
  [D] I actually didn't really see anything about it until people had kind of gotten it out of their system. So I can't.
• 47:44
  [B] I.
• 47:45
  [D] It was a very confusing back scroll for me.
• 47:48
  [B] I had. I had Mike Black on my side, too. That's. That's what I knew. I was right.
• 47:53
  [A] It was one of those things where it's like, I don't think he's going to nuke Iran, but, like, are you sure he's not going to nuke her on. And.
• 47:59
  [B] No, no. Like. Like I said a couple of weeks ago, I was like, okay, if it's anybody who's not Lindsey Graham, the probability of nuking Iran is zero. But with Trump, I think it's pretty close to zero, but it's not zero. You know, I. I thought it was, like, 0.01, which is still way too damn high for my liking.
• 48:22
  [D] Can we just have Eric Adams back?
• 48:26
  [A] No.
• 48:27
  [B] Because he's moved to Albania.
• 48:29
  [A] Yeah.
• 48:30
  [C] Yeah. Did you see that? He's. He's an Albanian citizen now. That's amazing. Yeah. So, like, we. We backed off the nuclear posture a little bit again. That was Tuesday. Tuesday. But we still have the Marine Expeditionary Unit on the way, which maybe two Marine Expeditionary Units on the way. I don't know. We're into Department of Defense acronym speak, and I've kind of lost track of all the assets we're positioning in the Gulf, which. Sidebar. Apparently in official communications, we are now referring to it as the Arabian Gulf. So we were just renaming all of the gulfs under this administration.
• 49:09
  [D] When did this happen? Because this is the first time hearing about it.
• 49:13
  [C] I only noticed it. I only noticed it today. I guess this has been a thing for some years that there are certain parties that prefer not to call it the Persian Gulf and certain parties that want to call it the Arabian Gulf.
• 49:24
  [B] Well, I think, if I remember correctly, Iranians don't really like being called Persians anyway. And. Yeah. I mean, the Gulf monarchs are probably not wild about it being called the Persian Gulf either.
• 49:36
  [C] Yeah.
• 49:37
  [B] Although it might as well be now, since. Right. I mean, Iran has comprehensively owned them. Yeah.
• 49:44
  [C] I mean, they set up the Ayatollah booth, so.
• 49:47
  [B] Yeah.
• 49:50
  [D] Oh, there's even an entire Wikipedia page on the Persian Gulf naming dispute.
• 49:56
  [C] See, now I'm kind of wondering if, like, that's. If that naming dispute is why we're having the Gulf of Mexico naming dispute that Trump just went. Oh, you can rename Gulfs. That's fantastic. Let's do exactly that.
• 50:10
  [D] Well, like, we officially have not like the. The United States National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Geonet name server does call it the Persian Gulf.
• 50:22
  [C] All right.
• 50:22
  [D] I looked so like. But it does have 16 variant names in different languages.
• 50:27
  [C] 16.
• 50:28
  [D] So, you know, look, this, apparently a legitimate alternate name is Gulf of Basra. Like, all right, we're going deep. We're going deep.
• 50:38
  [C] The Gulf. Let's go with the Gulf.
• 50:40
  [D] Yeah, the Gulf of Blank.
• 50:43
  [C] Yeah.
• 50:43
  [D] Wait, no, that's to our south.
• 50:45
  [B] But it's why it makes sense.
• 50:51
  [D] It does. I mean, it's there, but like. Yeah, there's also the Persian hyphen. Arabian Gulf.
• 50:57
  [C] Oh, I don't like that one.
• 50:59
  [D] Yeah, that's. That's kind of splitting the baby a little too much.
• 51:01
  [C] Yeah.
• 51:02
  [B] Oh, I thought that would have been the propter one.
• 51:05
  [A] No,
• 51:07
  [B] you get, you get both sides to agree on it. It's the Persian Arabian Gulf and everybody's happy and.
• 51:13
  [D] No, but then, then you have to figure out which one comes first. And the alphabetical argument is. Is on side.
• 51:19
  [B] Yeah, that's fair.
• 51:21
  [D] And then. And then they close the straight of hormoves again and you're all up.
• 51:45
  [C] So a thing happened in California this week also.
• 51:49
  [D] Wow, that's you. You're just swerving straight in, aren't you?
• 51:55
  [B] Yeah, well, I mean, it's a bigger, bigger train. Rick.
• 51:59
  [C] This one actually does involve dorking to peanuts. So this was.
• 52:06
  [A] Are we really going to use that as the episode title?
• 52:10
  [B] Oh, we should probably. Should be misspelled.
• 52:13
  [D] Malone.
• 52:15
  [C] On the one hand, this is a deeply horrible story, and on the other hand, I think the reaction to it has actually been pretty positive that first the San Francisco Chronicle and then CNN came out with deeply researched pieces detailing the recent sexual misdeeds of Eric Swalwell towards young women in his employ or affiliated with the Democratic Party or in some cases maybe just kind of physically proximate for whatever reason. And Eric Swalwell was, at the start of the day, polling first among Democratic contenders for the governor of California. That's why Eric Swalwell was in the news these days. He's a Democratic congressman from Northern California. Has been for what decade and change, Ran for president in 2020. Clearly an ambitious guy. He had his partisans. But at the start of the day, you could see a pretty clear path for him to become the governor of California. And within 24 hours after the first of these stories dropped. Literally all of his Democratic elected endorsements had recanted their endorsement pulled back. And it seems unlikely to me that he's going to have a future political career. People are calling for him to resign from the House of Representatives. People are calling for a vote to expel him from the House of Representatives.
• 53:43
  [A] There's some interesting stuff on that we should circle back to. I just want to note too, as of about 10 minutes ago of this recording, he has pulled out of the Governor's race.
• 53:50
  [C] Oh good. Okay, great. Which actually solves helps solve a problem for California Dems because one of the issues here is that California has a top two jungle primary for their state elected offices, including Governor and including House of Representatives and Senator at the federal level. What that means is that everybody, regardless of party, runs in the same primary and then they're then the top two candidates go on to the general. This is one of several different options that have been employed in various places to try to address some of the problems where you have extreme party skew in parts of the state and so most voters kind of get shut out of the process by virtue of the primary. It's got a particularly nasty failure mode in multi candidate elections where if you have two candidates of the minority party and lots of candidates of the majority party and things split just exactly right, you can wind up in a situation where the top two candidates that go on to the general election are from the minority party and therefore in the GE there is no choice that represents the skew of the district. So in this case you might have had a situation where despite the fact that anybody in California with a D next to their name in the general election is going to beat any Republican at this point you might have had a situation where two Republican candidates get through the jungle primary and then you have a Republican governor of California for however long it takes them to organize a recall. They also have recalls and that would have been a major problem for the California Democratic Party. That is a significant failure mode if you are gifting the governorship to the other party despite the fact that you have something like a, a, something like a 30 point natural advantage on anyway, Swalwell pulling out means that the Democratic vote is less fragmented and reduces the chances of that. It's still theoretically possible. But I would say that it goes from being something where it was maybe a, maybe a 15 or 20% risk to being something that's more like a 2 to 3% risk.
• 56:00
  [B] It means Styr gang. We are so back.
• 56:03
  [C] Yeah, so it's Tom Steyer, who is a billionaire who I find kind of likable, made his money in finance and then has spent the last decade and change working on mostly environmental stuff that people who work with it seem to say nice things about. He's kind of painfully dorky. And he ran for president in 2020 also.
• 56:27
  [D] Oh, that's where I know that guy's name from.
• 56:31
  [C] He spent a ridiculous amount. He's extremely rich. He made a lot of money and spent a lot of it running for president in 2020 and then kind of got that kind of got forgotten as Mike Bloomberg, who is probably an order of magnitude more rich, entered the race and spent probably an order of magnitude more money in the span of about three months.
• 56:54
  [D] How'd that work out for him?
• 56:56
  [C] I enjoyed it.
• 56:57
  [B] Hey, he won Guam.
• 57:01
  [C] Anyway, so Tom Steyer and Katie Porter are now. The two are now the two leading Democratic candidates. And I would say that I haven't looked at what the betting markets say, but I would guess that there's probably upwards of an 80% chance that one of those two will be the next governor of California. But I think it's a very good sign that you had institutional Democrats closing ranks against Swalwell's sexual predations very, very quickly. I don't know if we need to get too far down in the details on this, but what you need to know about it, if you haven't read the articles, is that there is no place for any serious doubt about whether or not Swalwell did the things that he's been accused of doing.
• 57:44
  [A] Yeah. Including sending midnight cease and desist text messages to people that were not directly named in the reporting. Based on the reporting.
• 57:54
  [C] Yeah.
• 57:54
  [A] Which if that's not an admission of guilt, I don't know.
• 57:58
  [D] Yeah. Is
• 58:02
  [C] there were just paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs in both of these articles of contemporaneous proof that the women were at minimum, in the frame of mind that they claimed that they were in, you know, contemporaneous STD tests, contemporaneous conversations they had with other people, contemporaneous texts they sent to other people about being maybe sexually assaulted and certainly groped by Swalwell and.
• 58:33
  [D] Yeah.
• 58:34
  [C] Anyway, I don't think there's going to be a lot of long term dead enders on this one. But you never know. People are sometimes very strange.
• 58:41
  [D] But I was going to say that it does seem like, I mean, he. The obvious comparison is Al Franken. And now I have to duck for snipers now that I have invoked this. But like it probably helps that no one knows who Swalwell is. But also, like, I think we've maybe chased a decent amount of that out of, like, the mainstream. You'll still see it on the Internet, but, like, I don't think I've heard a normal person really even mention Al Franken in, like, the last 10 years.
• 59:13
  [C] Yeah. Which is the residence. That was pretty good.
• 59:18
  [D] I don't know what that is.
• 59:20
  [C] Netflix murder mystery that takes place in the White House. It's good.
• 59:23
  [D] You should check it out. Okay, I. I'm not going to do that proper.
• 59:27
  [C] Yeah, fair enough.
• 59:30
  [D] But like. Like Swalwell, it helps that no one knows who he is. But, like, it also probably helps that this is very. One drop. Like. Like it hits the ground with a. With a resounding thud. And. And this guy goes away to creep hell for a while or by ever.
• 59:49
  [C] But there wasn't like, the slow pain out where people got dug into positions of. No, no, he couldn't possibly have done this. There was. There was an overwhelming amount of evidence presented right away.
• 59:59
  [D] I don't know. A certain senator said, no, that's the last one to a certain majority leader.
• 1:00:04
  [C] Yeah.
• 1:00:05
  [D] And then it was not. But if they're getting better at cleaning up the garbage, fantastic. Right.
• 1:00:12
  [C] George said that we would need to return to this. And I think what he was talking about was there are the outlines of a deal to expel one Republican and one Democratic House representative at the same time that are both very credibly accused of some pretty heinous shit. And isn't it convenient that we have layers of this where we can expel them in pairs?
• 1:00:39
  [A] I think there is an additional two that have also been proposed, one from each side. I'm not up on the allegations, seriousness, et cetera, thereof on the additional two, but certainly it's sort of like the procedure they do to pair off for votes where you can't be there for the vote. Right. You'll have your buddy from the other side of the aisle who will agree, okay, well, I won't vote because they're not able to be there because of whatever life circumstances. Is the thing that happens, like, pretty regularly in Congress, or at least it used to. I don't know if they're still doing it, but they used to do this all the time. And doing that but for excising sexual demons is, like, pretty great, pretty convenient. I think that's a good way to approach it. And you could actually see people get on board with this in Congress in a way that if it's only one side doing it, or if it's one side trying to leverage it against the other, if it's just, just pairing them off.
• 1:01:30
  [C] Yeah.
• 1:01:31
  [A] You might actually see consequences for bad behavior and some sort of benefit to virtue. Imagine.
• 1:01:38
  [C] Yeah. I mean, as long. As long as we have surplus sex monsters, let's make sex monster aid. No, I mean, like, like, like this, this is, this is a useful and constructive solution to the problem. Like, like it, it, it is a major issue that you wind up in these situations, in very closely divided legislatures where you can't get rid of a guy who you would otherwise like to get rid of because it would swing the balance of power in the legislature in a way that is unacceptable to one or more of your coalition. And you can argue until you're blue in the face that the coalitions should accept that if they lose the majority because one of their elected members did something terrible, they deserve that they should vet their guys better. My experience has been in the main that parties are not willing to do that, that it is much, much harder to take a vote, to kick a guy out if that means that you're giving up power as a party over somebody's personal failings or in this case, personal atrocities. This is, this is a little bit more than weakness of character stuff. So if you compare it off one by one, that, that makes it easier for people to do the right thing. And we like it when it's easy for people to do the right thing.
• 1:02:53
  [D] Yeah. What a brave statement, Proctor.
• 1:02:58
  [C] I'm just saying. I'm just saying it's great that we have so many sex monsters in Congress. That's, that's really where I come down.
• 1:03:05
  [D] This is Propter Malone speaking. That is Propter Malone. No, but like, what if. Just fewer hex monsters. God damn it.
• 1:03:15
  [C] You know, to some extent, this dovetails. One of the things that we. That has been a topic of discussion in the discourse recently is whether or not we're going to get a legitimate shot at, you know, punitive justice against people. In the Trump administration, in a future Democratic administration, are we actually going to be able to go back and prosecute people? Are we actually going to be able to go back, seize assets, put people in jail, you know, do the kind of illustration activities. That's a word I like to restore the integrity of American government that necessarily involve putting people through some pretty unpleasant things because they deserve it and because you need to set an example. I would say that things like this, where you are excising bad actors from both parties, move the needle significantly towards the likelihood of that happening. If you have lots and lots of people who can't, because of their own personal cross pressures, accede to the proposition that politicians should be punished sometimes for things they have done that are either related or not related to their office. If you have people in both parties who, because of their own legal exposure are committed to the proposition of elite immunity, it becomes much harder to do lustration at some point. The corruption is so widespread that you can't, you just can't. I think you can make a case that this has been a significant problem for the Supreme Court in particular over the past couple of decades that there are enough people who are sufficiently tainted that you can't effectively prosecute a campaign against the people who are worst. Because numbers, even if there are one or two guys who are clearly much more corrupt than the median on the Supreme Court, you know, you got to go pretty far down the list before you get to somebody who doesn't have any criminal exposure or somebody who is, who is unquestionably inviolate in that way. Whether it's, you know, to use SCOTUS as an example, like, like it's, it's clear that Clarence Thomas is operating on
• 1:05:28
  [D] another level, but Michael Jordan of crime.
• 1:05:34
  [C] But, but like, even, even if you get down to kind of like the middle of the list, like, you know, John, I think John Roberts is a fairly ethical justice, but also, you know, his, his wife's profession for the entire time he's been on the Supreme Court is essentially connecting Supreme Court clerks to high paying law firm jobs after their Supreme Court clerks. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how at least some perception of potential corruption might adhere to that kind of direct linkage of professional favors for people who are under the auspices of her husband to law firms where everybody involved has interests before the court and will have interests before the court in future. So like, and again, I think John Roberts is pretty clean as far as Supreme Court justices go. But it's difficult to say, okay, the standard is zero conflicts of interest. When everybody on the court has conflicts of interest or nearly everybody on the court has conflicts of interest. I think KBJ is probably pretty good. I haven't heard anything terrible about what Kitaji's done with her money.
• 1:06:53
  [A] She hasn't been there that long yet either, so she hasn't been. Although if I was going to pick someone on the current Supreme Court who was going to remain clean as a whistle ethical standards for the entire time they were on the court, she would be my pick.
• 1:07:05
  [B] Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:05
  [C] I mean, that helps.
• 1:07:08
  [D] Absolutely. No RVs
• 1:07:12
  [A] or junkets in Italy, teaching, no show classes like I. It's just the entire culture around what can be dumped into the pockets of Supreme Court justices is disgusting. I mean, it's, it's honestly the amount of public trust you have to execute that role. And
• 1:07:37
  [D] I dare say it is bad.
• 1:07:39
  [C] Yeah.
• 1:07:39
  [A] I mean, the solution is just to start adding Supreme Court justices until you're. Your number of errors is low enough. That or the percentage chance you get any one bad justice on a panel that's drawn randomly is low enough that you don't have issues anymore. But that's something we need 60 Senate votes for, I think, and won't happen until at least 20, 28. Although then maybe depending on how things go with JD Vance running at the top of the ticket.
• 1:08:10
  [C] Yeah, we'll see. We might, we might be able to do it with 50 if there's the will. That's going to be.
• 1:08:15
  [B] I don't think there's the will.
• 1:08:19
  [A] Or we could do it with 57. If there's the will. Right?
• 1:08:22
  [B] Yeah, yeah, that. Yeah. I was going to say probably 57 or 58. You think?
• 1:08:27
  [A] Yeah, I mean, if you got a guy like Ruben Gallego being like, yeah, no, let's do whatever. We can go after him. He. And he'll get there like. So.
• 1:08:37
  [D] Yeah.
• 1:08:38
  [A] I think it'd be nice to close out this week on a little note of optimism. I know all four of us really enjoyed Artemis 2, content all week and seeing Splashdown, while not unique as a way for spacecraft to return to Earth, which was somehow something that some people thought that SpaceX's Dragon capsules aren't landing in the ocean, etc. Nonetheless, just really, really special and such a nice reminder of what we can all do together. Because that wasn't Elon Musk doing all that stuff. That was us. That was our government doing it. A government that everyone who's listening to this, who's an American citizen anyways, and the four of us and our families and our friends and our political enemies, honestly, all have the same equal share in. And that's just. That's lovely. That's wonderful.
• 1:09:32
  [D] I also had to repair a toilet this week, so I feel some real bonding going on here.
• 1:09:39
  [A] Did anyone have any outlook issues they had to deal with to show some solidarity with our brave astronauts?
• 1:09:44
  [D] No, I can't follow there. We're a Gmail household.
• 1:09:50
  [C] Yeah, it's pretty cool what we can do when we pull together. And I think space Is occupies kind of a unique spot in the American public imagination. There's a reason that people shape roughly like me. Keep coming back to these space age narratives of success and of ambition. Ambition as a species, as a nation, as a culture to go try to do something that nobody's ever done before.
• 1:10:20
  [A] It's free real estate.
• 1:10:24
  [D] Just don't go look at the 2027 proposed budget.
• 1:10:29
  [B] Yeah, yeah. So what are, what are we supposed to actually land on the moon?
• 1:10:35
  [D] 2028.
• 1:10:36
  [B] 2028.
• 1:10:37
  [C] Okay. Artemis 4.
• 1:10:38
  [A] Well, not if the budget.
• 1:10:39
  [D] Well, you know, no, that, that is actually like in like I went looking myself, it does fully fund Artemis, but like it cuts a bunch of other stuff.
• 1:10:49
  [C] I actually had another cool space related thing happening happened this week which was the. Yesterday the. The rocket went up that has an experiment on which my dad is the is. Is co PI to the International Space Station. That was pretty cool. I got to watch. Got to watch dad's experiment blast off with my kids. So nice. That one was Elon Musk, that one was SpaceX.
• 1:11:12
  [A] And he's growing the most expensive alfalfa in history. Even more expensive than the stuff they shipped from Arizona. Saudi Arabia, which is pretty expensive Alfalfa.
• 1:11:22
  [C] Yeah. Although actually the water rights picture is a little clearer up there than it is in.
• 1:11:28
  [A] I was like up in Arizona famous for unclear. Oh, you mean on the International Space Station. Right, right, right. Where they're surrounded by vacuum. Right. Okay. I've had a long weekend, gentlemen.
• 1:11:40
  [B] I appreciate Proctor's dedication to alfalfa, his family's dedication to alfalfa. He will not rest until the west is completely destroyed.
• 1:11:49
  [C] Look, alfalfa is a great plant. It doesn't a bunch of things that you want it to do. You should not grow it in places where there are no water. Like. Yes.
• 1:11:58
  [A] Including space, but yes.
• 1:12:00
  [C] Well, okay, so it's got an argument in space because you need to fix nitrogen.
• 1:12:04
  [A] At least not at commercial space.
• 1:12:05
  [C] You should not, you should not feed it to cows if you're growing it in space. That's not. That's not why you should grow alfalfa in space.
• 1:12:10
  [D] What about space cow? Obviously.
• 1:12:14
  [A] What is the year that. What will. What will be the first year a cow goes to space?
• 1:12:20
  [C] Oh man, never.
• 1:12:21
  [D] We will have vat grown meat before then.
• 1:12:24
  [B] Yeah, I'm still mad at NASA for the color of those parachutes because I saw the Artemis 2 craft land and I saw the parachutes and I was like, now I want Whataburger.
• 1:12:42
  [A] For those that aren't aware whataburger is an overrated burger chain from Texas.
• 1:12:46
  [B] A hugely overrated burger chain from Texas.
• 1:12:49
  [A] There's one in Gaston county now. Actually, I haven't been yet because I haven't had a Whataburger since about 2012.
• 1:12:55
  [B] If you've never had Whataburger, if you're listening, imagine Burger King, but instead of way too much mayo, it's way too much mustard.
• 1:13:02
  [C] Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 1:13:04
  [D] Yes, that's a real. Yeah, that. Wow. Yeah, you really put some thought into that one.
• 1:13:10
  [C] Yep.
• 1:13:10
  [D] Yeah.
• 1:13:11
  [C] Up.
• 1:13:11
  [A] No, he nailed it. That's exactly. That was my experience to a T. Oh, I've been.
• 1:13:15
  [B] I've been a Whataburger hater for years.
• 1:13:18
  [A] Yeah, let the hate flow through you.
• 1:13:20
  [B] Although once per quarter or so. Yeah.
• 1:13:23
  [A] You just check in on them. Sample to make sure that the hatred's still justified.
• 1:13:27
  [B] Yeah, I'll go and get a double meat, double cheese, just. Just to make sure I'm still right.
• 1:13:32
  [C] I like to get one when I fly through Dallas Fort Worth, you know, because it's the same level of disappointing every time. Like there's no, there's no variance. It's just like I'm definitely not going to enjoy it, but it's not going to be terrible.
• 1:13:46
  [A] The nice thing about In n Out is it's that same experience where it's the same level of disappointment every time. But it's not actually that much disappointment because in and out's still pretty good. It's just nowhere near as good as the Californians make it out to be. So you're left with a decent but ultimately forgettable burger and a bunch of lost hype.
• 1:14:02
  [C] It's great.
• 1:14:03
  [A] It's. It's exactly what it should do.
• 1:14:05
  [B] In N Out is at least cheap though, right?
• 1:14:07
  [C] That's true. Cheaper.
• 1:14:10
  [D] I don't know about cheap.
• 1:14:11
  [A] I don't know about airport. In and out.
• 1:14:12
  [C] Yeah.
• 1:14:14
  [B] Oh no. Airport, in and out. Yeah. Is probably pretty steep.
• 1:14:18
  [D] I went to five guys today, so I really can't talk because I spent very close to $20 on a. On a friggin cheeseburger.
• 1:14:26
  [A] Early 2010s ass burger chain.
• 1:14:28
  [B] Yeah.
• 1:14:29
  [A] Yeah.
• 1:14:30
  [C] That feels like a zero interest rate phenomenon right there. The Five Guys burger.
• 1:14:34
  [A] Yeah, yeah, the five guys burger and the five Guys mountain of fries in a, in a brown paper bag that you paid $3 for.
• 1:14:40
  [B] Why do they do that?
• 1:14:42
  [D] I didn't even get fries. I don't even. I, I just needed.
• 1:14:46
  [C] You just got the softball sized burger.
• 1:14:47
  [A] Yeah.
• 1:14:48
  [D] Basically that's enough food, as you well know.
• 1:14:51
  [B] Why? Because you think I'd want to dig my burger out of seven pounds of fries that I am never going to eat. Why? I like Washingtonians. No offense, Proctor, are idiots.
• 1:15:04
  [A] Wait till you start hearing about the Columbia River Treaty and all the agriculture downstream of the place I grew up. That is just assuming it's all the water they can use for the coming century or so when. Ooh, Canadians. Have a bit of a different take I in saying that, yes, low tax. You're right. Washingtonians are. With the notable exception of our boy Proctor, and I'm assuming his dad. Idiots.
• 1:15:34
  [B] And Mrs. Proctor, of course.
• 1:15:36
  [A] Oh, right. She's from Washington, too. Sorry, I didn't mean to impress.
• 1:15:39
  [C] No, she's not. She's from New York.
• 1:15:40
  [A] Oh, never mind. Then we can impugn her in other ways.
• 1:15:43
  [C] Yeah,
• 1:15:46
  [D] she's not allowed to run the Democratic Party.
• 1:15:50
  [B] You know, with this Cal. With this Swalwell thing. I think California hurts. Heard me when I was denouncing New York over the Mamdani campaign last summer, and I said that, like, even the Californians wouldn't stoop to the level of perversion that New Yorkers would, and then they decided their knuckles and went, that's right.
• 1:16:13
  [A] All right, well, I think that's about it enough for us this week on what has been another exciting episode of Normal 1. Now, we hope you've enjoyed it, and if you want to rate or review the podcast or email it to your boss and tell him you think that he's great and. Or she's great and that you should listen to this great podcast because it's definitely family friendly. You shouldn't take career advice from us, but you should, you know, share the podcast around to people who would actually appreciate it. We'd appreciate that. And I think that's it.
• 1:16:43
  [D] So, for no men, there is one more thing we really should leave the people with.
• 1:16:47
  [A] Oh, what's that?
• 1:16:48
  [D] Just think about how bad a week JD Vance has had and how bad a week he can have next week.
• 1:16:59
  [A] Normal Man. In Charlotte, I'm George.
• 1:17:02
  [C] In dc, I'm Proctor.
• 1:17:04
  [B] In Outer Florida, I'm Low tech speed run enjoyer.
• 1:17:07
  [D] And in Boston, I'm at Stay Normal, y'.
• 1:17:10
  [C] All. Sam.