Latest / Normal Men / Episode 55 - Cracking Spreads

Transcript

Episode 55 - Cracking Spreads · Normal Men

• 0:00
  Ed: You know you can get glacier cherry powder, right?
• 0:03
  Propter: I just looked up the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. By the canister.
• 0:08
  George: Damn. Where are you finding that?
• 0:09
  Propter: Walmart?
• 0:09
  Ed: Amazon?
• 0:10
  George: Oh, hell yeah.
• 0:12
  Ed: You get. You get both flavors.
• 0:14
  George: No, I'm not talking about glacier cherry. Hold on, that's not what I'm talking about. Glacier cherry is white. I am talking about the clear kind now.
• 0:24
  Ed: I'm pretty sure there isn't a clear one. There's just the, like, unsettling milky white.
• 0:32
  George: No, there is a clear one. That's my point is like, it used to be. You used to be able to get it and you can't anymore. The unsettling milky white has been around forever. It's fine. I'm not really opposed to it. You just pretend you're on Star Trek DS9 and you're. You're getting handed your ration by a Vorta. But the clear kind is a different level. It is. I can't. There's no description. On a hot, sunny day when you've been sweating and it's come out of an icy cooler, it is the best beverage on the planet.
• 1:01
  Lowtax: Is it Lightning Blast?
• 1:03
  George: I don't know.
• 1:04
  Propter: Are you sure they weren't just under mixing, like the clear cherry?
• 1:08
  George: No, it was its own packaging. It was its own packaging and it was a distinct flavor. It was. It kind of had more raspberry to it almost. It was.
• 1:18
  Lowtax: I don't know what David Cutcliffe is just like, perks. You're a walk on. You don't get the good shit.
• 1:24
  Propter: Could be the glacier.
• 1:25
  Lowtax: Go drink that watered down Gatorade.
• 1:27
  Ed: Did they have a mixologist for you?
• 1:29
  Propter: Oh, was it. Was it the lemon ice?
• 1:31
  George: It was not lemon.
• 1:32
  Propter: Okay.
• 1:32
  George: Nope. It was a cherry ish flavor. It might not have had like an actual fruit label attached to it.
• 1:38
  Propter: Glacier Freeze, maybe That's more familiar. Yeah, that one's being described in the marketing copy as a light blue transparent flavor, which doesn't shed a lot of light.
• 1:48
  George: It's. It's clear. This is really important. It's not white. It's not blue. It's clear. It's. It's clear.
• 1:55
  Propter: Ice punch. Shit. Reddit's got a post about. About it.
• 1:58
  George: Okay, that's it. That's it.
• 2:00
  Ed: Wow.
• 2:01
  George: Ice punch. It was the. I can't describe to you how good this flavor was.
• 2:06
  Propter: Hang on, hang on, hang on. The AI says it's often considered discontinued, which suggests that it might still exist.
• 2:13
  Ed: Yeah, but it's just.
• 2:14
  Propter: Hedrick,
• 2:17
  George: I. I don't know.
• 2:19
  Ed: It is.
• 2:20
  Propter: It is discontinued.
• 2:21
  George: If any listener can find ice punch Gatorade for me in powder form or otherwise, I will, I will reward you. Not handsomely, but something in the neighborhood adequately. Like low tax level looks as opposed to level looks. 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.
• 2:47
  Propter: I'm George In Charlotte, in D.C. i'm
• 2:49
  Lowtax: Prop Der Malone in outer Florida. I'm low tax speedrun enjoyer.
• 2:53
  Ed: And I'm Ed in Boston. Anyway, now that we've got that mystery out of the way, I have a, I have a note here from one Go like Hell machine. It's really confusing. I've never seen him write something like this. It's, it's very scrawled and it says, need to go somewhere for a while. Don't ask questions. Forward my mail. So, you know, anything happened this week we should know about?
• 3:25
  Propter: Yeah, there was some dinner going on in D.C. and that couldn't have been important. There were people in Texas, all over the bars. I don't know what was going on. They seemed a little out of sorts.
• 3:36
  Ed: I heard they were stealing wine bottles.
• 3:39
  Propter: You know, I, I, I, I did see more people than usual walking around with that like 250 year anniversary fox News gift shop crap. So
• 3:51
  Ed: I thought they just took a detour through the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport.
• 3:59
  George: Oh, man. Who was it that got popped in there for sticking his hand under the edge of the bathroom stall? There was a Republican.
• 4:06
  Lowtax: Oh, the Idaho Congress.
• 4:07
  George: Senator Larry which first of all, that should not be a crime. I mean, obviously, like, let's just, let's just get that out of the way.
• 4:14
  Propter: Larry Craig, I think.
• 4:16
  Lowtax: Yes. Larry Craig.
• 4:18
  Propter: Yeah.
• 4:19
  Lowtax: When was that? That has to have been like 20 years ago now.
• 4:24
  George: It was at least a decade.
• 4:25
  Ed: 2007. 2000.
• 4:27
  Lowtax: 2007.
• 4:28
  Ed: Wow.
• 4:29
  George: And see, the reason I know so much about this is because I used to connect through mini St. Paul on the way home, North Carolina. So if you were running a Mid Atlantic origin, destiny origin, and ending up in for instance, geg, which is an airport I'm sure Proctor is very familiar with, which is also the international airport closest where I grew up, then you were probably flying through mini St. Paul because northwest Airlines, which Delta bought in, I want to say 2006 or 2007 or that that was their hub. So if you were flying anywhere into the Pacific Northwest from the mid atlant, it's like that's how it worked. So I would fly RDU to GEG on Delta sometimes slc, but usually usually go through msp.
• 5:16
  Propter: GEG is in Spokane for those of you who have no idea where it is. I don't know why it's called geg. I probably should know that.
• 5:23
  George: It's. Yeah. And you probably shouldn't know where Spokane is. I. I always tell people who are like, true. Oh, where are you from? Nelson, British Columbia, is a really tiny town. You've probably never heard of it. It's about three hours north of Spokane, Washington. You know where that is? And every single time I say that, I get a knowing. Oh, yeah, spok. And it's like, yeah, sure, buddy.
• 5:43
  Lowtax: Good old spoken.
• 5:47
  Propter: That's true. We used to call it spoken growing up.
• 5:51
  Lowtax: Oh, I know. I had a colleague at the Census Bureau who used to call it that. He was from there.
• 5:59
  Propter: It's a lovely city. We like Spokane.
• 6:02
  George: Really good healthcare, actually.
• 6:03
  Propter: Yeah, actually. Actually used to consistently make the top of, like, the nicest places in America to live lists, and then it's bottomed out during the 90s and now it's kind of on the way back, so.
• 6:13
  George: Shouldn't. Shouldn't have. I mean, it's not.
• 6:16
  Propter: Yeah, it's a totally reasonable place to live. Probably. Yeah.
• 6:21
  George: Okay.
• 6:21
  Propter: Okay.
• 6:22
  George: Anyhow, so Nerd prom. Nerd prom. Got an active shooter.
• 6:27
  Ed: Correction. Evil Nerd Prom.
• 6:29
  Propter: Okay. Evil Nerd Prom is the White House correspondence dinner for anybody who is one or two brain worms, levels below the average on the. On this podcast.
• 6:37
  Ed: And if you are, please get on our level. Thank you.
• 6:42
  Propter: So the White House Correspondents Dinner is an annual event where the White House correspondents, who are the press corps who cover the White House, throw this big gala. And often the President attends and speaks and has jokes written for him by professionals. And in good times, it's a nice togetherness exercise that still sort of smacks of decadence and back slapping and all those things. And in bad times, it is arguably, literally the event that inspired Donald Trump to run for president when Barack Obama roasted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.
• 7:17
  George: That's true.
• 7:18
  Propter: This particular year, it was already going to be kind of a sick spectacle. Even in the best of cases, there was plenty of intimations by the White House that Donald Trump was going to come out and confront the press at the White House Correspondents Dinner, thus turning this thing that is already a little bit gross into something that is massively disgusting, an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.
• 7:42
  Lowtax: I believe there were specific words used by Caroline Leavitt about what it would be were there not proctor what did.
• 7:48
  George: What? What?
• 7:49
  Propter: She had some predictions, right?
• 7:51
  Lowtax: I believe she predicted there would be shots fired.
• 7:53
  Propter: Shots fired. Well, as it turns out. Oh, Miss Caroline.
• 8:00
  Ed: My.
• 8:01
  George: My college position. College football position. Coach. The. The coach specific to my position. Tight ends. He was also special teams coordinator. But whatever. He used to have a saying, right? If you put it on tape, it's there forever. So if you are in practice and we're filming practice and you put it on tape, it's there forever. If you're worse in a game and you put it on tape, it's there forever. Caroline, leave it. Put it on tape and it's there forever.
• 8:28
  Ed: Yeah, but no one cares.
• 8:30
  George: So I care a little bit.
• 8:33
  Ed: Let me. No one who matters cares. Proctor. We don't matter.
• 8:36
  George: Let's be practical consequences negligible to zero. Humorously.
• 8:41
  Lowtax: I mean, I don't know, man.
• 8:43
  Propter: Like, no, this is.
• 8:44
  Lowtax: Get really into conspiracy theories these days.
• 8:46
  Ed: You know, there's. That's true.
• 8:48
  Propter: There's some real ones though risk on this one.
• 8:50
  Lowtax: It's been a few months. Proctor, do you want to explain? Gonzo?
• 8:54
  Propter: Yes.
• 8:54
  Ed: I was literally about to congratulate him for breaking this habit. And you do that low tax. What are you doing? Why are you helping him backslide?
• 9:05
  Lowtax: I regret nothing.
• 9:07
  Propter: All right, so we've got several layers that we sort of have to bring you through here because again, we're not assuming that everybody is as conversant with the details of this story.
• 9:18
  Ed: The idiot Onion.
• 9:19
  Propter: What happened. What happened last night was that Cole Allen, as we eventually found out, who is a 31 year old farmer. I guess he's still a Caltech grad and I guess itinerant tutor for about the last six years in Southern California, rushed the White House correspondents dinner. He was allegedly carrying weapons. I think the chances of that panning out are pretty good at this point because we've seen his. The New York Post is calling it a manifesto. I think it's more of a suicide note in which he explains what he's about to try to do. He did not get as far as the floor of the hotel in question, the hotel in question where the White House correspondent was being held, which is sometimes referred to as the Hinckley Hilton because it's where John Hinckley took shots at another president once upon a time. He did not get as far as the floor where the dinner was happening. He was not particularly close to shooting anyone that he wanted to shoot. It is not clear that he actually fired any shots, although that's sort of still up in the Air.
• 10:27
  George: What we have on the security camera footage is. I think it's fair to describe it as completely hilarious. And I'm not gonna use the anime reference because nobody's gonna get that one. I haven't seen it also, so I shouldn't be using a reference for something I haven't seen. But this dude literally just gets a good old run and start. He had to have been cruising for at least 20 yards before he hit the security perimeter and just sprints through. It's possible he took a couple shots at the Secret Service agents that were at that post as he was moving through them. It's not totally clear from the footage whether that was the case or not, but he basically just tried to Leroy Jenkins the thing and sprint from outside the perimeter, through the entire perimeter to wherever he was in range of Trump administration officials, excluding Cash Patel, for reasons that haven't been properly explained to me.
• 11:19
  Ed: And you don't want them explained?
• 11:22
  George: I. I do. I do want them explained, actually.
• 11:26
  Ed: Do you want to know the answer to that?
• 11:29
  George: Yeah, I do.
• 11:30
  Lowtax: Maybe he's the guy who was banging Cash, his girlfriend.
• 11:34
  George: That would actually explain a lot about this story.
• 11:39
  Ed: See, I would like to know where the director of the FBI was, but I specifically would not like to know where Cash Patel was.
• 11:47
  Lowtax: I would just like to say that, yes, he got past the initial security check, but within, like, 20ft of that, he was down.
• 11:56
  Ed: Right, Right.
• 11:57
  Lowtax: And this is a bunch of Maryland people after September. And usually when the back gets to the second level like that, he's gone, you know, so that's the best defense a bunch of terps have played in decades.
• 12:15
  Propter: So the good news is we can all chuckle about this at this point because we're far. I mean. I mean, again, we still haven't gotten the whole story on what exactly happened. We may never get the whole story on what exactly happened, but it appears as of right now, Sunday night, April 26, that nobody was hurt in any serious way as a result of this last night. So that means that we are in. I wouldn't say that we are completely in the this is very funny side of things, but we are closer to the this is very funny side of things. Then this is deeply horrible from my perspective. Others. Others may differ.
• 12:51
  Lowtax: We're close, and I do the very funny side that people are berating Taylor Lorenz as they should, as an important figure in this whole discourse.
• 13:00
  George: Yeah.
• 13:01
  Lowtax: Yes, absolutely right.
• 13:04
  George: All I. All I could think of when I saw she. You know, for those who aren't familiar, Taylor Lorenz Yeah, first off, don't be. And second off, Taylor Lorenz is a. Allegedly a journalist of some ilk. I think it's a stretch of the definition, but whatever, we'll use it. Who basically came to Blue sky, apparently to complain about the fact that this was a horrifying experience or whatever, and was roundly told, why were you at the Nazi party? And why should we feel sorry for you for the consequences of being at the Nazi nerd prom? And she then went back to the Nazi website, the, the one run by Elon Musk, who complained she was being mass canceled. I saw no evidence of mass cancellation or other. Anything other than people just not centering Taylor Lawrence as the protagonist of reality.
• 13:59
  Ed: But to be clear, that's why she went to Blue Sky.
• 14:03
  George: Yes, yes, yes.
• 14:04
  Propter: I, I, I did. I did learn something about Taylor Lawrence as that I didn't know before as a result of this today. But she was complaining about how this, this hit particularly hard because she was someone who had been assaulted at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. To which another person who had been at Unite the Right in Charlottesville pointed out that what Taylor Lawrence was talking about was that somebody had knocked her iPhone out of her hand while she was trying to film the dead body of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
• 14:37
  George: Bad God. Bad, bad person.
• 14:43
  Lowtax: Okay, now we're canceling Taylor Lorenz.
• 14:45
  Propter: Yeah, I mean, I mean, we haven't even gotten to her thermostat crimes. So what was the temperature?
• 14:51
  George: She said she leaves it on 90. Wait, it was 90? I thought it was like 80. 80 would be bad. 90 is.
• 15:00
  Lowtax: No, I think it's like 90.
• 15:02
  Propter: I'm looking this one up.
• 15:05
  George: It is scary how few keystrokes you just put into your computer.
• 15:11
  Propter: I've got a Taylor Lawrence macro. She claims that it's not 90 degrees, but I am not seeing specification of what it is. She just says that it is. She has a metabolic condition where her body cannot hold on to heat. Her body temperature is several degrees below normal. Her words, not mine.
• 15:29
  George: Okay, so she's like the one person you can fairly call a lizard person. And it's not.
• 15:33
  Lowtax: I have a photo of her thermostat from Twitter and it says 90.
• 15:42
  George: Okay, all right. So our derision towards Laurens in this particular example is reflective of, I think, the lack of sympathy anyone should have with this particular event, and especially given that no one actually ended up getting hurt, or at least not severely, despite the admirable attempt by the. Well, admirable in the very, very limited sense, not the general sense. The admirably stupid attempt at breaking the security perimeter from the perpetrator. I do think, though, I mean, it's not all good. It's not. It's not all good at all. And I think there's some stuff to unpack there. It's just you have to laugh sometimes. And that's what we're here to do. And I think this is a very laughable event, if not one with. Without negative implications.
• 16:29
  Lowtax: It is. I mean, it's got to be one of the dumbest assassination attempts in history, right?
• 16:34
  George: No, it's not even close. But it's.
• 16:36
  Lowtax: I know.
• 16:36
  George: No presidential assassination attempts especially.
• 16:40
  Lowtax: I'm struggling to think of a worse one.
• 16:43
  Propter: Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the Kavanaugh assassination. I'm making air quotes that you can't see, but the Kavanaugh assassination attempt that happened a few years ago, which. Which you guys may have forgotten about. You guys may have forgotten it happened entirely.
• 16:56
  Ed: I don't know if I ever knew it happened.
• 16:59
  Propter: Well, it's clearly looming large in the psyche of SCOTUS at this point. But what happened was this guy came into town. Hey, he had. He had looked up where. Where Justice Kavanaugh lives. He had obtained a gun. He went to Justice Kavanaugh's house. He decided he no longer wanted to kill Justice Kavanaugh, and he turned himself into the cops. Assassination attempt.
• 17:27
  George: It was an attempt at something.
• 17:28
  Ed: Yeah.
• 17:30
  Propter: So, I mean, did they.
• 17:32
  Ed: Did they like have something to charge him for?
• 17:35
  Propter: I think so. I'm not totally sure how that one, that was like. That was like 20, 23 maybe.
• 17:41
  Ed: Yeah, like, that's like contemplated attempted murder.
• 17:44
  Propter: Yeah, I mean, it's like. It's like half ass attempted murder. Like, you didn't really put your back into that one, buddy.
• 17:50
  Lowtax: Yeah, but he didn't even attempt it.
• 17:52
  George: He attempted to attempt it.
• 17:53
  Lowtax: He turned himself in.
• 17:54
  Propter: He had taken. He had taken concrete steps towards. I should probably look up what actually happened to him. I think he's in jail.
• 18:01
  Lowtax: Yeah, I would guess so.
• 18:03
  Ed: They gave him eight years. Okay, sure.
• 18:06
  Propter: I don't think there was necessarily a change of heart in the same way on the part of Cole Allen, who was the guy who rushed the White House correspondents dinner.
• 18:16
  George: Well, not if the speed at which he hit the hole was any indication.
• 18:20
  Propter: He was. He was decisive. You got to give him that on that. He was moving, but he was essentially drawing dead as, you know, in terms of accomplishing the goal there. He was not going to assassinate Any of the dignitaries that he intended to assassinate by charging the magnets.
• 18:39
  Ed: Hold on one second. We, we, we do need to amend the record. The assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh, the perpetrator identifies as a woman.
• 18:52
  Propter: Oh, I'm sorry.
• 18:53
  Ed: Which seems to have been post coverage, so.
• 18:57
  Propter: Oh, okay.
• 18:57
  Ed: We regret the error.
• 18:59
  Propter: Sorry.
• 18:59
  George: Anyway, I, I do think it, you know, we've been talking about this since forever, but the, the stochastic violence thing, the fact it's basically, you know, our fellow travelers. Like, like if you look, this guy's Blue sky history has been pulled at this point. And.
• 19:17
  Ed: And here we get back to Go Like Hell Machines. Note,
• 19:25
  George: with the noted exception of one Mr. Go Like Hell machine, none of the four of us were people he interacted with frequently on BlueSky. But a bunch of the people that we interact with regularly on Blue sky were people he did. We're not going to name names here. You can go look it up yourself if you really care. But it's not a comment on any of them, including Mr. Go Like Hell Machine. But I mean, this is a guy who's like plausibly a listener of this podcast who just decided to take the train from LA to Chicago and then Chicago to DC and bum rush Secret Service and got shot in the process, which is wild.
• 20:02
  Lowtax: Like, how do you. You took a train. You took Amtrak from Southern California to Washington D.C. like, when did you start planning this? The Coolidge administration.
• 20:12
  Ed: It's a big, beautiful country. You gotta.
• 20:16
  George: Proving premeditation is not going to be an issue for this one.
• 20:19
  Lowtax: What is that, like a three month train ride?
• 20:23
  George: I think from LA to Chicago takes about three days, if I'm remembering correctly.
• 20:28
  Propter: That sounds right. Yeah, it's a haul.
• 20:30
  Ed: Yeah.
• 20:31
  George: It's not as bad as the bus ride, but it's long.
• 20:34
  Propter: I think that the normal men's stance is that train from LA to Chicago, you do you train from Chicago to D.C. at some point, maybe you should consider flying bum rushing the Secret Service. You should not do that. Was. That was really where things went off the rails on this travel itinerary.
• 20:49
  Lowtax: I agree, I agree.
• 20:51
  George: So it's always the last mile problem, baby. Or last 50 yards in this case
• 20:56
  Lowtax: at admirable downhill speed. Don't get me wrong.
• 20:59
  Propter: Yes. He.
• 21:00
  George: I'm telling you, he hit that hole like right, right into the B gap. Like.
• 21:06
  Lowtax: Yeah. Not great lateral hip movement though.
• 21:08
  George: No, no.
• 21:09
  Lowtax: Like, you know, fifth rounder at best.
• 21:11
  Propter: And.
• 21:13
  George: Yeah, yeah. I do think it is really bad, though that people like the listeners of this podcast, not I'm not going to impugn directly the listeners of this podcast, but people pretty close to them are just deciding to pick up guns and go after political figures because what that represents is just an ever wider circle of people that that logic works for. And American history has been rife with people like that for literally all of American history. This is, you know, stochastic. Violence is not new. But the bigger that circle gets, the worse the world is. And I don't necessarily think that this particular event is something that is actively widening that circle, but it's certainly an indication of how wide that circle has gotten. And that is real bad, leaving aside the many humorous aspects of the event itself, which I enjoy laughing about. But you. You do have to come back to the fact that this means that there are a very large number of people in this country, because, I mean, this guy fits the description of a lot of people.
• 22:22
  Propter: Yeah.
• 22:24
  Ed: Yep.
• 22:24
  George: Well, psychologically and yes and no.
• 22:27
  Lowtax: I mean, he's basically Evelyn Normie Lib.
• 22:30
  Ed: I was just about to say, like,
• 22:33
  George: Evelyn Normie Lib does not have the foot speed that this guy has. But other than that's true.
• 22:40
  Lowtax: Her grandson might though.
• 22:43
  Propter: On the one hand, there. There are probably. There are probably 50 people who roughly fit this guy's mold who we could name that we know on Bluesky that we talk to regularly, who. But on the other hand, there are some things about his biography that are kind of unique that. True. That stand out. Like. Like I. In the aggregate.
• 23:04
  George: Yeah.
• 23:04
  Propter: There are probably more guys like this guy and certainly there. There are more people that I could see thinking about things the way that he was thinking about things in. In the document he wrote, which we'll get to in a minute. But number one guy's a Caltech undergrad. What that says is that he is extremely bright. One, because there are not a lot of dummies who go to Caltech, and number two, there are not a lot of people who go to Caltech, period. Number two, he's a Caltech undergrad who, it seemed like he had been somewhat frustrated in his. In his career ambitions, which no shade on that. Lots of people are. But it suggested to me that there was maybe some history of mental health issues that maybe had been resolved better at times than others. This was this, this was something where, like you look at his, at his career arc. He. He came out of Caltech, he was working for a big defense contractor for a year, I think it was. And then, and then he was an indie game dev shortly after that. And then he went back to go get a master's at. I want to say Santa Dominguez, which is a real step down from Caltech in terms of university prestige, despite the many virtues of the, of the CS system that we've. We've sung on a number of occasions.
• 24:31
  Lowtax: And where is Santa Dominguez?
• 24:34
  Propter: Let me, let me make sure I got that one right because I don't want to insult any of the many California universities by accident.
• 24:41
  Ed: Now I have to find some elevator music to put in here.
• 24:48
  George: Jeopardy.
• 24:51
  Ed: We've used that one already. I have to get something really bland and inoffensive.
• 24:56
  Lowtax: He was also from Torrance, California, which all the Californians seem to be saying means something.
• 25:04
  George: I'll take their word on it.
• 25:06
  Ed: How long do we let proctors keep talking before we tell him? He's muted.
• 25:09
  Propter: Cal State University at Dominguez Hills is, Is. Is the place in question. Which again, Cal State universities are great, but they're not Caltech. To put that in. I don't even know if I can put that in east coast terms. Maybe that's
• 25:28
  Ed: better. Not to try. You'll offend someone.
• 25:31
  Propter: Probably me.
• 25:32
  George: I think that's fine.
• 25:34
  Ed: No, no, no. See, probably me.
• 25:36
  Lowtax: You uwf. Ecu.
• 25:39
  Ed: These letters aren't real universities. Low tax.
• 25:42
  George: ECU is probably a pretty good. That, that feels spiritual. Spiritually correct. I mean, halfway between Compton and Carson. That's.
• 25:49
  Propter: Yeah, ECU maybe. I would say that ECU is probably a step up the ladder. Like, like, like we're down in maybe. Like.
• 25:57
  George: Yeah, but you're still in the, you're still in the Cal State system. I mean, ECU is true.
• 26:02
  Propter: Anyway, so he went back, got a master's in computer science and it spent the last six years working as, I think a standardized test tutor teacher. I wasn't familiar with the outfit he was working for, but apparently they're, they're big. This is a guy who, who I suspect is. Is extremely ferociously bright. Certainly has had some academic success and that suggests some, that he really kicked the crap out of some sand out of some standardized tests at some point and had some frustration also apparently I'm going to leave this to the Christianity knowers to dissect. But apparently his background may also be from a branch of the church that I guess is a fairly conservative splinter of the Reformed Christianity movement. Some of the people on bus guy who were talking about this seem to think that, okay, this explains a lot. But I haven't dug in on that enough to say whether or not that tracks for me. But it's it's consistent with some of the themes he hit in his manifesto, slash suicide note, which were explicitly religious. The various, the various parts that go into this. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of people who fit that kind of general description, but I would be surprised if we are going to have another guy exactly like this or another 50 guys exactly like this. There's, there's a lot going on in the pot there. And I think that's true of almost anybody who takes the step to try to, to try to commit public violence, that these tend to be idiosyncratic, even if they're the result of larger stochastic processes.
• 27:51
  Lowtax: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's millions of people who think along very similar lines to what he thinks, but there's that break to go and actually commit an act of violence that I think would eliminate nearly all of those people from ever doing that, at least to date.
• 28:09
  Propter: It has. Right. Like, like, we haven't had this gigantic outpouring of violence, even if there has been a significant uptick that we've talked about on this show. You know, we had the murders of the, the two Jews in D.C. last year. We've had a number of other incidents that are pretty clearly being driven from the left side of the spectrum in a way that we haven't had terrorism in the United States driven from the left in a very long time. That, that almost all terrorism for many, many, many years in the United States has been primarily right wing. So this is, this is new and it's not great.
• 28:48
  Ed: Nope. But I, to some extent, like, this feels inevitable. Right. The pressure cannot keep being ratcheted up and people are, who are prone to cracking are going to crack. I don't know what you do about that when, you know, the political moment is essentially, hey, let's go to talk about shooting people. And like, that's what the people in power have been doing for Trump's entire time in public life. Right. Like, this is what they do. And, you know, at some point it's going to, to get uglier and uglier because what is, what is the incentive for somebody who is predisposed to violence to back down? Right. Like, they've already made the call and like, that's a really scary place to be in societally.
• 29:47
  George: There's also an aspect of this, too, that looks very similar to the entirely legitimate and peaceful counter move from Democrats doing what Republicans have been doing for so long, where if Republicans and Democrats are both gerrymandering aggressively, then the Odds that you get to some sort of negotiated settlement go up. If it's just Republicans doing it, there's no chance you get a negotiated settlement because they just keep doing it. Like there's no, it's a one way ratchet. If it's a two way ratchet, then things start to look a little bit different. I don't, I'm not particularly optimistic we'll get a national settlement on politically motivated gerrymandering anytime soon, but I'm more optimistic about that outcome in a world where it goes both ways than I am where, where it's a one way street. I am more optimistic about the temperature cooling down. If both parties have an element associated with them that the wrong individual from a mental health perspective falling into turns into violence, I'm more optimistic that that leads to less violence in the long run than I am if it's just one side because again, if it's just right wing kooks doing it, then any effort to turn down the temperature or ameliorate that threat becomes a partisan attack. If it's both sides doing it, well, maybe you get, maybe you don't get to a better outcome, maybe you don't turn down the temperature eventually. Maybe it's just continues to spiral, I don't know. But at least it's possible. Whereas it's not if it's one sided.
• 31:22
  Ed: The right wing has been saying that like trans people are gun toting powder kegs for years. Right? Like they already think that it's going both ways.
• 31:30
  George: That isn't the same thing as them actually having to duck when the bullets are flying. No, of course that's the thing.
• 31:34
  Ed: But like they're, they have, they have built an epistemic closure where this is already true and they still act like this. Bullets are a little more real than ideas, I'll grant you that.
• 31:44
  George: I'm not sure that right wing elites are, are fully captured by that epistemic closure. Some of them aren't. The President is right.
• 31:51
  Ed: Like I'm sure not all of them are.
• 31:54
  George: You cannot convince me that Ted Cruz earnestly believes that every trans person is a AK47 toting lunatic who's going to gun down his family.
• 32:03
  Ed: No, but, but let me ask you this. Does Cruz fear a bullet more than Donald Trump?
• 32:08
  George: Not yet, but he probably will in short order. And I'm not saying that's a good thing. I just think that at the end of the day, if Ted Cruz fears a bullet as much as Donald Trump does, then the solution to this problem looks a Lot different than Ted Cruz not fearing a bullet at all.
• 32:21
  Ed: Yeah, you're not wrong.
• 32:23
  Propter: I got to jump in a little bit on this one because the other major incident of left terrorist violence in this country in the past several decades was the baseball shooting of. congressman. Yeah.
• 32:35
  Lowtax: And so like, if there's the one in Alexandria.
• 32:39
  Propter: Yeah. Which, which, which came. Came real close to killing kind of a lot of Republican congressmen, insofar as there is a group of elites in this country who can credibly claim to have been close to left terrorist violence, it actually is the Republican Congress. Like, like those guys were very substantially standing on a baseball field where someone tried to shoot them all and had a security guard not shot him, probably would have successfully shot them all. You know, that was, that was a very near miss. Things could have gone differently that day, and things could have gone differently without things being, in a structural sense, a whole lot different than they actually were. That said, you know, so, so I'm not sure that advancing at least the occasional threat of left winging political violence is necessarily going to have that, that joint effect. I sort of agree with Ed that whether or not it's true, it's already, it's already priced in on the Republican side. Also, one of the other major news stories, at least here in D.C. this last week leading up to this has been that Todd Blanche, who's the acting Attorney General, has been going pretty far out on a whim to defend the pardons and commutations of the January 6th people. So, like, he's doing that in the same conversation at some times, like, like he was on the Sunday shows today talking about that at the same time as he's talking about the WHCD guy. There should be a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. Right. Like,
• 34:19
  George: to be clear, I don't think we're there yet. I'm not saying that this event is sufficient to get us there. What I'm saying is as the circle gets ever wider, the odds of something being done as a general shift in how this all works is higher. Right now, I'd rate those odds as very low. But there is no indication that the circle is not continuing to get wider. None. The exact opposite. And I don't know how wide it has to get. All I know is the wider it gets, the more likely the outcome that ultimately turns down the temperature.
• 34:52
  Propter: Well, and I mean, frankly, it was a, it was a miracle in some ways that we got through, particularly Minneapolis, without, without anybody taking a shot at ICE who were clearly shooting at people Charlotte too.
• 35:03
  George: Yeah, Charlotte, man. Like.
• 35:08
  Lowtax: Yeah. Although we did get, we did get right wing violence in Minneapolis. I mean, they did shoot the Minnesota speaker of the House.
• 35:15
  Propter: Yes. Yeah.
• 35:17
  Lowtax: And we have had incidences of right wing violence towards Democratic politicians. We had the, the guys who tried to, what was it, kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
• 35:27
  Propter: Yep.
• 35:28
  Lowtax: In Michigan.
• 35:29
  Propter: Yeah. Yep.
• 35:30
  Lowtax: So it's not like, it's not like those incidences are not to be found, you know.
• 35:36
  Ed: No, no, no.
• 35:36
  George: Definitely not.
• 35:37
  Propter: To be crystal clear. Like I, I've been talking about the very, very few isolated incidences of left wing and relatively left wing violence in this country over something like the past 50 years. Like you basically have to go back to the Weather Underground and. Yeah. And, and the Black Panthers to, to find a coordinated leftist gun violence. Anyway, you get a little bit of it with black bloc stuff if you go back to, to the World Trade protests. But whereas like right wing violence, Right wing political violence you can find in any year, you can find 30 examples of it. And it's, it feels like it barely even registers most of the time.
• 36:21
  Ed: Right.
• 36:21
  Propter: Despite the fact that it's quite frequently lethal. Like, like people are literally getting murdered over this stuff. You've got, you've got people getting you. I mean Portland had a couple cases a few years back. There are always these clashes between protesters and somehow it's always the right wing guys killing left wing guys. So I do not in any way mean to understate the problem of right wing political violence in this frame. It is to my mind an emergent thing that we now have more left wing political violence than we used to. And what do we do with that? What does that mean? How do we tamp that down on our side and how do we predict other people's actions based on, based on this rising trend? That's all.
• 37:10
  Lowtax: Although what makes this guy weird, as I think we've all probably noted, is that the people he was following on Blue Sky, a lot of these people who were all mutuals with like these are people who get yelled at because they're very much opposed to political violence.
• 37:27
  Propter: Yeah.
• 37:28
  Lowtax: You know, Hell Machine is very much opposed to political violence. Micah is very much opposed. And so I think the idea that this guy could have been in tune with these folks and then done this is, is just very strange.
• 37:47
  Propter: Yeah, no, to me he was, he was, he was very much in the do not firebomb a Walmart cluster as opposed to the you should fire Walmart
• 37:55
  George: cluster, which to be clear, we are when it comes to firebomb in the Walmart. We are all very much opposed to firebomb in the Walmart. On this podcast, yes, Ed is doing some sums, but I have to think about it.
• 38:13
  Ed: But I'll get back to you.
• 38:14
  Lowtax: Please don't firebomb the Walmart. They're my only competition versus Publix keeping prices down here.
• 38:21
  George: Please don't firebomb the Walmart. Costco was out of 0% Greek yogurt today. So I had to go to Walmart and get some of that and some Sasangoya and some non alcoholic Budweiser.
• 38:34
  Ed: That's a very detailed list.
• 38:37
  George: It was three things, I mean. Oh, and two dog toys.
• 38:39
  Propter: Is the non alcoholic blood any good?
• 38:41
  George: It's great. It's the best nonalcoholic beer by far in my opinion. Yeah, because you can't tell it's non alcoholic because it's like mimicking a beer that doesn't taste like that much to begin with. So. And it also does all the really good like refreshing, like satiation stuff for me in a way that other non alcoholic beers do not. I don't know if it's the carbonation level that they've tweaked higher or what. It's not very bitter. I could use a little more bitterness in it, but yeah, actually it's the best one that I can get easily. In the US the best non alcoholic beer I've had is the Cerro Punto Cero Estrella Galicia. That there's a Spanish lager called Estrella Galicia. That stuff and their zero percent is phenomenal. It is so good. Everything else is beneath that and then bud and then everything else beneath that.
• 39:33
  Propter: Cool.
• 39:34
  George: Yeah. So if you, if I would have
• 39:38
  Lowtax: figured, you know, the Macro Brew Pilsner lager site brands would be the ones who do best at it.
• 39:47
  George: Yeah, I definitely put it in the ice punch category. So like if you can get a line on Some Estrella Galicia 0.0 in the US I drank it in Puerto Rico this past week was first time I'd seen it, which is the US still technically mainland US Estrella Galicia 0.0. If you, if you can find that, you let me know. There'll be some reward in it for you of some kind.
• 40:12
  Propter: So I want to talk about this guy's, this guy's manifesto, a little bit about Cole Allen's manifesto.
• 40:16
  George: Should we do that?
• 40:17
  Propter: Is that a bad idea?
• 40:18
  George: No, we can do it.
• 40:20
  Ed: I'm just really thrown. I'm just really thrown.
• 40:23
  George: Named sound.
• 40:26
  Ed: I. I'm just really thrown that like he only has two names like, are we allowed to have attempted assassinations from people who are not referred to by a first, middle, last?
• 40:36
  George: I mean, I've been thinking about that
• 40:38
  Ed: for, like, the last two minutes. I was ignoring you the entire time because I don't drink beer. And, like, that bothers me. I guess there's John Hinckley. But, like, this doesn't feel. This doesn't feel American.
• 40:51
  Propter: It does. It does seem like Cole Allen's a little too simple, right? Like, you gotta have. Gotta have some three syllable middle name.
• 40:58
  Ed: Is this, is this the first two first names? Presidential assassination.
• 41:01
  Propter: Oh, my God, are we there? Someday, someday there's going to be a presidential assassin named Jaden. I'm not ready for that.
• 41:14
  George: Hopefully we'll be gone by then and it won't be ours to think about.
• 41:18
  Ed: Yeah, he'll be in his 70s.
• 41:22
  George: Can you imagine what a Zoomer in their 70s is going to be like?
• 41:27
  Ed: Oh, God, I try not to, to be honest. We're gonna be bad enough.
• 41:33
  George: Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I don't think millennials will be that bad in their 70s. We'll be like, you know, modal, 70s person. It won't be. It won't be that bad.
• 41:47
  Ed: I hope so.
• 41:49
  George: I. I really. We're like, we're like Greatest generation light.
• 41:56
  Propter: Are we now pretty, Pretty good generation.
• 42:00
  Ed: The war against the burrito Taxi.
• 42:07
  George: We did not suffer the same level of economic carnage from the Great Depression or human carnage from World War II. But I do think that the Iraq War and the Great or Great Recession, the global financial crisis, shaped millennials in a way that ultimately will make us much more normal than our kids or the kids of the baby boomers, for instance. Or the baby boomers were really right. If you. I mean, and again, I'm not saying that the millennial greatest Generation comparison works in the sense of, like, it was the same thing. It wasn't. I'm not saying that. But if your formative years, which, you know, I was in college 2008-2012.
• 42:51
  Ed: Right.
• 42:52
  George: Like, if your formative years are. The world is ending, you're going to be a lot less risk seeking. You're going to be a lot more. Not socially conservative necessarily, but small C. Conservative in how you sort of view a lot of things. And I think, like the millennial Gen Z thing, I think it really does work that way. Right.
• 43:16
  Propter: Yeah.
• 43:17
  George: Just like it did with boomers and the Greatest Generation.
• 43:19
  Propter: No, I mean, I mean, I agree. And I think that sort of speaks to one of the things I think of as a transitional line between millennials and Zoomers is the rise of the gambler's economy as zoomers came of age. And that's very much aligned with that, that there's a different risk tolerance that zoomers, I think, are like, you're saying they're generally more willing to, to take significant, I would say, sometimes foolish risks in pursuit of great rewards. And that sounds great if you're a sports gambling company or you're. Or you're a crypto brokerage.
• 43:59
  Ed: Yeah.
• 43:59
  George: Or. Or an equity market brokerage. Or an equity market.
• 44:02
  Propter: Yeah.
• 44:03
  Ed: Yeah.
• 44:03
  George: Like Robinhood, I think, is more dependent on zoomers than millennials. There are lots of millennials who are super risk taking, don't. Don't get me wrong. But I think if you look at the modal median average, however you want to parse it, you know, the 80th percentile, whatever. The 80th percentile. Zoomer has a much higher risk tolerant than the 80th percentile millennial. Like, there's no doubt in my mind about that. And I mean, there's downsides to this too. You know, like my grandparents on my mom's side, like, they scrimped and saved their whole life. They, they, you know, my, my grandmother especially was big time a child with the depression. My grandfather woke up. He couldn't shower in certain showers throughout his adult life because it reminded him of being in the shower when his ship. He was in the merchant marine when his ship was hit by a kamikaze pilot. And he had PTSD his whole life because of that. It created a degree of conservatism in them. And again, not political conservatism, but just caution that I think hurt them in the long run. Right. Like they over saved and underspent in their retirement and they could have had a much more comfortable life. And, you know, there were downstream effects of that that weren't entirely bad. But. Yeah, and I think it'll probably be true for millennials too, where there'll certainly be people who wish they had put down less and got into the housing market earlier or, you know, bought a few calls in Robinhood or whatever the thing is, right. Or started that company or whatever that a Zoomer will just do. But, you know, I do think, though, that'll be the defining difference between those two cohorts.
• 45:57
  Ed: I hear what you're saying, but Gamestop was so many millennial idiots.
• 46:05
  Lowtax: Yeah, that's true.
• 46:06
  George: I mean, it was a lot of idiots. It was people in their 50s too, and seven even older than that. I mean, it was, you Know, my
• 46:14
  Lowtax: grandparents were a lot like George's, and that on my dad's side and that they, like, way over saved. This was not intentional on my grandmother's part. She just didn't realize they had as much money as they did. And then she found out that they had money and looked at my grandfather and went, you mother.
• 46:43
  Propter: All right, so back to this guy's manifesto.
• 46:46
  Ed: Which among us decide ever.
• 46:49
  Propter: I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. It's. It's short, but I'm not gonna read it on air. But. But I. I think it's worth the time to seek out, actually, because it's. It's a good read. It's well written. I think it is more of a suicide note than a manifesto. And I'm gonna make the argument why here. It starts with a long series of apologies to people in his life, to people he's hurt, to the world, to people who have been damaged by the United States, and segues into an explanation of why he feels he has to do what he's about to do. Again, we, from the perspective of the day after, know that this was not successful and really was never going to be successful. But let's assume that Mr. Allen went into this with the thought that. That he had a chance of accomplishing his goals. Certainly, the note seems to think he had a chance of accomplishing his goals. He thinks that what Trump is doing in his name, he can no longer tolerate. This is an explicitly political argument, and it's one. It's an explicitly moral argument that I think is fairly resonant, that there is this idea that in a democracy, even if you voted the other way, even if you fought against it, these are things that are still being done in some sense, in your name. I mean, hell, even. Even in other forms of government, you're a member of the team. The team is doing something, therefore, that reflects on you. And therefore you have some responsibility to try to do what you can to improve it, to ameliorate the harms, to effectuate the good, and to stop the evil. That's the part that resonated for me. I thought that the apologies were very much of a piece, with this being kind of an attempted suicide by cop, but in. In a way that was cloaked in at least ideas that suggested a nobility, that this was. This was kind of an acceptable suicide, a noble death. He also talks about his rules of engagement, who he's trying to kill, who he's not trying to kill, and he's very specific about who he's trying to kill, who he's not trying to kill and how he's going to effectuate that. The one other passage that I will read here was at the end of this, there's a paragraph that really stuck out to me. This is something he wrote right before he made his run. Oh, and if anyone is curious how doing something like this feels, it's awful. I want to throw up. I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will. For all the people whose trust this betrays. I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done. Can't really recommend it. Stay in school, kids. I thought that was affecting, that this is. This is a guy who a. That graph reinforces my sense that this is a guy who was trying to get killed by the cops, but also he's not having a good time doing it. This is not, you know, chrome spray paint on your face and riding eternal. This is not something that feels like a blaze of glory. This is something that is making him miserable even as he feels he's fully committed to it. That's the part that stuck with me. And I would say that I hope that's the part that sticks with you if you're similarly situated.
• 50:37
  George: It's depressing.
• 50:40
  Lowtax: Yeah.
• 50:43
  George: Especially because this is such a doomed enterprise.
• 50:49
  Lowtax: Yeah. You wrote this whole manifesto and then you did that.
• 50:52
  Propter: Yeah, they got.
• 50:54
  Ed: They've. They've got maps for, like, fire evac.
• 50:59
  George: Let's not. Let's not.
• 51:01
  Ed: In.
• 51:01
  George: In the group chat this afternoon, I. Proctor pointed to a post I had made on Blue sky and said, hey, let's not. Let's not come up with better ideas for how to do this next time in public. And I said, yeah, that. That's true, but, you know, to be fair, I was just saying it was bad. I wasn't giving ideas for anything more specific. Ed is.
• 51:19
  Ed: Yeah, but I'm. I'm doing the edit here, so I'm just going to put. I'm just gonna put the peanuts. Wah, wah, over that and no one's going to know what I said.
• 51:27
  George: That's okay.
• 51:29
  Lowtax: Well, yeah, yeah, the manifesto is kind of like, you know, the opening of the Leroy Jenkins video, when the guys are, like, nerding out about the statistics, like, oh, we have a 33.3.
• 51:42
  George: Repeating, of course. Repeating, of course.
• 51:47
  Ed: Somehow I've never seen that.
• 51:49
  George: Oh, you gotta watch. It's just. It's the most classic. It's wonderful.
• 51:52
  Propter: It's worth a watch.
• 51:54
  Ed: I just, like, realized that because, like, it's just permeated Everything. And then I've just don't know how I never saw it. Weird.
• 52:03
  George: Now we have to use it as outro music Fair.
• 52:07
  Lowtax: It was staged, I think.
• 52:10
  George: Doesn't matter.
• 52:12
  Ed: Ah, so now, now Lotex is a Leroy Jenkins conspiracy theorist. Right, Got it.
• 52:18
  Propter: That is another thing that this event has surfaced, which is that there are a lot more people who believe that the Butler assassination attempt was staged than I thought there were.
• 52:29
  George: Oh yeah.
• 52:32
  Ed: And a lot of them are Republican.
• 52:35
  George: Sorry. To be clear, I am saying. Oh, I am saying oh yeah to Proctor's observation, not oh yeah, it was staged, just.
• 52:41
  Ed: But you would say that.
• 52:45
  Propter: Yeah.
• 52:45
  George: Look, not if I'm one of the people that Proctor's talking about. There they are letting that flag fly, baby.
• 52:50
  Propter: Look, Donald. Donald Trump lies all the time. You can't trust anything he says. You can't trust anything that people around him say. But like a dude died like they were very definitely shooting live bullets in the direction of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is not signing. Right?
• 53:07
  Lowtax: No. And you would like the idea that the Butler shooting could be a false flag operation is like. No, no rifleman on earth would you trust with that shot.
• 53:22
  Ed: Right.
• 53:23
  Lowtax: Not one. I mean, the only reason Donald Trump survived that was because he moved his head to the side at just the right moment.
• 53:32
  George: I will say the conspiracy theories on this are that he was never actually fired at in terms of in the crosshairs and that they faked the bullet impact on or bullet grazing and feasibility of that aside, either way, we have do agree with Proper's point that he would not have signed up for this.
• 53:51
  Lowtax: Yeah, but we have images of the bullet going by his head.
• 53:56
  George: Yeah. Conspiracy theorists are famously not gonna just accept that.
• 54:01
  Lowtax: Sure, I know.
• 54:02
  Ed: I mean, some of them think the earth is flat still. Yeah, more of them than it perhaps any other time in human history.
• 54:12
  Propter: Well, there's more of us now.
• 54:14
  Ed: That's true.
• 54:15
  Propter: But we do know more about the Earth now, so.
• 54:17
  Ed: Yeah, we also have planes. Yeah, you can kind of see that curvature going on. Weird.
• 54:23
  Propter: Yeah.
• 54:24
  Ed: I blame YouTube and the schools.
• 54:25
  Propter: It's because of that thick glass they use on the windows.
• 54:28
  Ed: Ah, ah. Ah. Yes.
• 54:34
  Lowtax: I'm just saying I can't see California from here, but I can see the moon, so it must be closer.
• 54:43
  Propter: I wonder why they didn't land on the moon this time.
• 54:45
  George: Huh?
• 54:46
  Propter: Huh.
• 54:49
  Lowtax: Really makes you think there's not enough
• 54:52
  Ed: room in like, you know how they're. They're doing all the shows in that like Unreal engine volume now. Just not enough room. Yeah, you had to Put the whole spaceship in there. Where you going to put the moon?
• 55:04
  Propter: Anyway, Yeah, I.
• 55:07
  Ed: This is a trash fire, and I do not apologize for it.
• 55:10
  Propter: So, like, we're having fun, though.
• 55:11
  Ed: That's what, that's what happens.
• 55:13
  Propter: There are a lot of people and like. Like, you can see this already forming in real time that there are a lot of people who think that this attack is a false flag or, or it's something other than what it superficially appears to be. I think they're incorrect, but this is in the bloodstream and it's clearly taking hold. So I think also, like, if you weren't, you know, glued to the White House Correspondent's Dinner because you're a. You're an addict to a political microblogging website, then my guess is that the overwhelming majority of Americans, this is something that they woke up to the next day and were kind of like, huh, shucks.
• 56:00
  George: Again, it won't be the day today, but someday it will be. Until then, time for some coffee.
• 56:07
  Propter: Yeah. Damn shame. You know, I said this on Blue sky, but I think it's going to be shocking when Trump finally exits, how quickly he is forgotten, how quickly he just goes down the memory hole and he's no longer a force, that there's not this. This ghostly legacy that's gonna persist around him.
• 56:37
  Lowtax: Oh, it's gonna be five minutes after the next president is sworn in. That'll be the end of.
• 56:47
  Propter: Might be before that.
• 56:48
  George: Honestly, it might be five minutes after the first polls close on in November of 2028.
• 56:54
  Lowtax: Yeah, maybe.
• 56:56
  Propter: I mean, I mean, if he makes it. If he makes it that far, like, we're barely going to be talking about him last. That last summer. Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know. You think, you think Donald Trump is immortal.
• 57:07
  Ed: Look, he hasn't proved him wrong yet.
• 57:09
  Propter: Yeah, I mean, like, at some point, I'm hoping that I can make a better counter argument.
• 57:20
  George: Yeah, I fully agree with that. What's the waving the bloody shirt of the post Trump era going to be called? Because there's a lot of stuff to hang on this political movement.
• 57:33
  Propter: Yeah.
• 57:34
  George: And it's gonna continue for at least a decade after Donald Trump. Whether it'll be politically, you know, salient or not is an open question probably for quite a while after, I would imagine. But what are people gonna call that? As in a derisive sense? For those that aren't familiar, waving the bloody shirt is what the Republicans did during Reconstruction and maybe a little bit after that, it was basically saying those other guys are the reasons that all the union boys got killed on battlefield, so they're bad. And this was called waving the bloody shirt. The politics of reconstruction. The Democrats didn't like being associated with the regime that they had been associated with. So what's that going to be?
• 58:19
  Propter: I'm not wild about this, but I think it's going to be shaped like the Epstein class stuff, that it's going to be shaped as that populist campaign against corruption and elites and maybe, maybe with a little bit of anti Semitic crossover. We'll see how that goes.
• 58:38
  George: Oh, yeah, that's a good bet. Yeah.
• 58:41
  Lowtax: Yeah, I'd say so.
• 58:43
  George: Yeah. Impugning Donald Trump's hallowed memory is just shiftless, rootless, cosmopolitan, and you know what that means. Yeah, ruleless, cosmopolitan thing.
• 58:59
  Propter: But frankly, a lot depends on how it happens. A lot depends on how we get from here to there so that we can be talking about a post Trump world. I think it matters a lot if he dies in office. I think it matters a lot, you know, who gets sent up there as a successor candidate and how the various other organs of both the right and the left react to that. We're already seeing some schism lines on the right that are pretty well defined along this. Along this populist line like you're seeing. You know, there's been a fair amount of, and I don't know if we've talked about it that much on this podcast, but there's been a fair amount of being spilled on this, on this, on this cleavage now between, like the Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson side of things that are going off in this more populous direction that is already turning against Trump in a lot of ways. And at least in the Republican Party, the populists map to the anti Semitic side, whereas the creepily philo Semitic side of the right is more associated with the legacy of kind of like Charlie Kirk's movement.
• 1:00:15
  George: So philo Semitic that you turn into a bit of an anti Semite, like that whole deal.
• 1:00:19
  Propter: Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, as a Jew, I'm not like, super excited about any of this. Like, you're kind of seeing those lines of battle drawn. And I think that those cleavages are going to continue to deepen over the next couple of years. You're probably going to. It's probably too late for that to play out in primaries for this electoral season, but I would expect to see some of it start to pick up as we go through specials over the next two years and for it to kind of reach a fever pitch in 2028. I think it's going to be really nasty for the Republicans. I'm excited about it being really nasty for the Republicans. I just. It would be nice if there was a faction that I was excited about the possibility of them winning. And I think they're both awful. So the only.
• 1:01:07
  Lowtax: The only thing is that the. The populist, anti semitic side, I'm not sure they really have a dude to run.
• 1:01:15
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:01:16
  Lowtax: Who can be seriously competitive. Yeah, I know, but nobody's voting for mtg. Like, let's be real. It would be very funny. But they're not going to do it.
• 1:01:25
  Propter: Yeah. I mean, like, maybe it's Tucker. You know, he's not.
• 1:01:31
  Lowtax: Nah. Tucker's smart enough to wait for 32 or 36.
• 1:01:35
  Propter: I.
• 1:01:36
  Ed: It's not even that. I'm. I'm gonna put my marker down here. That dude has some of the worst skeletons in his closet that have not been revealed that are on the playing field.
• 1:01:47
  George: Like, care to speculate?
• 1:01:53
  Ed: Not quite at this time. Because, you know, libel is a thing. Yeah, but no, like, people know. People know. Like, they have to. This guy is a snake.
• 1:02:05
  Propter: All right. Ed's marker is that there is bad shit that is not in the public sphere fully about Tucker Carlson. Is that fair?
• 1:02:11
  Ed: I'm going with top decile. Rancid. Wow.
• 1:02:18
  George: Wow.
• 1:02:19
  Lowtax: That is a claim.
• 1:02:21
  George: I guess we're not talking about a hand under a bathroom stall in Minneapolis.
• 1:02:26
  Ed: No, no.
• 1:02:28
  George: Which again, to be clear, is not actually rancid. That's the bit there.
• 1:02:33
  Propter: Yeah. Minneapolis. It might be the sexiest of the major hub airports.
• 1:02:40
  George: The what?
• 1:02:41
  Ed: No, no, it is pretty nice airport, but I wouldn't go that far. That's. That's kind of imputing some characteristics that, frankly, make me feel a little uncomfortable.
• 1:02:49
  Lowtax: Well, I mean, it's.
• 1:02:51
  George: Come on.
• 1:02:52
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:02:53
  George: Is much sexier than Minneapolis. Minneapolis seems like a great place. I haven't spent much time there, but it seems like a great place. I'm not impugning Minneapolis. Atlanta is sexier than Minneapolis.
• 1:03:02
  Ed: Atlanta is the Houston highway system of airports. You go there and you merge across 30,000 lanes to get anywhere.
• 1:03:12
  George: Hold on, hold on. Sorry.
• 1:03:13
  Propter: We're talking about the airports. We're not talking about the cities.
• 1:03:15
  Ed: No, I know. I specifically said the airport. Yeah. No, it's the worst place.
• 1:03:20
  George: I got a little confused there, but I'm still going with Atlanta being sexier than Minneapolis.
• 1:03:25
  Lowtax: I think Ed. Ed makes a fair point. If the train has broken down, which admittedly does happen with some regularity.
• 1:03:33
  George: Yeah, that's fair.
• 1:03:36
  Ed: I used to go every year Broken at least two out of, like, seven times.
• 1:03:41
  Lowtax: Minneapolis, not a terribly sexy airport in my experience.
• 1:03:46
  Ed: Very utilitarian. It has a Fox News store.
• 1:03:49
  Propter: Nobody. Nobody's speaking up. Defend Houston here. Or dfw, rather. I just want to say.
• 1:03:55
  George: Oh, God, no.
• 1:03:55
  Lowtax: Oh, God, no.
• 1:03:56
  Ed: God.
• 1:03:56
  George: DFW is the stuff of nightmares.
• 1:04:00
  Ed: DFW would be rapidly improved by, like, an earthquake.
• 1:04:06
  George: Oh, dfw. Disgusting. I mean, it's not ord, which.
• 1:04:13
  Ed: Oh, buddy.
• 1:04:15
  George: If you tried to turn a favela into a major hub. We don't love that. Ctac. Ctac, I think, has a shot at it, but it's also just so, like, complicated and convoluted that it's not really sexy. But I guess you could say that it's like, you know, there's some mysterious allure there. Like. Like, when do you have to take a train? And, like, how far away is Terminal 3? But, you know, it doesn't really do it for me. I think when we haven't talked about. That's probably worth discussing. Is Detroit. Philadelphia is also an American hub. I'm not big on the Philadelphia airport other than meeting Sarah McBride there, which was a wonderful experience. So that gets some sexy points. I'm trying to think, who else are we missing here?
• 1:04:58
  Ed: There is one. Really?
• 1:04:59
  George: Denver. Denver. Denver's got the Denver.
• 1:05:01
  Propter: It might be Denver. Yeah.
• 1:05:03
  Ed: Yeah. But have you ever, like, had to go. Have you ever had to board, like, in Denver? Yeah.
• 1:05:11
  Lowtax: Yes.
• 1:05:11
  George: Yeah. It was my. My wife's home airport.
• 1:05:14
  Ed: I'm. I'm so sorry. Because for my sins, I had to go out there for work three times in the last couple years. And, like. No, I mean, I guess if. If you're defining it as nice to look at.
• 1:05:26
  Propter: Sure.
• 1:05:27
  Ed: But then there's the whole experience of interacting with it that I think you kind of have to take into account.
• 1:05:32
  George: It is in the middle of nowhere.
• 1:05:34
  Lowtax: Yeah. Like, the fact that they put it in Kansas.
• 1:05:39
  Ed: One thing I am proud of is that no one mentioned Phoenix. Yeah.
• 1:05:44
  George: Phoenix's airport is. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's fine. It. It's. It's mids.
• 1:05:51
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:05:51
  George: It's just.
• 1:05:53
  Propter: I don't think it gets over. I don't think it gets over the Minneapolis line.
• 1:05:58
  Ed: What?
• 1:05:58
  George: Phoenix?
• 1:05:59
  Propter: Yeah. No, don't.
• 1:06:00
  George: Minneapolis more sexy than Phoenix? For sure.
• 1:06:02
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:06:03
  George: Yeah. Detroit is one we haven't talked about. Detroit is a Delta hub. Yep.
• 1:06:07
  Propter: We're not talking about the international hubs. I think that's a different. I think that's a different weight class.
• 1:06:12
  Ed: Send in your messages. We will. Power rank. The sexiness of the various American airport hubs.
• 1:06:18
  George: So there is also another major hub that we have not mentioned.
• 1:06:24
  Lowtax: Okay.
• 1:06:26
  George: Like one of the busiest airports in the world by plane movements.
• 1:06:29
  Ed: I know what you're going to say, and then I'm. I'm waiting for you to say it before you are excommunicated.
• 1:06:34
  George: It's about 15 minutes from my house.
• 1:06:37
  Ed: Oh, I wasn't even thinking of that one.
• 1:06:39
  Propter: Good to throw it up for the Queen City.
• 1:06:42
  Ed: All right.
• 1:06:43
  George: I mean, we do have a very sexy statue of Queen Charlotte.
• 1:06:46
  Ed: Yeah, I was really worried you were going to say o'.
• 1:06:49
  George: Hare. No, I. I just talked. I talked smack about already earlier. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:54
  Lowtax: You said o' Hara was favela.
• 1:06:57
  Ed: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:59
  George: So, yeah. I mean, Charlotte is. Is the thing that's not sexy about Charlotte is it's the world's largest airport without a people mover. So, like, you. Every gate, you have to walk to any other gate. There is no. There's some, you know, moving walkways and such, and you go through a very nice atrium that has some lovely rocking chairs. And it's not badly laid out. Such as it. Such as is possible in that scenario. But I mean, you. If you're coming into a. And you got a connecting flight over an E, you're in deep trouble. That's. That's a solid mile on foot.
• 1:07:32
  Propter: So.
• 1:07:33
  George: So, yeah, sweaty.
• 1:07:34
  Propter: But I'm thinking that's sweaty, not sexy. As opposed to sweaty. Sexy.
• 1:07:41
  George: Usually not. Yeah, usually the not sexy variety.
• 1:07:44
  Lowtax: But there is.
• 1:07:45
  George: So, you know, there is a major. Yeah.
• 1:07:50
  Lowtax: There is a hub that is very sexy in my state, and that is mia. And you know why it's sexy? Because it has a smoking lounge after security.
• 1:08:06
  Ed: Oh, no.
• 1:08:07
  George: You can also get a pretty good cube Cuban sandwich in Mia, which points for.
• 1:08:13
  Lowtax: I'm sure that's true. But the smoking lounge is in TGI Fridays, so I don't care. Oh, Lord, give me that Jack Daniels steak and a cigarette. I'm good.
• 1:08:29
  Ed: I did.
• 1:08:29
  George: I did have to run Fridays.
• 1:08:32
  Ed: I mean, no quote, steak unquote. I did have to run from Terminal 5 to Terminal 1 at Ord once because the people, like, all of the walkways were out. That was not a good day. An airport that doesn't have one and is that big. How did. Did they just forget? Did they, like, wake up one morning, go, ah, shit?
• 1:08:55
  George: There's just. Because the layout is, like, all spokes into one spot. And so it just doesn't. It wouldn't actually speed things up much to have people move and then to do it, you would just be traveling like where the building already is. So.
• 1:09:13
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:09:13
  George: Where are you going to put it?
• 1:09:14
  Ed: Oh, that is a really weird shape. I don't like that. Don't like it.
• 1:09:20
  George: CLT is one of it. It is, it has the highest ratio of experience as a final destination or, or origin point to connection of in the world. I mean, there's just, there's no, it is, is the, it is sick to fly in and out of and horrible to connect through. So got that going for me.
• 1:09:46
  Ed: How did we start talking about this?
• 1:09:48
  Propter: Larry Craig.
• 1:09:50
  Ed: Ah, yes, Larry Craig.
• 1:09:54
  Lowtax: Yes, Larry Craig. For the second time, somehow leading proctor to comment on the sexiness of the Minneapolis airport.
• 1:10:05
  George: For feedback, you can email lotax, speedrunenjoyerormalmen Biz.
• 1:10:14
  Lowtax: And again I will, and again, I will get to those just as quickly as I get to your complaints. As Blue sky CEO, Just remember, podcast,
• 1:10:28
  Ed: we offer a liberal refund policy.
• 1:10:32
  Propter: Do you guys, you guys see that? We just, we just broke the two hour marathon record. That's the other, that's the other big news this weekend.
• 1:10:38
  Ed: Pretty exciting. Like two separate people, right?
• 1:10:39
  Propter: Two separate people, one of whom was running his first ever marathon.
• 1:10:43
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:10:43
  George: And the third guy broke the world record in the same race. So you had three world record breakers, two of them under two hours. And the, the, and the guy that won, he didn't just break it, he broke it by like 30 seconds. Yeah, he was like 159. 30.
• 1:10:56
  Propter: Crazy.
• 1:10:56
  George: What? I, I, I just, you can't even get a normal treadmill to run 13 miles an hour. And that's what he did for over, well, slightly under two hours.
• 1:11:11
  Ed: What?
• 1:11:12
  George: Unreal.
• 1:11:15
  Propter: We're under a five minute mile and he's doing 26 of them.
• 1:11:18
  George: Yeah, I like, like on my, on my treadmill, it goes to 12 and a half and I can, I can run that pace for I don't know, 30 seconds, maybe a minute. Like I, and I do that fairly regularly, going up to 13 and then sustaining that for anything more than 30 seconds. 45 seconds, maybe a minute or, I don't know, two. And this dude's doing that for almost, not quite, but almost two hours.
• 1:11:45
  Propter: Humans are cool, man.
• 1:11:48
  Ed: I don't know.
• 1:11:49
  Lowtax: That doesn't sound cool to me. My knee hurts. Just hearing that sounds like a lot of work.
• 1:11:55
  Propter: That's about, it's about two hours of work.
• 1:11:56
  Ed: Yeah, that's a lot of work.
• 1:12:19
  Propter: We haven't talked about Iran. It's still there.
• 1:12:22
  Ed: Yep. This concludes our Iraq. This includes our Iran update.
• 1:12:28
  Lowtax: We're at, we're at an hour and 17. So I mean, yeah, we don't really need another topic.
• 1:12:33
  George: We don't need it. But I mean the, the Pakistan negotiations are entirely off the table. Like, like they, they're, they're not doing anything with that anymore.
• 1:12:45
  Lowtax: They can call us on the phone.
• 1:12:47
  Propter: Iran is now saying that they won't negotiate over nuclear materials. So that seems bad.
• 1:12:52
  George: Yep. The blockade, it's not just a blockade of hormones, it's a double blockade of hormones. That's been true for a while. But like we're really not messing around with that at this point. We've, I mean, there's a number of tankers that have been seized. Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's interesting, like typically a lot of people were talking about the fact that physical markets are really the pain point and futures are kind of just pure speculation. But physical markets are speculating a lot too right now. Because if you want to get a barrel of crude, if everyone who needed crude to keep operating bought crude right now in physical markets like, like bought dated Brent, bought wti, delivered in Houston, whatever. Like the physical market would be at 175, probably certainly north of 150. Right. Like the shortages are that big, but people just aren't buying it. And there's a few different explanations for that, but they all boil down to the idea that like, well, this, this will be over soon and then we'll be able to get our hands on the crude we need. And that's not like futures traders punting around dollars and you know, just pure speculation or whatever. That's people who are actually physical plant who are behaving that way. They're saying we're going to run down inventory or maybe we'll go 100% offline if we have to, which is extremely expensive for a refinery to do. That's like the worst case scenario. Instead of cutting runs to 75% utilization or 50% utilization, we'll cut to zero if we run out of inventory or can't buy our next cargo. And so there's a whole expectations game in that physical market, which is really unusual. Usually the physical market is the exact opposite of that. People are just like, this is what I need on this date and moving from there. Whereas futures always have a speculative, there's always some speculation in there. And so that's really interesting. And if we do hit sort of the point where people start buying crude at the marginal barrel and you know, buying marginal barrels up to the point where they're actually fulfilling what they need to keep operating then? Yeah, I mean we'll very quickly add 20, $50 to crude from where it is now. But maybe they don't. Maybe they just say ah, whatever, we'll just shut down. Like product prices aren't high enough so we'll just shut down. I don't know.
• 1:15:26
  Propter: I'm thinking out loud through this. So correct me if I'm saying something stupid, which I probably am, but if oil prices get that high and the strait is still shut, aren't you kind of just kicking the can down the road a little bit on when you have to shut down? Or is there, is there enough steady state oil flow that these guys can stay operating indefinitely? Like, like is this some plants making the affirmative decision that they're going to be one of the ones who are squeezed out by price?
• 1:15:57
  George: Yeah. So there's two ways to think about this. So the first way to think about this is how are individual refiners behaving? Right? Like are they basically saying, well, we need to have 30 days of inventory on hand and we'll burn through until we'll just run at our normal runs or at a modestly reduced run rate until we're out and we'll just run inventory from 30 days down to one or whatever or down to zero. Like whatever. That's one sort of way to do it. Another way to do it is to say, well, we'll just do our best to get our hands on cargoes when we can and you know, not really worry about it and what will happen will happen. And then another way to do it is to say, okay, price for our products is here and our marginal barrel is here. So you know, we'll just wait until price goes up and then we'll start buying spot barrels right wherever we can get them. When price for products go up, I guess the way to think about it that's like the mirror image of that is to say you can ration in two different ways. You can ration in volume or you can ration in price rationing in price. If you did it that way, and everyone was just saying, okay, we need to keep our normal inventory so we'll buy what we have to buy and that takes crude to 175 and that takes product. Therefore products are whatever. Then as prices go up for products, demand drops, quantity demanded drops.
• 1:17:26
  Ed: Right.
• 1:17:27
  George: Because demand curves slope down. And so at that point you're in the market is allocating less product to people who can pay less. Instead. The other way you can flip it is saying, well Price isn't really sending a signal right now. And whichever refiner happens to run out of money or run out of input first, their customers therefore are being rationed regardless of the price they can pay. Right. Because some of these are captive inside specific geographies. So either way you are seeing rationing. It's just how is that being expressed? In a properly functioning, functioning market, it should entirely be through price mechanism. But right now it's not. In other words, you're seeing some rationing in quantity as well as in price.
• 1:18:15
  Ed: Right.
• 1:18:15
  Propter: But you've got, you've got a discontinuity for is. Right. Like if you have to shut down fully, that's a discontinuous event.
• 1:18:23
  George: Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, so it kind of gets complicated. But I think on the one hand, because shutting down entirely is a very long term process to get restarting. I think the best analogy I've heard for this is that it's a giant chemistry set.
• 1:18:37
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:18:38
  George: And you can reduce flow rates, but stopping them means you have to start the chemical reactions from zero. And that's really, really complic. So it's a long process, it's a dicey process. These things aren't designed to be shut down fully that often and it's complicated to do it. And then also just the way it works, if you've got a bunch of a big fixed asset, if that revenue rate goes to zero, then the costs get really high really quickly because you still have to service all the debt, you still have to pay all the taxes on the land, you still have to, you know, amortize everything. It's, it's, it's a mess. So that's like the one side of it. The other side of it is that if refined product prices aren't high enough to justify paying for that, like if the crack spread, in other words, is, is negative. Crack spread is the difference between the products and the crude. If the cracks. Yes, Ed, it's called a crack spread because you are on, you are quite literally cracking molecules. That's.
• 1:19:41
  Ed: I understand, I understand the meaning. Just if you said that very calmly.
• 1:19:47
  George: So if the crack spread isn't high enough, then maybe shutting down doesn't actually cost you that much after all.
• 1:19:53
  Ed: Right.
• 1:19:54
  George: Relative to negative margins on what you're selling.
• 1:19:56
  Propter: Right.
• 1:19:57
  George: There's just a bunch of reasons to believe that right now prices are not reflecting reality because of expectations. There are a lot of people who are Wiley Coyote over the cliff and the legs are still turning. And it's not just futures markets. It's a ton of market participants in a bunch of different places around the world all doing it at the same time.
• 1:20:17
  Propter: So like, I guess, I guess kind of what I'm wondering here is if some of these guys, if their model is okay, if, if oil goes to 180 and we can buy it one and we can buy at 180 in the steady state, you know, we would do that as long as that's not profitable for us to run the refinery. But it's better than shutting down as long as it's going to come back down at some point in, in the relatively near future.
• 1:20:41
  George: They don't, they don't care what the spot price of oil is. They care what the crack spread is.
• 1:20:45
  Propter: Okay, got.
• 1:20:46
  George: So if product prices are high enough, like I. Let's use some major numbers here. Like let's, let's say you're able to charge $220 for a barrel of diesel and your spot crude is 180, then you'll run as long as you can. As long as that?
• 1:21:04
  Propter: Sure.
• 1:21:04
  George: I mean, you might have to arrange additional financing because now you have to come up with three times the cash on your input before you get your revenue from the output. But it's fine. I mean, it's doable. The real problem is what if product prices don't get that high? What if people using crude or using crude products, using refined products are rationing early and demand destruction is such that, like that short circuits. Also keep in mind that a lot of global oil demand isn't really tied to market prices. So if you're in an emerging economy, you're probably not paying a market price for your gasoline, your diesel, your jet fuel, all that stuff.
• 1:21:42
  Ed: Right.
• 1:21:42
  George: It's heavily subsidized in the emerging world, which is, I think, something that a lot of people don't really realize that like a big chunk of the world economy is like heavily subsidizing fossil fuel use as opposed to, you know, taxing it or trying to subsidize alternatives that would, could get us off fossil fuels. In a lot of the world economy, it's the complete opposite. It's being heavily subsidized because at lower income levels, incremental fossil fuel use is incredibly accretive to economic growth like that. They're, you know.
• 1:22:14
  Propter: Right.
• 1:22:16
  George: Burning an additional diesel engine is probably generating a huge amount of GDP relative to what's costing you. So it does make some sense from a strict economic efficiency perspective without taking into account all the externalities, of course, of carbon emissions to subsidize that particular behavior. So if you're a refinery in one of those emerging markets and you can only sell your products for a capped amount, right. You're in trouble because crude prices have already gone up so high that, and maybe that's the logic that's being used is just that, well, as long as we can't raise prices, then we'll burn through the crude we have on hand and we'll wait for it to get cheaper and that'll mean no gasoline and that's not our problem. Or no diesel or no jet fuel or whatever and whatever.
• 1:23:03
  Propter: I mean, so again thinking out loud, but it occurs to me the part of the problem here. So like if the crack spread is the determinant, then one of the things that's really threatening to refineries is if downstream customers start to substitute away from whatever your products are. Like whether it's the plastics industry, whether whoever is ultimately buying plastic packaging starts moving towards paper based packaging or what have you.
• 1:23:28
  George: It's entirely, it's entirely fuels. Like okay, yeah, the way to think about the global petroleum industry is that the vast amount of decision making goes through. I mean we just use so little of a barrel of oil on plastics that it's just not what's setting prices at the margin. It's still really important. And the idea of like what happens to the plastics industry or a bunch of other industries that are low in terms of volume but associated with those barrels, like here's a good example, like jet fuel. So if we go to 100 EVs, for instance, you can't just produce jet fuel exclusively from a barrel of oil. Like you have a bunch of other stuff that comes out of it and
• 1:24:06
  Ed: that's where the plastics come from.
• 1:24:08
  George: Well, yeah, I mean, but again, plastics are a few.
• 1:24:11
  Ed: Right, I know, but like, but like that's what a lot of people keep thinking about. But like literally when they do that refining process, it makes ethylene gas which turns into pe.
• 1:24:19
  George: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:24:20
  Ed: I do 3D printing. I know things.
• 1:24:22
  George: So like what do you do? Like how do you restructure global refining to, and you could do a lot to optimize for kerosene, which is jet fuel, for instance. You're also just going to be using so much less crude overall that you're also going, you're also going to be using so much less that it becomes a smaller problem. Like the, the, like the aviation industry just doesn't use that much fuel compared to ground transportation. But in any event, this, this problem is really widespread because that crack spread sends a bunch of economic signals and fuel is where it's most important. And if most of the global, or if much of the global refining industry not, not most, because I would say most of global fuel consumption is ultimately market priced. But if a large percentage of global fuel consumption is effectively, we can't make money on this, then they can't make money on it. That's it. In the US it doesn't work. None of the supplies in the US because the gasoline price you pay at the pump, the crude extraction, the refining, it is all on a day to day basis. It's 100% market based. Right. We have taxes on gasoline, but they're constant. They're not a subsidy, they're a tax. And there are subsidies for petroleum extraction, but they're not going to dictate how big a refinery runs from one day to the next. Right. And the flow of crude into the US and like, like the, the barrels that we mix with light sweet and the production of light sweet, all that's going to continue regardless of what happens in the rest of the world petroleum market. So like for us, for US consumers, and this basically applies in Europe as well, it'll be entirely a price based adjustment. There won't be actual. But in the emerging world, especially in Asia, it might not be. And it might just be refineries just stop operating. And we're not there yet, but we're pretty close. So. Yeah, that'll, That'll be interesting. Wouldn't want to be flying to Asia anytime soon.
• 1:26:25
  Lowtax: I'm just singing crack spread to the tune of the Beatles tax man in my head.
• 1:26:31
  George: You could, you could do that out loud if you really wanted to.
• 1:26:34
  Lowtax: No, I'm not going to do that.
• 1:26:36
  Ed: Oh, well, one person on this podcast is flying to Asia in a week and a half, so that's fun.
• 1:26:44
  George: Yay.
• 1:26:46
  Ed: They haven't canceled my ticket yet.
• 1:26:49
  George: It's not the getting there that's the issue.
• 1:26:52
  Ed: Oh, I know, I'm well aware. I've considered that.
• 1:26:55
  George: Wait, Japan or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should be fine.
• 1:26:59
  Ed: I know, I know. Worst case, I'm. Oh, wait, no. Boats use oil too, don't they?
• 1:27:07
  George: Indonesia, Australia, India, that axis, that's.
• 1:27:13
  Ed: That's worse times.
• 1:27:15
  George: Not gonna. I mean, Australia is not technically in Asia. I know, I get it. I've had enough blue sky pedantry this weekend.
• 1:27:23
  Lowtax: We would never wish that on Asia.
• 1:27:25
  George: All right, well, I think that's about it for this week. I'm, I'm tapped. How about you fellas?
• 1:27:29
  Propter: Yeah, let's call it.
• 1:27:30
  Lowtax: Yeah, I'd say so.
• 1:27:31
  Propter: We've done our contractually obligated Iran segment.
• 1:27:34
  George: Yep. All right.
• 1:27:35
  Ed: That was way longer than it needed to be. You could have gotten away with, like, one segment. Instead, I had to hear the phrase crack spread no less than two dozen times.
• 1:27:44
  George: Peanut butter and crack sandwich.
• 1:27:48
  Propter: You know, you talked about crack spread being high enough, and I think I. I think that should be wide.
• 1:27:53
  Ed: I just want to say prices go up, Rob. Come on.
• 1:27:57
  George: It is sometimes referred to that way. Yeah. Of course, cracks can also blow out, which. I'm not making that up. That's not a bit. That. That actually is the terminology for when cracks. Beds rise rapidly. They blow out.
• 1:28:16
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:28:17
  George: For normal men. In Charlotte, I'm George.
• 1:28:20
  Propter: In D.C. i'm Proctor.
• 1:28:22
  Lowtax: In outer Florida, I'm low tax speed run enjoyer.
• 1:28:25
  Ed: And in Boston, I'm Ed.
• 1:28:27
  George: Stay normal, y', all, if you can
• 1:28:31
  Lowtax: crack spread, I'm the crack spread.