I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible.
So Michael Ian Blank is a comedian, actor, writer, and a keen observer of the absurd and American culture, which aimfully is these days one in the same and you're repeat offender on mission in Plausa, Yes, Sam, on a more serious thing, on one of your more serious works, one of the classics you've written, A pig Parade is
a Terrible idea twenty ten. And in A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea, you claim that while people can be convinced that a pig parade might sound like a great idea, it just isn't in practice.
The pigs are a metaphor for capitalists. You think it's gonna be great, You know you're gonna you're gonna You're gonna throw open the doors, and then what are they gonna do. They're gonna snuffle all over everything. They're gonna eat more food than is their share. They're gonna be destructive, they're gonna be sloppy, and at the end of it, who's cleaning up the mess us the proletariat.
And it fits on top of that there is going to be a parade. We're told in just recent days that President Trump is gonna hold a military parade like he wanted to do in his first term, which happens to be on his birthday.
He's an asshole. Can we just make Has the United States ever held an official military parade? We must have, right at some point. I'm not saying that outside of wartime when we're sort of, uh, we're not not bringing back soldiers from the Gulf or something like that, But have we ever just had, for the hell of it, a military parade?
I think the military is usually against that type of thing. There's been times, like when President Kennedy died and there was a kison with some military. You know, there's ceremonial times, but I don't think we've ever had one like he wants that. Apparently he saw military prede in France and said we need to have that with tanks and everything, and.
They didn't want to do it because the tanks were going to chew up Pennsylvania Avenue. And like the I think they.
Also didn't want to do it because it's not who we how we want to represent ourselves as a purely martial power. But now that we have reduced and or eliminated all of our soft power, why not just have pershing missiles flying down constitution.
Pete Hagg's got doing push ups on the top of a Bradley fighting Don.
Bongino in his personal pretoriat? Is that what a preetoriat guaritorian guarding?
Yes, go back to Roman times.
Apparently he's the first deputy of the FBI who has to have a security detail because normally FBI agents are trained and can carry guns, and he is not.
He's not trained to carry a gun, or he's not allowed to have a gun because of things in his past.
Yeah, I didn't read deep enough into the article I saw on this, so I.
Did have a question about conspiracies in the US government and your background as a poker player, right, I never want to play poker with you. You want you know you're a pro, You want to want a lot of words and competitions. And so we're involved in like the biggest fucking poker game ever with this right now, at
least economically, with these tears. Do you think, with what's going on now, that they have a plan, the conspiracy to pull this shit off their eight dimensional chests or is this just like general fuckery, like you've got to rub at the table.
Well, in recent weeks, what we've seen is Trump deploying advance, deploying the poker metaphor remember how many times Trump has said of Ukraine, they just don't have the cards, they don't have the cards. And Avance said it about Greenland. I think that are the car I mean, they just they keep talking about the cards. But what your question presupposes is that they're actually that they have something in
mind that they're trying to achieve. And I do have a sort of wild eyed conspiracy theory about this very topic.
Let's here.
It begins, this conspiracy theory with Trump believing in climate change. It begins with Trump, maybe during his first administration or some other time, being surrounded by advisors who say, you know, sir, and these are big advisors, tears rolling down their faces. You know, sir, climate change is real. Here's the data. In the next one hundred years, the southwest and some of the south of the United States is going to
become less and less hospitable to human life. And Trump may have pooh poohed that poop pooh, that poo poo that. The second part of my conspiracy is the assassination attempt, which I'm saying is real. If somebody tried to kill him, and then immediately after, if you recall, everybody was saying, oh, Trump, he's a changed man. He's become more reflective, he's different now, and we all thought, those of us from a distance, thought, oh, that means he's going to become kind and compassionate. I
think the opposite happened. I think it made him more belligerent and hostile. And so when you combine those two things plus the other part of the assassination attempt that I think it did get him thinking about was Oh. I think it did get him thinking about his own mortality and thinking that he's going to be dead at some point, and what is his legacy going to be. And I don't think he necessarily considered that before that, because I think he thought of himself as immortal. Okay,
you put all that together, what do you get? You get a guy thinking about his legacy who understands that the southern half of the United States over the next hundred years is going to become lad less than hospitable. At the same time, up in Canada, all of that land is going to warm, all those resources are going to become more available, more accessible. Up at the Arctic Circle, all of those resources are already in dispute and already contended.
At the same time, you've got Greenland where all of this is taking place climate wise. At the same time, you've also got demographic trends in the United States which say that by the year twenty forty something or whatever, white people are going to become the minority. We know that he has surrounded himself by white supremacists and fascists who believe that white people should be in charge of everything. What does Canada have a lot of white people? What
does Greenland have a lot of land? What does Russia our new ally have a lot of white people? And ultra Christianity, Orthodox Christianity. So you combine all those things, and what I think that I think, my wild eye conspiracy is that Trump and his people are trying to position America as a soup superpower for the next one hundred and fifty years or two hundred years, which is allied with Russia, as a bulwark against Russia and against Asia.
And so you have this massive land mass which is North America minus Mexico, Canada, Greenland, You've got the Arctic Circle, and then you've got our closest new ally Russia. And what you've done is you've created a scenario where we become impregnable and incredibly formidable. That's my conspiracy theory.
What's the fee that's as delusional as the UFO stuff you talk to us about less.
Podcast, I said, delusional. Don't you think that makes perfect sense? White people, Russia, Christianity, Liban Swum.
Let me ask you this, have you seen anything else in Trump's history in the last twenty five years that makes sense?
Like you're saying, like.
A guy can think of a plan more than five seconds ahead of.
But what I guess what I'm saying is it's not his plan. He's just sort of instituting it, and he's being sort of led down the from Rose path by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the coupal of weirdos who's guiding this presidency.
The Heritage Foundation. I, you know, genetically just don't like conspiracy theories. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually say that I think there's elements in that that that actually resonate with me. The thing about a legacy, I think, the thing about wanting a white Christian nation, although he's hardly Christian, but not really the white nationalist thing. I think his whole thing of expansion. And when was the last time a president's went around praising William McKinley, right, I mean
it's been a lot. I'm the only one who's read his memoirs recently, but but yeah, I mean, will I think there's there is something to that, although I suspect it's less of a cunning plan than just feral instincts that that come together. But I think this is an
administration riven by conspiracies and conspiracy theories. I mean, look no further than Laura Lumer walks into the Oval office and suddenly and a sort of Madame LaFarge's head start to roll, and there's no understanding why the head of the n essay was fired, and just people in airal security and a sea are being fired, like why.
I think the more pregnant question, and I use that word advisedly, is why is Trump listening to Laura Lumer? Why is she always in and out of his orbit? Of all people like she's such a weirdo. Everybody around him hates her. They all try to keep them apart. And the question is why why does she have his ear? And I think that's I think that's an interesting question.
Does she have just his ear?
Almost every one of those things you brought up to talking about they they they And one of the things I see with that Trump and this time it was a little different last time, is there's a they is not a cohesive thing. I think he has overlapping and very different people who work for him. So he's got Musk who has a completely different view of what where the world should go and should go to Mars and
we should destroy the democracy. And then you've got the economic tariff people, and then you've got the true crazies and the lower Lumer people. You've got a group of real pro China people and then a separate group of
real anti China people. Even just yesterday they were asking about the tariffs and are they going to stay, are they not going to stay, or they just to do Different people in the administration, senior people who conceivably were in the same meetings together, say absolutely the opposite things because there's no coordination. So, Michael, with that lead up and the fact that I think these people do have different agendas and I think you agree to that, what do you think Elon Musk's agenda is?
And with his fighting with Peter Navarro, can there be only one who must be out? Or Navarro be out two months from now?
Well, Musk has already said he's leaving. Musk is saying that he's going to leave by early May. Ockham's razor would suggest that Musk is primarily interested in Musk. So how does all this random nonsense benefit Elon Musk? And obviously like he's destroying all the agencies that would regulate his particular industries, But then why go after Social Security? Why go after USAID? Like I don't understand, I don't
understand it at all. I don't understand how the nation as a whole just accepted the premise of waste, fraud, and abuse. We just were like, oh, yeah, well, the government spends too much money, and there's too many people in the government, and it's doing too many things and it's but why did we just accept that premise? I never accepted that premise. It seemed to me that the government in general's probably doing a pretty good job. Like, I know people who work in the government, they work hard.
You guys worked in the government, you work hard, you did good work. I'm friends with people who work in the UN World Food Program. All they do is try to feed people. That's their whole thing. Trump just destroyed their program. All the scientists, the meteorologists, the firefighters, Like, why did we just accept that premise? I find it infuriating. I also find the premise and narrative around immigration infuriating that we just accepted that illegal immigris Is.
That because is it an education thing? Do you think the American public just don't understand their government because I don't accept any of those things.
I think we've been propagandized so effectively by the right wing media and pireennial what you want to call it. I think Historically, I think we all know that Americans have a kind of fundamental, inbred distrust of government that
stems from our origins as a nation. But over the last few centuries, we've asked the government to do more because we needed as we became more complex economically, militarily, industrially, technologically, we needed people to regulate this stuff, to look at it, because when we don't, we end up with things like the Great Depression or all the depressions that preceded the Great Depression, or we end up with a sort of hodgepodge of like laws around who gets educated and who doesn't,
and who's allowed to buy real estate and who doesn't, and who can get married and who doesn't like all of these things. We've asked the government to provide some oversight and regulation because it was necessary and for the American people that just turn around and go, oh, yeah, we didn't mean any of that. You didn't think. You
hadn't thought it through. That's the issue. And so now we're seeing what happens when you think it through and you start asking people left and right, and suddenly the Social Security Administration you can't get through on the phone. Why because we're getting rid of the phones. It's just insanity. And I don't understand what Musk's role is in all
of this. To answer your question, I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me other than if your goal is to actually rip apart the government, which it seems like that is their goal. But to what end? That's getting back to your original question about the poker. To what end? What are they trying to accomplish? And I don't know that they've articulated it in any way other than to say we're going to make it.
I've come to think that this is chaos, that there is no conspiracy here. There is no three dimensional eight dimensional chess here. The American society, and I know people are going to like balk at this. We have it. We currently have it so good. We don't even think we need these things anymore. We haven't had people die of measles or measles outbreaks in twenty thirty years. Polio is gone. The Great Recessions was the nineteen thirties. We
haven't had a land war in Europe in eighty years? Right, Why do we still need vaccines? Why do we still need NATO? People don't think they need them because like we have work because they've worked exactly right. Yeah, we haven't an award because we've had a we have an alliance, and we also and this is much more difficult. Globalization is a fact. It just friggin' is. And there are winners and losers, just like there was when we moved
from horses to the internal combustion engine. Right, if you were in the horse tending business, you were fucked, you know. Henry Ford was the Elon Muskiv's day, and you know, when we're moving towards green energy, and I think a lot of people are scared, and I think that has been pushed, but there's no plan other and this is one conspiracy that I do buy into Project twenty twenty five with the Heritage Foundation. I think they do have a plan.
Just hold on for a short break.
We'll be right back. All right, we're back from the break.
Let's get back into it.
I think because people are scared, perhaps one thing is that people around Trump are thinking is, yeah, it's like authoritarianism. Let's just give them a simple solution. And that is something we see in history over and over and over again, going back to ancient Greece when you get the Athenians afraid they're going to look for a tyrant, or the Romans, or let's go to nineteen thirty three with the Germans. If you can make people afraid and offer simple solutions,
you can have power. And I think that's the pot at the center of the table at this poker game is power. What they want to do with it, I'm not really sure because I don't think there's a day. I think there's different days. Peter Navarro where he wants to go, and where Milan Musk wants to go, and where the Koch brothers want to go. But it's a conspiracy.
Everybody's looking to control this tired, confused old man at the nasty old man at the sitting and sitting behind the Resist desk with Elon Musk's kids booger on it.
But I think Musk is different from Project twenty twenty five. I think they am different, and I need to dig into it more. But I think the Musk people, there's some books and things that Peter Teel and Musk and sort of these South African tech guys have this view that the US government is just a giant and giant insurance company with an army, and the problem with the government is it spends all its money to support the Week in society, and the Week are holding us down.
And if we're going to move to a new world that's in Mars and Ai driven, we have to actually destroy that and get rid of the Week and have a group of white people who could do things. And so I think his view is different probably than a lot of these other people around Trump.
Yeah, I think you're exactly like Peter Teel and Elon Musk and like David Sachs, the other South African member of this troika. They're part of this techno utopian slash feudal vision for how they see the next phase of
human development playing out. And they've utilized the bizarre writings of Curtis Jarvin, this sort of weird philosopher of the right, as a kind of intellectual undergirding for their project, which basically just amounts to a new feudalism where you're going to have these tech overlords controlling literal land masses as private essentially countries that you can then move to and
become a citizen of. But it will be but they will be ruled over by these monarchs, the Peterteels, the Elon Musks, the David Sachses of the world, and you will abide by their rules, and presumably you will have freedom of movement. I guess if you decide you don't like their rules, and then you can go to some other tech oligarch's country. But then what happens when the tech oligarchs start fighting, as they inevitably will. Are they going to maintain their private tech oligarch armies and there?
I mean, what are we doing? What are we doing?
What?
And how do they even envision the role of the United States in all of this? And I don't really know, other than maybe it's what you said. They'll be a kind of insurance company with an army, and they'll be there to sort of mediate these disputes so that David Sachs and Elon Musk aren't sending armies of in cells to fight with each other. I don't know. None of it makes sense to me.
On Social Security. My grandmother had a an Irish immigrant. She had a third grade education. She had four kids and was pregnant three months pregnant with my father when her husband died of par toniis she would have starved a death without Social Security. But it's like Roosevelt friggin saved her. But dismantling that Muscus called it a Ponzi scheme?
Is there money to be made here by first of all making Social Security inoperable, cut its funding, cut its it budget so it doesn't function anymore, Then blame it for being poorly run after you've made it poorly run. And then, of course the next step is to privatize it or just not pay it out, so that the vast majority of people are then dependent on sure on what on the government and or on people like Elon Musko.
What's your sense why would tech brows and Musk in particular, why would they be setting their sights on Social Security? Because they must understand something has to come after it.
I can only assume what you just said is accurate, that they want to privatize it, and that they know that there's tremendous amounts of fees to be made in financial transactions and management and all of this billions and billions of dollars that they can then line their pockets with to pursue their dreams of going to Mars or
whatever the hell they're trying to do. And I think you you could make the good faith argument, although I don't think it's necessarily very good faith argument, that social Security could be made more profitable if you invested it in. Those funds into the market are sort of risk your investments. But all of that is blied by the events of
the last week. If you're relying on the market for your retirement and then you see it crashing fifteen percent, maybe twenty percent by the time this podcast airs, well, aren't you shooting yourself in the foot. So security was never designed to be an investment vehicle. It was designed to be a safety net so that when you reach retirement, or you have a disabled child, or you are a young widow, you don't have to worry about that money coming in. It was never meant to be a get
rich quick scheme. It was meant to supplement whatever retirement savings or pension or later on for a one K that you might have. And if you don't have those things, then it will keep you, at the very least hopefully right out of poverty. And that's enough. That's all it was meant to do. That's all it ought to be doing.
And it drives me crazy, having a mother who worked in source security for many years, it drives me crazy to see them trying to dismantle literally the most successful social program in our nation's history for no reason.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of these things that work against each other. At the same time, we are using up a lot of our One of the reasons that the administrations that they didn't want to give more weapons to Ukraine is we don't want to use up our weapons that we may need to fight the Chinese. And then now we're using all of these weapons to bomb the Yemenis and the Hootis. And the reason supposedly we're doing that, and we know that because we've listened.
We watched the signal chat between the main players who are looking to bomb yemen Is because we're worried about global traffic through this Suez Canal and the fact that it's disrupting global supply chains. But at the same time, all of the policies of the government in tariffs are
destroying the supply chains of the world. So like, on one hand, we're doing more damage to the supply chage and business ability to think forward, and then we're bombing the hell out of a country because we're claiming that's what we're trying to protect.
I think that's right. And if that doesn't make sense to you, then you just don't get it. Bro, they just don't get it. Let me ask you how as CIA, that's how bad from an intelligence perspective was the signal gate thing.
It's bad on a number of levels. And the first thing I think of, having been like Jerry, a senior officer at CIA, is just on the leadership place. If anyone could understand if you work for an organization and your boss says one thing and does the other. Thing that you're saying to everybody in your organization, the tens of thousands of people, is you cannot do this. If you do these things, you will be fired, prosecuted. It's dangerous,
it's against national security. You're helping our enemies. And then they do it. And then not only do they do it, but they then lie about it and obfuscate and then pretend like it's normal. You've just sent a message to your workforce that you're not serious, you don't care about the things that you tell them to do. So on the leadership side, it's bad. On the national security side the fact that these people have been using private devices. It was a window that opened up to show us
that's happening and let us all think about it. But I think that's been happening for a long time. I think foreign intelligence services have been living off of President Trump's telephone and listening to everything and all the crazy
things he's doing talking to people. Once you can get into someone's telephone, it doesn't matter that you're then using signal, which is an encrypted thing, because signal, if you try to break in between the two encrypted pieces, which is the hard part, it's encrypted and it would take a sophisticated organization to be able to do that. Can we do it sometimes? So it's bad. I think it's bad on the nest security front. It's bad on the security front,
it's bad on the leadership front. And then of course the lying is the biggest problem, because leadership should be about character, and our nationalecurity officials show that they have no character and they can't be trusted. That sends another message to our enemies.
And once you're in a device, you're in it. Yeah, So maybe they're talking about Yemen, talking about Iran, talking about the Ukraine, negotiations the Russian that for us would be like that was our quest, if we can figure out plans and intentions of the leadership. We've done everything, We've done our job. And the fact that you've got somebody with the phone in Moscow talking about this, you just simply got to assume that not only did they get his phone, they got everything on it. You got
to assume that. And let's be clear about this. People are gonna get killed if the Russians got this, and I think you got to be you have to just assume they did. If they told the houtis in advance, just hey, get your air defenses ready, just one phone call. And the Russians do work with the hoodies, right, they don't hit our ships. They do talk back and forth, they trade. They certainly work with the Iranians. I'm going to get in your jet and you're gonna lie in
and they're waiting for you. It's like the Battle of Midway. We knew the Japanese were there. That's why that's why we won the Battle of Midway and then won the war in the Pacific. It was because of good intelligence. So this is there's been so much other shit going on that we've swept that under the carpet. But this is horrific. Now I just want to quick come back on the poker thing I've just seen right now as we're talking, Trump apparently has paused all terrors and except
for China for ninety days. Right.
It's good because now we have all these new factories that have been built in the last.
Line, all these new factories. Right. So I'm saying this is this is a blink thing. So you're playing poker and he's just you know, warinated on the tailor. He's playing park. He's bluffing. Don't fuck with me, man, I got four aces. And now he's he's funny.
He's folding because the rest of the world and the nation called his bluff. They're like, you want to do this, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna crash of markets. We're going to create a new Asian Pact between China and Japan and South Korea. We're gonna get Europe to retaliate. Like he folded. He folded because it's stupid. I assume it's a declare of victory and say, everybody's kissing my ass and everybody wants to negotiate, so we can hold the we can
hold the tariffs for ninety days. But the problem, and look, what do I know. I'm a jerk on I'm a college shop out who believes in uf folks, So what
do I know? But it seems like it seems like as an economic matter, how as a business person do you project out for the next three months, six months, year if you don't know every ninety days if Trump is going to be slapping tariffs on all the nations that you're trying to import your goods from, or are you going to say, maybe I need to start investing in the US and I'm gonna spend two billion dollars
creating new factories and infrastructure. And then four years from now, some other dude gets in and it's listen and it's just like, yeah, these tariffs make no sense, so we're going back to free trade. Like, how do you plan anything if you're a business person right now? I have no idea. Thankfully, I'm an idiot about business and money, so I don't have to worry about it too.
But let's talk politics for just for a second. Given that we're going to actually have fair elections in twenty twenty six D, which is not a given. But let's run with that. Where do Republicans if they don't want to lose the House in the Senate like your fo okay, your Fox News. Let's pretend Rupert Murdoch is going to live this long. And how do you spend this as a as immediate personality yourself? How do you spin this as a win?
It's a huge win? Are you kidding me? This is this has been an incredible win for the American people over the What have we seen over the last few days. We've seen every single nation on earth, including the ones that are only populated by penguins, picking up the phone and calling the greatest president who has ever lived and said,
let's make a deal, mister president. All of them, even the Pelicans, had tears in their eyes, just rolling down their eyes as they say, you're absolutely right, mister President.
Not only were you right, we have been unfair and we want to do whatever we can to ensure moving forward that America is our biggest booster and friend and ally, and we're just gonna write We're just going to write checks to you, and the American people are getting rich, richer than you can possibly imagine richer than they've ever been because of this president's foresight and bold leadership.
Mister Fox News reporter, you just said yesterday that these terrorists were going to stay in place for years so that we would fundamentally change our system so that manufacturing comes back to the United States. How do you say that today's something completely different.
You in the fake media are so obst with this president's comand of the American economy that you can't wrap your heads around all the good things that he's doing. The American people. Look at what the stock market is doing right now, right now, and you will see the bold leadership that this man has performed. And yes, we need to bring back manufacturing to these shores, and all of our conversations with our partner nations will ensure that they invest right here in America.
And more importantly, it is wrong that trans athletes are like fencing with real women. Let's talk about the really important things about which bathroom you get to use? That's right, That's all this economic stuff. Don't worry about it. Don't worry your pretty little head, baby.
I have to say, John, just acting as a White House spokesperson slash Fox News analyst, it's very easy.
Yeah, I think you'd be good at it. Yeah, to try that, because if you're on CNN, no one's watching it.
You got to get over on Fox News.
Yeah, it's easy to lie if you just don't care.
That's the thing is if you have one talking point and it's just do whatever, say whatever it is to make the present look good. Right, whether it's consistent with yesterday or five minutes ago, does.
Consistency's irrelevant And when you're cornered attacked the questioner.
So let's take a break and be back in a moment. Let's pick up where we left off.
I do like your theory about how no reason we're so willing to get rid of things is because they work so well, and so you don't understand that these things are happening in the background. That's my theory about how Trump got elected in the first place, because Obama did a good job, and so the America was like, well, if this guy who came out of nowhere and he's just a black dude, if he can do the job, then why wouldn't Why why wouldn't we elect this genius
billionaire business man. He'll do it ten times better. I do think a good president makes it look easy, and so you think anybody can do it, and then you and up with a clown like this.
For years, it'll be like the government needs to be run more efficiently like a business businessman. America is about business. And I don't think previous presidents, even ones that we thought did well, communicated effectively with the American people that the government is different than a business and it's different
because it's in support of the American people. Like the US government is set up for fairness, not efficiency necessarily, So if the Defense Front wants to buy a new thing, it has to put out bids and give everybody an opportunity to bid. Everybody could do you can. They can't just say Michael, I like you, your company is good, I'm going to buy your thing, and I'm not going to look at so I can move fast, and the same thing with Elon Musk. Yes he can blow up rockets.
I can move fast and destroy things. But if you're in the US government and nasty, you can't just blow up rockets. In other words, there are fundamental different things, and it's not just efficiency and speed, it's other things. So the business thing has never really been the proper way to look at it. Yes, we want our government to be a active and more efficient, but it is
going to be slower than potentially businesses. But businesses go out of business all the time, and the United States can't go out of business.
And the other thing that short of drives me crazy about that analogy is the subtext of it, which is that if the American government will run as a business, it would then be in a sense profitable. We hear this kind of talk when they talk about the post Office or Amtrak or any number of services that the government provides for the common good, that if we just privatized it, the government or whomever could be making money hand over fist with this stuff. But that is not
the purpose of government. The purpose of the post Office is not to make money. It is to provide postal service for the American people at an affordable price. And that's just a common good.
If you wanted to make money with the post office, you wouldn't send things to these talents with three people and I'm way out in the middle of nowhere. Effective thing to do is go to bigger places and cut off these smaller places. But the postal services said, we're going to make sure that every American, no matter where they live, can get mail.
You can extrapolate that to the whole of government, because in a sense, when you're saying you want the government to be more efficient, in a way, what you're saying is we want it to it's a rough analogy, but we want it to make more money. We want it to do more with the money that we provide it. That is a natural and justifiable feeling to have. But if you don't understand what the government actually does or how it does it, you're not in a position to
say we just need to cut everything. You're just not in that position. And the Democrats, I agree with you, have never made the case, or at least in my lifetime, for government why we have these things, why they're important, How your life will be materially worse without these things. Like the fact that so many people think or thought that the American government spends something like twenty percent of its annual budget on foreign aid is maddening to me.
We pay a penny less than a penny on the dollar for all of that foreign aid, all of that stuff that we were doing, feeding people, saving lives, preventing aids, education, helping women get out from under the thumbs of the men in their lives and the patriarchal cultures that were controlling them. Like all of that cost, relatively speaking, so little and provided us so much in return, and we don't Nobody was making that argument, And I don't understand why.
Michael Lewis was making the argument better than the US government was. He's the best person I listened to on this.
Generationally, are at least my parents trusted the government because their experience with the government was helped us out of the Great Depression, right social security. We won World War Two, we won the Cold War, And I really think it all changed when Ronald came in, although he didn't mean it this way, but he said, I'm from the government.
I'm here to help, and everybody laughed. If you're from FEMA, you are from the government and you are there to help, right, Or if you're making sure that people aren't driving in unsafe vehicles, or the food you eat isn't poison, or there's no insider trading the court's work. The police aren't like bribeable like they are in the Third World. They are from the government. They are here to help. But I think this is something inside of the American psyche
to be distrustful of government. And I think that in its measure is good. But like anything else, when you take it to the NTS degree, you get to nihilism. But before we go, I did want you to comment on a conspiracy theory that I do buy into, but I find very difficult to articulate. So all the countries in the world, to include country, you know, places with just penguins or poor little Lisutu or Bhutan, they all
got schwat with tariffs, but not at all. Russia didn't get hit with a tear And then he's true that off his order negotiating. We're also negotiating with Ukraine and other places. So what do you think the deal is with Russia and Trump? What is it? There's something everybody knows. There's something. Everybody's senses it. John has written articles on it. You know, in the intelligence community, we'll sit around Congressmen have speculated on it. There is friggin' something.
I guess I know. I don't know if that I ever was, but I guess I'm no longer of the opinion that there's any sort of compromot or anything like that, because Trump is so shameless, Like, what difference would it make at this point, What possible information could they have on him that would in any way damage him. I don't think there's anything.
But it suggests that he needed help to win these elections. It wasn't just himself, and he can't live with that.
So I'm at a loss. None of it. Is it as simple as he looks at the way Putin runs his nation. He understands that Putin is getting a kick back on every dollar that these oligarchs earn. He understands that Putin is arguably the richest man in the world, or one of the richest men in the world, and he just wants that. He said it over and over again. I want generals who will salute me, and I want Hitler's generals, and want when I want people to stand
up when I like he said all this stuff. It might just be the sort of theatrics of power and the image of it. And I think he's enraptured with this idea of the strong man. And if he could be the strong man of the strongest country that the world has ever known, I could see that holding some appeal for him.
You've written a little bit about Trump and a third term. What's your take on that.
If And I know you guys know this, but your viewers or your listeners and they probably know this too. But clearly the playbook for this regime is to maintain power at all costs. And the question is why. And we've talked on that a little bit, but I think Trump understands and the Trump people understand that whatever that goal is, whatever they're aiming for, cannot be accomplished in
this term. Fully, you can put the pieces in motion, you can make it a lot more likely that this project will succeed in four years, but it may not be possible to execute everything they want to do in that time. And they know, and Trump certainly believes, and it's probably correctly that the movement falls apart without him. That's probably true. And so if that's the case, then you've got to figure out a way to keep this guy in power. And that obviously feeds into his own
narcissism and ego. And so they're going to try any novel theory that they can think of to get around the constitution. And I'm not convinced they won't be successful.
I'm not convinced that John Roberts and whoever else is going to somehow find some sort of narrow legal ruling like they did with Gore v. Bush or Bush vers or whatever that was, to sort of allow some weird precedent that will allow him to serve or he'll do like a Putin Medyedev thing where they where he gets Vance to be the president and he's the vice president and then Vance resigns. I don't know, but I don't
think he's going to go quietly. And he said that he's been talking about this since his first administration, and I don't see any indication that he's at all joking, and he said in recent days he's not joking.
I think the one thing I would add to that, though, is I think he doesn't want to go to jail. I think he knows he's guilty of a lot of shit.
Okay, so he knows that, and he knows they all know that twenty twenty six, at least the elections were held today, would be a blood bath for them. So you got to figure they're already anticipating that. So what are they going to do? Where are they going to do that?
I think there's a conspiracy there. I don't know what it is yet.
Act cheap.
It's a hell of a pig parade.
Michael. Awesome to talk to you. As always, I do follow your substec I think it's really fascinating and we hope we can have you on it anytime.
I'm mostly unemployed. Even though I'm on TV and I write the sun Stack, I'm mostly unemployed.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable mention and Abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.