Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of The Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So, without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist. All right, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined by one of the hosts of the incredible podcast five four, a show about all the ways the Supreme Court is a complete disaster. It's also a supervising attorney at Texas Law has worked
as a public defender in Rio Grande City, Texas. Please welcome to the show.
Rihann and hm On. Hello.
Am I gonna do like a little jingle for myself?
You got one? Yeah, I'm here.
You're great, hot girl summer coming up?
Yeah, all right, all right predicted here here here. My shoulders started moving a little. Yeah. I was like ship, Yeah, I'm feeling that one. What's your what's your the thing? I always ask people and they're like, should I sing it? Like, what's your karaoke go to?
Oh?
I do have?
The go to karaoke is always TLC no scrubs.
Shit.
You start there right like you can. The sky's the limit. After that, yeah, but once you get going on that, the vibes are going on that, your power is sort of centered in a no scrubs direction. Yeah, karaoke is boundless.
And that's brave because karaoke bars are usually full of so many scrubs. I can't imagine that's very popular. Yeah, you know, they're like they start booing and hissing.
Talking about me, but I'm grub. I do think I'm fine and people. I'm also known to be a bust.
No no, sometimes I hang out the passenger side of my best friend.
Ride fully hanging out the passenger side of my best friends the whole time.
I just did get in the car and I'm hanging out the whole time. I had a friend who and then when the first song first came out, they could have swore they were saying, it's also known as a bus stop. I was like, you need to hang out around different people. That's like a that sounds like a Joe Biden slang, like yeah, yeah, the bus stop. Yeah, he's one of he's scrubs. He's also known as a bus stop.
Corn Pop was always hanging around the bus stop.
I'm serious. He was a cannibal and I'm serious, man, I'm serious.
Man.
No, we know you think you're serious.
Rather, no, you're not a serious person in your brain, you're serious.
Yeah, but I mean that was what I mean. Is I mean what I'm saying. Yeah, No, we know, we know, we wish you didn't. But yeah, because your ice cream is melting all over your suit, sir, it's just really unseemly out his ice cream. To imagine, I feel like that would do a lot of damage to his campaigns, Just sloppy melted ice cream all over his suit. People be like, oh, you know what, that was it for me somehow.
I think that's how they They need that damage on top of like genocide or yeah, oh okay, okay, okay, So the ice cream is gonna yeah, he'll.
Do yeah, maybe he'll do that to distract from his lack of action there. And he's like, but I got his ice cream all over Oh most sloppy for me. But secretly I'm really mad at BB really secretly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, of course, what is something from your search history?
Well, I'm gonna do change it up. I'm going to tell you what something something real. I'm gonna tell you something like well, not real. But you know, I'm not going to tell you about like a Humans documentary or come on, but you know we should still check that out. But I've been googling pulmonary nodule ever since I broke my shoulder in January. I broke my shoulder in January and the ice and then when they x rayed, they found well, they thought it was a bruise on my
from like when I hit the steps. I slipped on my front steps and one one stare broke my rib and the other stare broke my shoulder. And when I when they did the x ray, you know, so I was like, the doctor gave me morphine and he said, you don't need surgery. And then he asked me why I was in a good mood. I think I've been through through this with you guys.
I don't know.
But he asked me why I was such a He said, you, I don't understand your affect. Yeah, he was like, you seem too happy.
AI powered medical bot. I do not understand your because you were on morphine.
That's what I told him. I said, well, you gave me morphine and also just this isn't like I broke my hip in twenty eighteen, and that was fucking So this is not a broken hips. I'm already like in a decent like I'm walking around, you know, my arm's in a sling, but who cares compared to that anyway. So then he's like, oh yeah, and by the way, we found this pulmonary nodule. And then all of a sudden everything went you know, I was like, oh God,
what the hell's that? You know, you hear pulmonary. You don't have pulmonary ever, you don't want to hear pulmonary. Yeah, So then like he was like, oh, well, they're normally you know, they might be might be nothing. You have a thirteen millimeter pulmonary nodule. It's just like a little growth in your lung and you should have it checked. So then I was like spun out for like a
couple of days. And then yeah, but I couldn't get an appointment with a pomonologist until well, at first they offered May, so I was like, well, and then they found a person who could see me in March, so that still gave me a couple months.
So I just sort of like spin out.
Yeah, but I did forget about it eventually because I googled it, and it was like most pulmonary nogeles eighty five percent of them or nothing scar tissue from previous illnesses or whatever it is, but you usually non malignant, but they prefer to be the non malignant ones, like you're looking at hopefully five millimeters eight millimeters. Thirteen was a little big, but still it was like, most of
these are nothing. So I kind of put it out of my mind because it was a couple months, and I really did, which is a testament to like fucking therapy and zoloft, because it was the old days, was when I was younger, before I addressed my real anxiety that or I don't know anyway, I would have worried down stopper those whole two months. So the fact that I was even able to go back to my regular life was was was kind of nice. And then and then when I went to get it, I got went
to the doctor. They did, they did. He said, yeah, you have a thirteen million millimeters thing, and we gotta look, we gotta look at it, you know, cause it's kind of big. You know, it's not you know, it's not huge, but he's like, we gotta look at it, So you're gonna do a pet scan. So a pet scan is like you you know, it's a cancer. Generally, it's a cancer test to see if like sort of nodules and
things are active. Like you want it to be dead, you want it to be scar tish, you want you want it to be not active, right right.
So I so I go.
And get the pet scan and they put die in your arm and stuff, and I don't mind that stuff because like I wasn't parented properly. So like when I went the doctor, I feel like I'm finally like getting something.
I really actually really yes, I really do, I really do.
You guys are laughing. That's too hard to laugh.
Laugh that hard at that.
Dude.
We were just talking before. I was like, you're gonna fucking say some bummer ship.
But I let into this Miles Miles Miles, like I was telling Miles beforehand. Yeah, this has been quite a couple of months for me. It really has. It's been. It's been the worst few months of my life. But I'm so happy now though. I mean, I got through it.
And so then they did the scan and then they're like, all it's You're all clear.
It's no no, no, no, no no, that's why I'm going through the going through the scary version. So I go to get the pet scan and I feel great because I like people like touching me and stuff, you know, like putting things in my.
Arms to like I will get a haircut just to have somebody touch.
Yeah, it feels good. It's something. There's something really wrong about that. Miles looks like he was parented correctly.
That's fucking squinting and really.
Yu, this one I was never in to. I didn't know Jack, I would be more. I would be so much more affectionate with you in person. Man, you know I love Give me a little between the shoulder blades, r a little because every time every time I hug jack he he releases the hug first. That's how I know.
Say I release a black dye, forms a cloud around.
Man, then I that I'm blinded moments that I retreat. Every time I hug Jackie at least a cloud of black. Guy, are you breaking into aquariums again? That's what it is, all right?
Sorry, That's like an Irish person hugging an Irish person like they've never been touched till they went.
To the freeze you go to the barber.
Yeah, the first time you ever touched, you go to the barber. I went to a barber once. You were going to a barber where they give you the whole treatment with the hot towel and everything. Yeah, and then like an Irish guy doesn't know what to do. You know, I'm like, am I supposed to be able to moan?
Am I supposed to go birls in love with me?
Yeah?
I'm like, daddy, here this fool goes again. He's probably go to the barber and be like, Yo, this barber is down to fucking go out with me. I'm pretty sure barber's down to fuck. BARBERA said, I was different than the other customers that come here.
Every name barber's down to funck, but I never come. I was talking to Miles before this or just about a time on the show. And let's clarify one thing.
I come on pet scans anyway.
So I got back to back to bet scans. So I got I got the results sent to me in a portal. Yeah, right before the doctor looked at him. So I look at the portal.
And I've got the labs. But I'm not a doctor.
So I'm like, well, they must not. They wouldn't send them to me if they're bad, Like, they wouldn't send me bad news for me to look at before the doctor, would they.
Well, yeah they would.
So it says active, it says activity, it says concerning, it says all this, all this horrible stuff.
So that's when I'm like, oh my god.
Then the doctor calls me the next day and he's like, yeah, there's the two things lit up. The nodule lit up, and the and the and the lymph node nearby lit up. So I'm like, Okay, I'm dead, you know. But he was like, this is not necessarily cancer. He's like it, cancer is one of the things it could be, but there's a lot of other things it could be. But
we're gonna do a broncoscaby. So two weeks ago, two days before I was on the show, I had the broncoscopy, and the reason I was in a good enough movie.
The day Blake episode days before Chris.
But I got I had just gotten good news in the sense that they did the broncoscopy, which is a big deal. They I full anesthesia in debated needle down the throat with a camera to take it. He took a biopsy of the of the lymph node and the and the nodule. And then but then when I was in recovery, the doctor said, like right after I woke up, the doctor comes in and gives you talks to you, which is insane by itself because I'm like, I don't know what he said. Yeah, so he's like, he said,
your lungs look fine. He's like, they look good because I told him he used to smoke a lot. It's like they looked really fine, he said. And what I saw did not look like did not look like cancer to me. And then everyone said, oh, if that's if they said that, that means that it's it's probably not because they would not say that. They're like doctors don't say so I felt much better and that's why I
was able to do the show. And then and then and then on Monday, they called me last last Monday, so like whatever it was, though what days today, I don't even know he's there or.
Whatever it was day last Monday.
Yeah, So like that day I got a call and they said, you don't have cancer, fud, and they said I didn't need anything. They said, what you have is histoplasmosis, which then I googled that. So first I've been googling pulmonary nodule over and over and watching YouTube videos about pulmonary nodics, which turns out there's shit tons of them.
Yeah, of course, and you're gonna find them and watch all of them. And I'm sure that didn't help it. Oh yeah, that's all I watched.
I went from abandoned minds the pulmonary nodules in a flash and uh and then and then I went to uh, yeah, histoplasmosis, which is something from a like the environment, like an allergen that turns into a little infection. And they said, you don't need to do anything. But then I got so I went from thinking I had cancer to nothing, like, you don't need to do anything, you're fine, and then
I just like went kind of felt kind of insane. Yeah, man, anyway, so I'm all, I'm all better, And just to say, like if you do get if you're over fifty and uh, god forbid.
And you and I wouldn't.
Yes, I mean, you know, and I'm a hair over fifty.
I mean, you know, fifty five, but you know that's that's a hair that's a little rounding day, a couple of hairs.
Yeah, it's not that far them, and then uh, you should probably get a cat an X ray or cat scan. You're supposed to get a cat scan every year. No one knows that ship and no one will do it. But if you used to smoke, the thing is, this is the way they find lung cancer. So I would have been lucky, right, because lungs don't have nerve ending in them. I did not know that. So when you get lung cancer, the reason they find it's usually stage four is because that's when you start to feel affecting thing,
you can't breathe, whatever, that stuff. But the most lung cancer they catch early is through these other events like breaking your shoulders. So you know, no one's just just in general, like if you're over fifty and you used to smoke a lot, you might want to get an occasional cat scan, which, of course, you know, if you have an extra couple thousand bucks.
Yeah, yeah, I just have. I actually have a built in one, so I'll just start doing doing them more often.
We need to do home cat skis. These things do not look like complicated. My brother said, you look at those machines. He's like, you know they're paid for.
Have you seen I just saw a video recently of one that was outside of like it's shielding firing up, and you're really, oh my god.
Then it's like a transformer, like transforming in a Michael Bay film.
And once it that shit really starts like rotating, You're like, yeah, holy shit, dude, this thing has like the power to move. Oh so it's worth the money. I mean yeah, I mean you're making money on this thing.
I looked at it when I was in there, and you know, of course when you're in there, they're like, we're just going to do one more cat scan and you're like, oh, but uh, you know, like are you sure, like how much? You know, how much does it cost? They should have a thing like on a gas you know, on a gas thing where you can see the money.
The money going up right every rotation.
You're not giving me another cat's skin.
I don't care what I got.
There was a when I went to the Kentucky Derby one time, there was a house just like a private house that had an ATM machine in its yard by like right by the thing.
And I've always that changed the way I like thought.
I was like, what if like you could just like open a private shop like or a private like atm whatever you wanted, Like, what if you could just have a cat scan at your house? That Like people were like, oh, yeah, you go buy this dude's house and get your get your lungs check.
It's like, yeah, he's he's not a text so he can't make sense of it, but he will send it to a doctor to you, Yeah, in a portal, and you.
Can look at it.
It's in his backyard. Is look at this thing, fucking go This is a cat scan machine firing up like uncovered.
Oh my god.
Yeah, and it's like barely getting fired up.
Now what does it look like? Jack?
It looks like the large hay drunk collider, Like I what I imagine the large hay drunk collider.
Looks like the inside is completely full of clock radios.
Yeah, like a window a window ac unit or something.
Yeah, they put a bunch of decommissioned clock radios in.
A yeah, translucent corded telephones that think.
Doesn't it does? Yes, it's not. It doesn't look that complicated.
But we're surrounded by technological miracles and we're just like could.
You make it quieter? It's too loud. Jack kind of annoying to me.
Jack O'Brien's smog tests, cat scans.
And at M he's made and legal services and in legal service.
Yeah, I mean that there is that one service the people who like witness you sign a document, the notary public like that one is just like a dude who walks around with some papers and like pulls up to your house, you know. So like I feel like, yeah, I feel like we should have more of that stuff. Yeah, that's a great bullshit job.
Fucking notaries.
Yeah, they make good money those ship.
Yeah, fuck those guys.
Let's uh, let's take a quick break.
And I wonder how how often they're just asked repeating people, Oh, you think you're better than me, Well, because you sign this in front of you, it means something.
Or are they all drunk and parties? And like people are like can you notarize this? And they're like, I'm not really supposed to.
The notaries, Like, I mean, to be fair, without my stamp, this isn't going to be an authenticated legal document. Go, oh, it's you're a tough guy. We got them real drunk. Oh, but to chalk you out, choke out the notary. What is something you think is underrated?
I'm going to say Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Oh yeah, I don't know if you guys are familiar. It sounds like, oh yeah, celebrating network. Yeah yeah, it's celebrating its thirtieth birthday at the moment. And this is the show that like launched our adult swim Like this is the thing.
Yeah.
So I've loved the Space Ghost Like I stumbled on it when I was probably about fourteen years old coming home from a party kind of drunk and just turned on Cashing Network at.
Like one in the morning. Damn, you were told you were fourteen coming home from a party drunk, and just like that sounds like some twenty eight year old behavior.
We build them different in New Zealand.
We got it, we started. I'm not proud of that, but I'm also not going to lie to you guys. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, just got in the coal mine. Yeah, just yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So I'm punching through a pack of Lucky Strike and I flick on the TV and there's this crazy cartoon and it's like, if you haven't seen it before, it's a chat show hosted by this nineteen sixties cartoon hero which is really quite badly drawn, but they punch in the guest and the guest is filmed on camera, so the guest isn't animated, and they had like really famous guests.
So they're doing a big replay live stream at the moment, which is probably still going on YouTube to sort of celebrate the thirtieth year, like Conan's on it.
Tom York's in an episode. Oh wow, York. Wow.
This is like real heavy hitters, and the show is it's just like built for stoners, Like the writing is crazy. And it was the first kind of thing I saw as a teenager where I was like, oh man, this is this is my shit. Like I didn't know that I was supposed to smoke weed until I saw Space.
Coaster, you know what I mean.
It sort of like went that way around.
It was like, oh, this comedy is so great that I should start smoking marijuana, which I didn't until much later. I will say, don't touch that stuff if you're if you're under like twenty, I gotta say that, right, thank you drink when you're fourteen, but not yes, of course.
And then also I feel like I feel like the first appearance of like Aquatine Hunger Force was also on Space Ghost. That's right. There was a lot of ship. Yeah, a lot of ship comes from the tree of Space Ghost. Yeah for me. And then I like then I was like I was all in on Aquatine too, and I was like, this shit is fucking yeah. I just love that absurd.
Master Shape was a totally different character and that in that vision in the Christmas episode is like some kind of whiny white dude. And then and I'm glad that they kind of like changed the dynamic, but yeah, what's the same?
Oh?
Wait is that right?
No?
Sorry, fry Lock Flock's different. Fry Lock's different and had legs. I feel like visually in much like it's the Supreme Court. I'm actually an originalist, so I think that no characters should ever change. I actually prefer the first episode of The Simpsons. I think the animation was better back then. I prefer the Tracy Omens.
Simpsons.
They looked like their faces were melting. Yeah, and Homer was like the home on, come on boy.
We're hungry, Like, what the heck? I remember? I remember it was so alarmed when I saw the Tracy omen version of like those characters, and like, what is the fuck was going on? Here? Is the Simpsons back.
I've been hearing online that, like the Simpsons is back, you.
Guys watching again? Yeah, I haven't been watching. No, I I've I'm I'm I'm also an originalist. I'm an original a first eight seasonist. Yeah, but I know, but I have heard that repeatedly. Actually, people like, no, like it's it's funny again. That's good. I mean probably in a way that's like not disappointing. But I think I've moved on from like my deep love of The Simpsons and that tent. I got to come back to the Springfield Baby.
Yeah, maybe I did.
I had a segment and it did a comedy show and then you see it on Comedy Festival like four years ago, which actually was just me ripping off Space Ghost. I did like a chat show, like a comedy chat show thing. It was called Space Couch and Honor of Space Ghost.
Interesting, uh huh. Yeah.
I wrote this whole thing where so the couch that the guest would sit on was brought into space by the Russians and then got blasted by cosmic radiation and became sentient and I got Pauliff Tompkins to voice the couch so during the show we got to like talk, you know, back and forward to the couch and then we're getting gist on And had a musician friend of mine Disaster Radio aka Eyeliner if you're into vapor wave, he's like the OJ He was my you know, my
band leader on it, and we had a segment called let the Simpsons Die, so he I made up this like video package that was just a bunch of famous comedians in New Zealand going, hey, I grew up with the Simpsons. I love the Simpsons. Simpsons means everything to me. You got to pull the plug on the fucking show man the good for the good of the show. You gotta say die, it's gone, baby, it's gone.
Really seriously addressing the camera.
Yeah, totally, like said, piano music, my chords.
That's amazing. And you would have pulled the plug too soon because apparently it's back.
Apparently it's bad. Baby.
What is something you think is overrated?
I think the TikTok band or I don't know if it's fair to call it a band at this point, because we don't really know if they're you know, going to sell if my dance is gonna sell it or not, and if it will continue to exist in the United States. But to me, you know, that's very overrated. Like I'm seeing, you know, various proponents of this band.
You know, I'll be like, well, like social media is.
Bad, and you know there are data privacy concerns, which is true with all social media. Yeah, but like banning this app specifically, you know it. To me, it seems to be about two things. One which is, you know, like, oh, China, that's so scary, you know, just this kind of like really stupid.
You know you Yeah, but did you know that they like beat people up for speaking out against their government's policies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh no, that's okay, but yeah, go on, yeah, there's a China.
Do you know that they do surveillance in China that they're just the government looking at your looking at your private messages. It's out of control.
Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like everybody who ends up trying to like justify the TikTok band, like they're just showing their ass in every single way. Like to your point, it's like, if it's about privacy, then what about the fucking American companies. Yeah, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I mean, to me, this just seems like it's like a you know, either there's like some corporate interests that are you know, hoping to buy it, like.
American protect American technological hegemony, you know what I mean. It's like this app is kicking our apps asses? Are our countries apps? Asses? Oh yeah? Fuck? That's one version. And then there's just like very casual way of trying to explain away why younger people are more engaged and outraged by what is happening in the country. I like, it's fucking TikTok. It's not the fucking policies that we enact that create the hellscape in which they live that's
radicalizing them. It's this fucking thing that tells you to add more sugar to your watcher.
Yeah yeah, yeah, And you know, and I think that's a lot of it too.
It's like, you know, there's just.
They don't have, you know, control over whatever, like you know, sense like all the social media apps do censorship to to some degree, Like you know, like on TikTok, there is censorship, like you can't say sex, so people that's why they say segs, which is extremely annoying. It's really annoying when like gen Z college students will like type like segs on Twitter or something that you don't.
We don't do that here here.
I say, like grown ups, come on now.
Yeah.
But you know, there's like there's a there's different censorship right like China, and like, well it's not. There's just like I think it's isn't it. The CEO is like he is in Singapore, right, But either way, TikTok is not there. Like censorship is not based on like US foreign policy interests, right, so they're not going to like censor stuff just because it looks bad for the United States.
Like whereas like.
You know, New York Times we see you know, has like you know, if policy is to you know, censor the language of their journalists and reporters, to to not you know, to not go.
The department line.
Ye, it was a blast. It was not an Israeli bomb. It was a blast. The protests turned violent when the police started becoming violent, which is always X, we're gonna get that out of there. Just just the protests turned violent, yeah, turned violent.
Yeah, I mean it's really I think it's just like they don't.
Like when if I think about like the Iraq War a lot, and that was you know, I think like really my political awakening, Like I knew and everyone I knew knew that this like weapons of mass destruction thing was a lie. I felt like it was pretty obvious, you know. But we you know, had the media just repeating this WTMT lie again and again. And now it's not like they can't really lie to us in the same way a lot of the time because we can
see videos ourselves of what's happening. So it's more like, uh, instead of lying, it's more like just gas lighting. They're like, no, that's not what you saw. That's don't believe your eyes, you know.
Yeah, And if you disagree, like we're going to hit you.
Yeah, And the reason you disagree is actually just China has infiltrated your brain.
And that's I don't even have TikTok. I just I just saw a news clip.
Yeah, but you were people people who have TikTok told you that.
Actually, So I'm seventies e has TikTok. Yeah, it's yeah, it's uh, that's why it's like really interesting, Like we talk all the time about how the sort of propaganda playbook that the government tries to run, it's just it's diminishing returns. At this point. It's like they're trying to be like, that's actually not what's going on. Everyone's like you think we're fucking dumb or somebody like this ain't this ain't the nineties.
Bro, Yeah you were like really recently, nor could you give us a break here?
We are used to Yeah, you guys being done dude, Yeah, you know, seventeen year old fucking pushing back like that. What the fuck was that? Yeah? Fucking flamed me? What the fuck? I mean?
There's you know, there's like.
Uh, I mean, you know there's these like State Department and White House press conferences where they come out and they repeat these, you know, things that are obviously lies. You know, like for example, like one thing you know was that Israel is not blocking aid to Gaza, right, and you know, like we can see videos of like the AID trucks not being let in.
We can even.
See individuals saying like hey I've gone here to block this aid. We can see every you know, un or other humanitarians, you know, staff person saying like hey, we're trying to get this aid in. They're not letting the truck in, you know. And then they go out and they like the State Department, you know, spokes for us saying we'll go out and repeat like, oh, there's there's no evidence that they're blocking the aid and it's like they know, we know, they know, we know. So it's
just gaslighting. It's not even lying anymore.
Yeah, and yeah, and then you deal with shit boiling over like it is now because exactly can only tell somebody they're not seeing what they're seeing for so long, and I hope that it just goes away anyway. Biden, you're doing a great job courting the youth vote. Just cracking skulls on campuses, yeahs, arresting professors, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got this.
Remember Biden's campaign ad, the Charlottesville one. It was like about like restoring the soul of our nation or something like that, you know, and it's like, how's that going, man?
You know? Yeah, I mean I think that it's the same soul. It switches, you know, as as American capitalism and neoliberalism will do just just we lurch more further and further towards authoritarianism.
It's reminded me of like this more. I kept being reminded of that time in the twenty I think it was twenty fifteen, maybe twenty sixteen Republican primary where they.
Were like, oh, yeah, no, it would be great if Trump won.
Are you kidding me? We're gonna fucking demolish this guy. It's gonna be so easy. But like there was probably some level of like, and if he wins, like we can get like we become left even by being yeah, what is currently the GOP party. Yeah, like we can get away with so much we like take up we get so much more ground now by like the if
he keeps going further and further to the right. So like this morning, like as he's in from the Supreme Court, you know, his lawyers are arguing that he can do purge, and you know, meanwhile, the Democratic fucking administration is just out here pulling a Nixon administration like on on protesters. It's like, yeah, I mean that's what Having this uber right wing like dictatorial regime dangling over everyone's head like
buys them. Like I do wonder if that was like part of the calculus from the start.
I think that you know, it's like the Republicans are just going to keep getting like more and more fascist, and the Democrats can just you know, keep getting more and more fascist as well, because like you know, there's like this rhetoric that like the other the other guy, the Republicans will be worse. Like that can be it can be literally used to justify anything. Like there's no limit to what it can be used to justify.
And I think we've.
Seen that with like the Gouse of situation is like you know, you'll you'll see people like be like you know, oh well, like Trump would do ten genocides and it's.
Like what the.
And in this one, I'm like to fuck up and let Biden ignore this one? Yeah, yeah, fun to this one.
That's what's so wild too, because like, as I you know, we keep hearing about you know, the the what the what the Republican will Republicans will bring if Trump is president, But as you look at it, I'm like, I'm you're you're you're brutalizing peaceful protesters just like they were doing in twenty twenty and years past every single time, And I'm like, is it the only difference going to be It's like, well, Biden will just allow students to be
tasered and maced, and Trump would probably allow like full blown guns like maybe a week in or something like that. Yeah, but are we still dealing with the fact that we are not allowing peaceful, non violent protest to happen, because that's the crux up And yeah, I'm like, you got it. I'm doing a really bad job differentiating here, really bad job. And that's on you.
Actually, that's on you in your brain diffruciating Yeah.
So yeah, oh so you want Trump? No, I never I don't want Trump. No, I know, I never said, well it sounds like you want Trump. No, I'm saying we need to be we need to be holding ship to a higher standard, that's what And people are fucking up bad, That's what I'm saying. You said you want to be holding ship.
So dude, this guy's a fun Did you hear the studio city was a whole This guy was the whole ship man.
No, anyways, you've done me, the media done me. Yeah, got his ass.
Yeah, all right, let's say let's take a quick break and we'll be right back, and we're back. We're back, And I highly recommend everybody punk completing this. Go check out the five four and specifically the Federal Society history.
It's it's. Yeah, I'm just gonna.
Keep going, it's, it's, it's and I think that communicates plenty, but I guess so.
I always found it amazing.
Mind blowing that there was in the earliest twenty century something called the Business Plot where a bunch of industrialists and business people tried to recruit a US general to overthrow FDR's government and just be like, now we're we fucking with fascism and like we want better conditions for businesses. And it was unsuccessful, but it was so brazen, so out in the open, and just so like counter to whatever,
like what America is supposed to stand for. That it just seemed like wild to me when I learned about that, like ten fifteen years ago, and now I feel like this the Federalist Society just was that, and they just stuck with it and have basically succeeded in doing what those people, like what those the uber wealthy were trying to do in the earliest twentieth cent early twentieth century, like even early funders of the Federalist Society were like
the melon like billionaires, you know, like that gilded like literally Gilded Age money monsters who were probably involved in the Business Plot got the Federalist Society off the ground, and now we live in basically like what the Business Plot would have liked America to look like.
It feels like, yeah, yeah, absolutely, So the Federal Society. I think people like listening to this, like you might be familiar with, like the term. They know that the Federal Society is an organization. Especially when Trump was president and was making his nominations to the Supreme Court, it like came out that Trump was saying explicitly, yeah, the Federalist Society is providing me with these names, right, I got, I got the Short Life, Amie Cony Barrett, right for
Amy Cony Barrett and Neil Gorsich and Brett Kavanaugh. Those came to me from the Federal Society. So I think people like have a sense of like, well, who the fuck are these guys rights?
You know?
Yeah, right, yeah, they do.
Listicles, that's right. Number three will make your heart flutter.
But what we talk about on five to four is how the Federal Society is really kind of like the judicial wing of the Republican Party. Now, the Federal society as an organization, it bills itself, kind of presents itself. They call themselves a debate club. They say they're a network of conservative attorneys, judges, conservative legal academics, professors, right, And they say that they're just there to like talk about ideas, debate ideas in you know, conservative legal spaces,
that kind of thing. Bring together all kinds of conservatives so we can debate, and sometimes we bring liberals in two so that we see the other side and stuff like. That's how they talk about themselves, right, And the Federal Society, this organization, they have student chapters at law schools all around the country and where in fact ostensibly kind of started as a student organization at Yale and the University of Chicago in the early eighties.
But eighties student one of those grassroots student organizations funded by.
Billionaires, that's right, exactly.
So they have all the best food at their meetups, right right.
You peer behind the curtain one step and you see that, like, this is not a student organization, This is not a debate society. This is, like I said, this is the judicial wing of the Republican Party. This is the legal services provider for the Republican Party and for the conservative legal movement. So any conservative legal mission or like goal right overturning Roe v. Wade, you know, the crushing of
the administrative state. Federalist society lawyers, Federalist society professors, Federalist society judge are all on the same page about all of this stuff and working in this network to bring those cases to the Supreme Court and effectuate those kind of like conservative legal goals. Because the Republican Party has realized over the past fifty years, the Republican Party has realized that it's policy goals are minoritarian, they are not popular.
They actually wouldn't win if real democratic processes were in place to vote on what they want. So they have to use the judicial branch to reach their policy goals.
Yeah, and they're doing it to an extent, an extent where I mean now like everyone's just like, what is what is the Supreme Court now? I mean, I get that there were ideologues in the Supreme Court in years past, but I think obviously now that it's like, bro, there's no breaks on the conservative side. Now, we're just getting like decision after decision where I feel like every time people are like is it legitimate? Do we how do
we tend with it? And yeah, Like to your point, it's they're basically once some freaky billionaires, Like how do I get this done? They're like, oh, yeah, we'll figure out a way, even if we have to make up a victim, yeah, to bring to the court. And they won't even really you know, really pry into that. I mean, the last few cases were like this person isn't even a web designer, and they're trying to act as if
like she's suffering damages or something by this law. And you're like, fucking how and you get that there's a whole machine. This is an apparatus, a machine, a whole thing pushing this all.
Yeah, that's the case three h three creative really really good example of how like the Federalist Society, the conservative legal movement, and now six fucking maniacs on the Supreme Court are are are dealing with their issues that they you know, it's like we call it results oriented, Like they know the result that they want out of a case and they'll get there no matter what.
Yeah, according their brains. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah I thought they I thought they called balls, that's what. Wait, what Yeah, they call balls strikes. Oh yeah, that's right. A strike, Yeah, yeah, that's a strike.
The only aspect of the story that made me hopeful was like how successful they they've been, Like the the history of the Federalist Society shows how quickly things can change.
Now.
Granted, like things have changed for the worst, like in huge way, like just compared to the seventies when this takeover kind of first started, Like guns were not mentioned in the Republican Party's like platform until like seventy six. Prior to that, everyone was kind of like, yeah, no, the Second Amendment is about militia's like it, like it says in the Constitution, which we're supposed to be like
into I guess as a party. And like there there's a quote from a conservative justice who calls like the Second Amendment thing that we're all familiar with and like I came up assuming was like a permanent part of the Republican Party. There's like a conservative justice who's like
calls it the greatest fraud they've ever heard. Like if they can so I don't know, yeah, it just if they can shift things that far that quickly, like maybe we can shift them back to where they were like in the seventies, like in some of these cases where it's just gotten so much worse because of them. But I don't know that that was Like the thing that I found one of the most startling things I found about it was just how much they have changed and how quickly it's happened.
Yeah, Like it shows the power the federal of society's success, the success of the conservative legal movement more broadly, Like it shows the power of like building a movement, like organizing, like yeah, taking taking courts seriously, right, Like It's not it wasn't like magic that did it. It was that, like people coalesced around their common interest in opposing the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement,
and movements to expand democracy. We can say, right, they didn't like that, and so they started to organize against it. They made connections with politicians all of that stuff, and over, like I said, over the past fifty years, like they are now, you know, kind of living in the world that they built, like living with their successes. And unfortunately they're still full steam ahead because they're an incredibly powerful movement now. But I think you're exactly right, Jack, Like
people will, especially law students will ask us. When we like go to law schools and talk about this stuff, law students will ask us like they're like hopeless, They're like despondent, right, They're like, what, like this world is unacceptable? How on earth do you like fight back against the
federalist society? And I think that's because like a lot of young people like you, just you have come up into your adulthood in like a Trump presidency, like everything awful, like institutions just completely illegitimate on their face, corrupt, and you're just like how do you fix this?
Right?
But taking a step back, it's exactly like you said, Jack, like politics can actually move quite quickly, and it just means that, like movements need to be built, we also can organize ourselves against what they're doing, right, And there are lots of different methods that actually, like it's not about like building a response twin organization of the federalist society to oppose the federalist society, right, It's about like recognizing, like you know, if you're interested in social justice, if
you're a movement lawyer, all of these people like we have power that is very different from a billionaire funded my case to go to the Supreme Court should and we should be using it right, And those things can happen very quickly in politics. Historically they've happened very quickly. So this is not like, you know, the end is not written, Like the federal society as it is today is not the world that we live in forever now, like we can do something about it.
Yeah, like things ebb and flown right now. I think if you're younger, then you've been caught up like you've
only known peak federalist society power exactly. I don't know how the fuck does this change, but like anything, yeah, things opinions change, and movements begin to form, and yeah, I think this is I mean, I think because of the like depravity of the Supreme Court, it's it's doing the thing of like naturally beginning to radicalize people or at least bring people into a level of consciousness about Okay,
so wait what how Okay? And they are able to get there why because their corporations are now treated as people and can also spend unlimited sums of money that is actually affecting the legislative products. Okay, okay, okay, okay, And I think yeah, to that end, I feel like we're just I mean, we talked about this all the time.
When you look at younger people, and like when I was in college, I was like I was engaged, but not to the degree that I even see people that are in high school are now because the stakes are just completely different for them. So there is like this double edged sword thing here where with the fuckery comes increased knowledge. But yeah, it's it's it's definitely a difficult time.
Yeah, could be existing, Yeah, exactly. And I think it's about like seeing where where power is right now and how we can transfer power right so right now, it's like not about like building the most powerful liberal legal
organization to counter the federalist society. It's actually about saying, like, the federalist society has too much fucking power in our politics and in our law making and in you know, in the judiciary, the Supreme Court has too much fucking power, and so you know, things like structural reforms, movement building that shift power to the people who should have it, workers, consumers, the people, right, democratic structures of government. That's where that's where our folks it should be.
Yeah, I was thinking about that too, right, Like, you know, I guess I was. We will talk about like what we could do later on, but it's come up pretty naturally now. Is like, you know, most people look at it and go, what can we do? Like if it like like all these people are screaming and shouting that they don't want X, Y or Z, but they just don't care. And I get that, Like, you know, one version is to build up the people power to do
something like that. And then the other version too, is like if we want things like term limits or like if we want to pack the courts, we need legislators to do that, and that means like we have to count on them because based on what I've seen, our legislators move at a pace that could be described as heroin snail and so that does make me a little
bit weird. But how do you look at that? Because I think that is one of the ways too, like we do need legislation that actually arises like that intersects with the justices out of place that they know they're like, oh, okay, these are new rules now. Yeah, but how like how do you sort of look at that and what do you see as being like more effective versus the other, or if we should just be like no, no, no, like for patient, maybe this will work.
Yeah, no, No, it's not about patients. It's about like like doing some real shit, right and doing some real shit kind of like across the board, across all of We should be using all of the tools that we have for this. So when like I said, we should be decreasing the power of the Supreme Court, how do you do that? There are lots of ways. Some of the things that you've just described are really good ways
that like we should be pursuing. So packing the court, making the court bigger, making the number of justices bigger on the Supreme Court decreases the power that each individual justice has, right It spreads power over a bigger body, meaning Sam Alito, the fuck face, Brett Kavanaugh, the psycho, Clarence Thomas don't have that like that the power that's currently consultalidated in them right now. Packing the Court is a really really is a really great way to decrease
that power. And that's kind of like what you're talking about with this kind of like short term, long term thing, right, we should be using like the short term avenues that are available to us in building a long term where the Supreme Court, the Federal society, corporations have less power over all of us, right term limits, That's a really good idea. I think there are tons of ideas for structural reform of the Supreme Court, and we should be
like talking about all of them. That's when it comes to the politicians, right, it's a failure of the Democratic Party that the Republicans and the federalist society, the conservative legal movement has taken the court so seriously for decades now, and they've won what they've won, and they are like rolling around in the pig sty shit that they've created
and they love it. They're partying, right, and Democrats still are not taking the Supreme Court seriously, still not saying, hey, we need to reform this, Hey we need to we need to be doing our politics around this is right?
What like what's the fear of the Democrats to legislate the courts? Like what you know, I mean, because I get part of it too. Is like at the same time, both parties still serve corporate interest to a certain extent, so like obviously they're like, hey, you know, like maybe go that Maybe they's just the will of the donors, aren't there or what or is just historically that there's
just this like aversion to it. But that's the one thing all I see is like things happen, and then you'll see people like Chuck Schumer or Nancy Polsy're like, you know what, we got to do something about the Supreme Court, just not now, and I don't know when, but I'm gonna say that out loud, because that's what we do as a party. I Mean.
The also thing I always hear them say is that if they packed the if Democrats pack the court when they're in office, won't the Republicans just pack the court back at them? And if so, it like who does that benefit overall?
I guess yeah, yeah, Okay, So I have two thoughts about this. One is like the historical thing in history, pressure on the Supreme Court by the other branches of
government work. So most famously, probably the most famous example is FDR in the nineteen thirties, early nineteen forties, and with Congress is passing all of this New Deal legislation, right, getting people jobs as a communist, getting people jobs, getting people to work, outlying child labor, you know, more rights for workers, supporting unions, all of that kind of stuff. And the Supreme Court at that time was conservative and was striking down all of that legislation left and right.
What did FDR do? FDR threatened to pack the court. He was like, I'm about to add justices if you guys don't get in line. And what did the Supreme Court do?
They got in line.
They started, they stopped striking down that legislation so that new Deal legislation could actually go into effect. So there are historical analogs here, like we could be looking at that for historical analogs for Democrats actually using the fucking political power that they have, right. And so there's that.
And then the other thing that I was going to say to your point Jack about like this counter argument that Democrats will be like, well, Republicans will pack the court if we pack the court, and then it will be all Republicans. The thing that is like the thing that people don't stop and realize is that Republicans have packed the court. We live in a reality that is a Republican packed Supreme Court and federal judiciary. When Trump was in office, he nominated twenty five percent of the
current federal bench. All federal district court judges were nominated by Donald Trump. That's because that Republican president took the judiciary seriously and was like, oh, we have all these
spots to fill, let's go. Right, So we live in the world that is already a Republican packed court, a Republican packed judiciary, and so Democrats should be taking that seriously as as sort of a method again, one of the tools that they have, and because the result would be that when Republicans pack the courts, the results are power is consolidated in the wealthy, in corporations, et cetera.
If Democrats would pack the courts, the results would be people have more power, workers have more power, women have more power, minorities have more power. That's very hard to take away once it's given. Right, So the threat, but I don't know a generation to generations from now that then Republicans would come back and pack the court. And if Democrats packed the court first, that is so remote. Like, let's actually do something with the power that we have
to give power to more people. And that is doing politics, That is doing good governance, right, And yeah, I'm not worried about Republicans packing the court in fifty years. I'm worried about the Republican packed court right now.
Right right, because it's there. It's like it's more the Democrats are unpacking than packing exactly.
You're just letting it being packed.
Really, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
The last thing that I just wanted to cover on the Federal Society is there's been this narrative of well, the Conservatives, now that they overturned Row, are kind of like the dog that caught the car, and it's kind of this hopeful thing of like, yeah, but that that was all they cared about, right, and now they accomplished that, it's unpopular, they're kind of fucked.
What are they going to do?
And I think you specifically framed it as like the Federal Society is a service provider to the Republican Party, like they will move in accordance with whatever the Republican Party wants. Like the gun thing didn't start with the Federalist Society. It started with like Reagan, and you know, the Republican Party kind.
Of adopted some of these nra and.
Then the Federalist Society is like, all right, well we are the judicial wing, as you said, of the Republican Party, so we're just going to get in line. So they are going to be you know, as Trump you know, continues to wheel power or you know, let's say he wins the next election, they are going to be a fascism machine like that. It's not going to be a thing where they're like, all right, well this is the
bridge too far. I think, like January sixth, the fact that they wouldn't like ratify a separate set of electors like the Supreme Court, I think made misled me to be like, so the Supreme Court like ultimately is not going to just go along with Trump's bullshit. But like a lot of people in the Federalist society who like put those justices on the Supreme Court were like guns blazing, like January sixth, like election overturning, like conspiracy theorists like that.
One of the founders was like, guys, this is too much like Trump shouldn't be allowed to run for president. And they were like, you can't call yourself the founder anymore.
Yeah, this is what his title.
And he was like, I'm sorry, I like Donald Trump again. January sixth was tight, but it's just like I do think the near future is just as dangerous, and you know, there there are a lot of really dark possibilities with the Federalist Society just as much as like the recent past.
Yeah, yeah, you know, we said that the Federalist Society, you know, provided the list for Trump for who he was nominating to the Supreme Court. Those justices, in fact, the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court right now are currently members of the Federal Society or have been at points in their past. Just want to make it clear, like this is this is a network that is like, uh, this is a network that's promoting from within its own ranks.
These are their own people, right, And there's not a separation. There's not a separation. There is not a separation between the Federalist Society and the people on the Supreme Court.
Yeah.
I think January sixth is like a really interesting like
moment in history. I guess you could say for the Federalist Society because I think that if we're kind of calling the Federal Society like a party, a political party, it's it's not officially, but if we think about it like that, they learned lessons from January sixth, right, and I think a really big lesson they learned was that you know, they can as they were in January sixth, leading up to January sixth and afterwards, in all of the litigation, whether it was Trump's fraud claims about votes,
whether it was about you know, states certifying their electors, all of it, Federal Society lawyers had their hands on all of that. We're directing all of that. There are Federal Society lawyers who were actually took part in planning
the January sixth stuff like specifically. But I think the lesson learned was that the public at large probably was left with a bit of distaste about the actual coup part, right, the actual invasion of the capital part, right, whereas the Federalist Society could have and I think now has like learned the lesson that it can still be behind the scenes doing all of the legal machinations, all of the legal stuff, the legal work that needs to be done
to effectuate the result that they want, which is Trump winning the presidency next time. Right, And so yeah, I think they've learned that lesson, and they know that the messy coup literal riot part was maybe something that would like kind of made it overall unsuccessful. But they know that they have allies on the court up and down
the Federal Judiciary. The lawyers have been working on this stuff for years, meaning like what kind of cases to bring, they're ready for the litigation, and yeah, they're the Federalist Society has always been really good at this exactly, the behind the scenes work where they're not saying like the Federalist Society is bringing this case. The Federal Society isn't suing anybody. It's people in this network, right.
Yeah, they don't give up. They've been They try and try, and you know, they were trying to overturn Row for decades and then they just kept trying different things until they found a strategy packing the court with Federalist Society people that actually worked exactly. So, yeah, this isn't going to stop until an alternate force is put to work that stops it in counterbalance.
Yeah, and you know, like a lot of legal analysts or journalists media at the time that Dobbs came down, which overturned Roe v. Wade, a lot of commentators were like, oh, well, what's the Republican Party going to do? Now, what's the Federal Society going to do?
Now?
Like they they won, They got there like big, they achieved their big project of overturning Row, and now it seems like they're going to be like kind of disorganized and they don't really know what they're working on now. False false false false.
R Right, it's the was like check made assholes.
Wait wait you just took it. Y'are after I embryos? Yeah right, exactly right.
So it's like, again if we're thinking of them as kind of like a political party, like now it's more like a normal political party where there's different bowls of interest, less focused on the one single issue that they did coalesce around over you know, since since Roe v. Wade, since the early seventies. But they have tons of energy, tons of political will, and and again what they're working on is even more fascist stuff coming down the pipeline.
And it's all centered not just their opposition to Roe v. Wade and abortion rights. It's all centered on their opposition to the New Deal, to the civil rights movement, to the women's rights movement, and to expanding democracy. So the wildest, most fascist shit you can think of, legally, they're working on it right now. It's absolutely coming down the pipeline.
Whether that's like rolling back protections for women and queer people, whether that is saying you don't have a right to contraception, whether you know, we're talking about like prisoner's rights, the rights of criminal defendants, all kinds of stuff. They are absolutely still working on it. They are not disorganized now that they quote unquote one overturn at robi ways.
I think the only part that I think they're like conflating what the aims are of the Federalist Society and like the broader conservative judicial movement with like the electoral politics of people that are a down ballot of Trump who are like, ooh, I don't know what to do now. It's like yeah, sure, in that narrow sense, yes exactly,
it's difficult now to campaign. But in terms of like a movement, like we're already saying, it's like they want to basically, they really want to go back to the nineteenth century at best, you know.
Yeah, yeah, and that's the Federal Society being that service provider. So you best believe they are hooking up with Republican and conservative politicians and being like, here's what you can campaign on. We're working on this. This is what donors care about right now, right yeah, yeah.
Sarah Marshall from the podcast you're wrong about talks about how the right wing takeover of media and of politics over the past like fifty years has been very similar to like the panics that the right wing was having about like communism, like the Red Scare and like Satanism and stuff like it's been this you know, smaller like minority group that has imposed its ideals through. Yeah, just like behind the scenes infiltration and all the shit that they were worried about.
Like I feel like their.
Concerns around the Satanic panic and like the Red Scare, we're just like them telling on themselves or giving themselves ideas about like how to do this shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Republicans, conservatives in general, especially social conservatives, they'll they're they're really good at making the issues they care about into culture war bullshit, right, like really firing up a base, really like yeah, firing up this moral panic about stuff. And then when you like take a step back, you're like, hey, people voting, like you're talking about mail in ballots like what you know. So yeah, yeah, that's as tried and true tale as old as time for sure.
Yeah.
All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back to talk about what's happening on the Supreme Court this week.
We'll be right there a lot and we're back. We're stand on a stool, stand on a stool. I don't care ta stand on a stool, stand on a stool, all right?
Hashtag Neil Young, Neil Young.
So just a quick roundup of some Trump news. Yeah, so you don't get too bogged down here, And because we don't have a ton of time, we'll just we'll.
Just rip through, all right. Where do we start. He's spent over seventy six million dollars in legal fees, and the main account that he's been using to fund all this is down to only a couple million. So people are like, oh, he's gonna have to start using the rnc's money. But I don't. I feel like so many these headlines are written in a way to be like they're coming home to roost soon. It's like he's always gonna find fucking millions of dollars in the couch cushions.
Shit has been coming home to roost for fucking eight years.
I know, I know this is the one that's gonna get him. CHRISP.
Maggie Haberman, your father went out for cigarettes and Maggie Haberman tunes. Oh well, I think he's pretty upset. I don't know, I know him pretty well.
Yes, he's upset. He's really this time Jack. He seems so mad at me.
That's a real story. Yeah, I know, so mad at me. Like you should have seen the look he was being such a bitch.
To me his self. Tanner was just dripping off his channel.
Someone should make a fucking TV show about the Maggie Haberman Trump romance.
Oh wow, that'll be a great, good show. It could be done pretty quick.
I knew how to make a show. I was about to say if I knew how to make a show, but then you just figured it out for me.
Yeah yeah, just put it in a co pilot and be like, uh yeah, let me give me a three acts structured romance.
This is what I'm gonna put in Haberman Trump love murder.
Okay, I do it.
Hand had gliding.
See here you go. Hang gliding is what was gonna be my next suggestion. Yeah, like whatever, it doesn't matter. Skuy's limit. Let Ai figure it out. The sky is the limit with hang gliding. And speaking of limited consequences, there's a lot of reports about how Trump's like violated his gag order like at least ten times in the last month, and like prosecutors like, oh, are you gonna fucking do it is a contemptive cord of a fucking real thing. It doesn't seem like it is. So that's a big shock.
Turns out gag orders are suggestions.
Yeah, merely like yeah, like traffic signals and like yeah. But then also his polling number numbers continue to tread downward with independence, but we're still seven months out, so
we'll see what's happening. Uh, there's that. But the real fun part is Jesse Waters recently he had to cope hard with the fact that Trump just looks so withered in court, like and there's all this talk about he's gonna be fucking in charge of that courtroom, and he's just been like tiny, little sleepy like rip van winkled in the courtroom. So you know, Jesse Waters, with his gigantic brain, was like, I actually have a counterpoint as to why Donald Trump like fucking shouldn't be having to
stand trial. And here it is, and but the guy needs exercise.
He's usually golfing, and so you're gonna put a man who's almost steady sitting in a room like this on his butt for all that time. It's not healthy.
You know how big of a health nut I am.
He needs sunlight, and he needs activity.
He needs to be walking around, he needs action.
It's really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that, And anytime he moves, they threaten to throw him in prison.
Yeah, cool and unusual punishment is making being unhoused a crime? That's yeah, that's that's cool if we're talking about the Eighth Amendment here. But I get it. But I guess Trump is too old then, is what you're saying. Yeah, to be sitting there.
They're trying the like I had. I had this thought when the reports first started coming in that he kept like falling asleep and farting up the courtroom, that like he might be trying to project an air of incompetence, like like the legal sense of incompetence, like incompetence stand trial sort of thing, because that's an old mafia tactic.
Trump is trained in the like mafia, you know, art of doing battle from you know, his early days, and like that's that's what the mafia would always do whenever like a a capo or a don would like stand trial. They would frequently be like, oh, yeah, he's lost his marbles.
Lingering. I think it's a legal term.
Yeah, but like that was Uncle June did that in sopranos, Yeah, junior cororado soprano robe.
There's a famous one. I think it was Vincent Gigante or used to wear the bathrobe. This is mob fact ship.
Remember we talked about mobat like New York mob footage YouTube to watch most.
Of my fucking I'm watching footage of fucking mobsters faking be insane on the streets of New York in the nineteen seventies, grainy footage.
Baby, Yeah, I know malingering when I see it.
I see more coppos. I've seen more coppos and worn out robes shuffling down the street.
And I see more coppos than a guitar shop. I guess you call that's for my music heads out there. But like, I guess it is funny because like truly to fit the standard of like incompetency to stand trial, you have to show mental like you're mentally incompetent to mentally competent to stand trial. But It's like, are they trying to thread the most elegant needle, Like too incompetent to stand trial, but competent enough to be the most powerful person on earth.
Yeah, weird, weird line to try and draw where you like, this guy just needs to be out running around like a golden retriever. He needs sunlight and like a yard that he can run around.
He need golf.
Yeah, or he's waters Man. Jesse Waters went to Trinity too, by the way, Trinity College in Hartford where I went, and so did Tucker Carlson classmates. They turn out a diverse group.
Yeah right, Yeah, what a fucking combo. Tucker Carlson, Jesse Waters crofton.
Tucker was my classmate and I knew Tucker in college. Wow, that's true. I've told you that before. Yeah, but yeah, but I never do Jesse Waters even much younger, but but same, you know, I mean, I just think colleges, I don't know, they should.
Have you tell us you were Tucker Carlson's classmate, like you must have been in passing. Yeah, yeah, I definitely told you.
Yeah, I mean I I knew him to say hi. He was not like super well known on campus or anything. He was just seemed like an average rich kid, you know, like most of the kids who went to Trinity were We're like people who are just stopping off at college because it was the next step to whatever job their dad had sort of set up for him. I ended up there because my college counselor was just like, you got the this is the best school you got into. So I was like, I was just eighteen and drunk
and I didn't know. So I was like, okay, I'll go yeah, you know. And then I went there and I was like, what is this? You know, wasn't we rowing boats?
About boat?
What was the main thing you have to do before you get rich is row boats?
Around it? What is kind of weird? Yeah? On board?
Yeah yeah, I mean that's really the weird culture of the rich people, you know, where you have to go to college and smoke pot and row boats and then you get to get your dad's job and then you just go you.
Know, yeah, manual labor at leisure activity.
Yeah, it's just weird. Anyway, it's a weird culture. And Tucker was just another He had a signet ring. I remember.
He just looked like the rich.
Yeah, like all those kids had gold rings with their initials on them. I just remember that was something that I didn't have, you know, so I noticed, you noticed. It was fun to be there because I got all this anger, you know that I kept with me, you know,
for the rest of my life. And that's where it fed into you know, Fugazi and all the things I love, like ended up being like things I got sort of channeled too because I had to try and be a punk rocker at Trinity College, which is like completely insane. That's like not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to go to art school where there's other punk rockers. You're not supposed to try to be a punk rocker at Trinity College.
But that's what I did.
Yeah, Like it makes no sense, Like, you know, what are you doing here? You know, I'm like, I'm doing my I'm taking it down from the inside. I'm taking it down from the inside place else to go.
You're paying, but you're paying for it.
You know, because my dad just gave me. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
But yeah, I knew Tucker in college.
He was a jerk. He I found out from other people who knew him better that he was racist. Then his dad used to send him John Birch Society stuff in the mail, which he would read that, which he would read aloud in his dorm room. So I look at all these kids as abused children. Really, I mean you look at kids. But you know, Tucker Carlson's a kid. All these people are stuff in there. Whatever their parents told them.
You know, that's the story about it. Like you heard about his mother like leaving him at Ay. She was like a liberal, Yes, she went off to be like a hippies. He hates hippies and stuff. What a what a moron?
I mean, like he's like, I hate hippies, Like, come on, really.
Because you're actually the one who fucked my mom.
Yeah, that's embarrassing, man.
But I mean, like, did you get over that? Like I'm gonna avenge my whole life trying to avenge my mother's honor against the hippies.
Me, Okay, why don't you.
Just fucking settle down?
What about that? Yeah? Settling the fuck down?
Yeah? Anyway, So yeah that that Uh Jesse Waters. I just think those those institutions like Harvard that turn out like Tom Cotton and stuff, where why are considered the best institutions you know, Trinity is considered this great school and it's just this diploma mill for.
Scumbags, which I just had. It just has cultural momentum for being like finishing schools for the elite. And then from there we're like, that's the that's what we were trying to aspire to. That's a good one. The US News on World Reports, So that's a good one.
Yeah, if you're turning out fucking people like Jesse Waters and Carlson, you know, you might want to look into like what your culture is. But of course there's no I mean that.
Would actually be good, like if somebody actually released a second magazine that was like US News and World Reports, like college rankings, but you actually looked at the shitheads that they had turned out, like actually helped them for like the worst people who they actually Yeah, I mean Harvard would be a fucking disaster, like the some of the people that Harvard's put out there.
That's a good behind the Bastards episode, Yeah, like the worst of Harbor, the worst of biggest Bastards, biggest. Yeah, control, we could do a magazine. We could do a magazine, Jack, if you want to put up the money, I'll do it.
Us I mean in my work, blaw.
The world, I'll be in charge of the editorial stuff. You just give me money.
Yeah.
In my experience, magazines are a great investment that never go.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're coming back, just like vinyl.
Yeah oh yeahh coming back vinyl.
Really magazines not so much.
All right, should we talk about the Voyager? I want to talk about the Voyager? Yeah.
Yeah, this is a nice small victory for us probe heads. So the Voyager, just for our younger listeners, launched in nineteen seventy seven, became the first human made object to venture into interspellar space. Decades later, I don't think I'm realized how rare it is for anything to come from or go into interstellar interstellar space. Like, you know, we have our Solar System. That's where basically everything that we
have observed up close has come from. Like it's that there's there was that big deal about Muamua recently because it was one of the first interstellar if not the first interstellar objects, like something that came from outside of our Solar System that we actually observed.
I love that.
Yeah, that things really cool. It was just it was going so fast. They were like, wait that can't have come from inside our Solar system. It's like flying from from outside. What was happening? Take me with you still haven't given a great explanation on that, But anyways, we sent a spaceship in nineteen seventy seven that has done the opposite, has left our solar system, has traveled into interstellar space. And it's not just a probe designed to
relay scientific information. It also contains like a basically like a mixtape for aliens, like it's actually a gold plated record, and the tracks include everything from an Australian Aboriginal song to Chuck Berry to someone named a work by somebody named Johnny Bagpipes, I Believe No, I'm Sorry, to Bamboo Flutes,
to Bach Beethoven, Chuck Berry. And it holds also a three paragraph letter written by Jimmy Carter, who relayed our desire to join a community of galactic civilizations, which seems like kind of I don't know, quaint, I like you.
Like the stuff.
Some of it's dated, you know, like ary a rotary phone.
Right, and a community of galactic civilizations makes more sense when you realize that they launched it three weeks after Star Wars came out.
President Jimmy Carter made the with you yeah where It'll get shirt.
Yeah yeah. But so Voyager one launch, Voyager two launch soon after. Pretty massive undertaking when you realize that, like the computer that is on board that is like controlling all of this stuff sending the information back to us has like far less computing power than like a modern day keyfob for like a car like that. That is the level of computational firepower that is on this thing. And it's still out beyond the edges of our solar system,
still transmitting back to us. But basically last year it stopped speaking coherently, and NASA was like, I don't know, like it seems like it just had like a stroke of some sort, because it's like it's ending back utter gibberish, alternating ones and zeros instead of binary code.
I remember that when that first came out, the conspiracies around it were like, it's happening, dude. Someone someone got ahold of the Voyager and got a hold of.
The Voyager and they're like texting us.
They're trying to tell but they don't know binary so they look so dumb.
Right now, They're like this album sucks, that's what they're messaging back to it.
Yeah, but say your theory, you got a theory. Yeah, I was actually good.
I didn't realize other people I thought that I was.
I was gonna say that.
Like it's just got intercepted by aliens and they're just like trying to text us.
They're yeah, they're like, yeah, what does this think that button do? Yeah? Rightways, they figured it out.
It was like some corruption of the computer's memory, so they fixed it.
They actually like fixed.
A forty something forty seven year old computer that is around fifteen billion miles away and like decorrupted the memory, and now it is once again sending messages back that take twenty two point five hours to even reach us because they're so far away.
That's got to be a great gig, huh to take a day to get there. So what I'm gonna just I'm gonna go sleep in my car in the parking lot, if that's cool, right way, when the signal comes back, you know, I'm actually go home, yef. You know, it's twenty two and a half hours.
Things, it is going to stop. It's going to reach its limit to be able to communicate back to Earth. In twenty twenty five, so we're we're at the end of its lifespan because basically the power source that is steering the satellite, you know, the thing that is communicating back and forth to us, like the thing that's required to point their communication dishes towards Earth will lose its power.
I think you're referring to the gas engine. Yes, exactly, I mean nineteen seventy seven.
Yeah, it's engines should have letted gas probably would have gone under. But there's this.
Guardian article about this. This just points out that like they will outlive the Pyramids, they'll probably outlive us. They'll probably outlive the planet Earth and will be the only record of our existence. I mean, assuming that we don't launch a bunch more of these.
But yeah, shouldn't we update that? Like I get like, shout out Carl Sagan for putting that together. What is the return on investment? Though, Miles, that is the question, right. I feel like the people of the outer and other intergalactic communities should at least know about I think you should leave, you know, on some rights that we've had on this planet too. It's just we also have fun too. It's not just music. You know, we do. We do dumb shit too.
It does feel like, yeah, the the amount that you were able to fit onto a gold plated record is not right, probably not enough for people, like we probably need to do another into these.
We need to do updates, and that should be at the same place where you can get a fucking cat scan. Yes, we should send a small test and a goddamn whatever Space updates, right, send new Space probes with your music in them. And then you don't really send them though, because you just can't. You obviously can't. But you take people's money and you take their music, and then you you.
Know, yeah, that's a good idea.
Put it in the dumpster out back and say you launched it.
Send your album, yeah, your demo, yeah you can, but you're also the recording facility too. We also can record the demo here too. Man.
Oh yeah, we do all that.
We do it all, man, I got back end, I got it all. May don't even need an instrument, man, just hop in the booth, just get it out, man, I'll send it right up to space.
Man, aliens are gonna love your demos.
Yeah. Yeah, it's just like a hard drive that is like just traveling into deep intergalactic space and you can like upload people's albums onto it be like upload your album to eternity. Yeah, you would have Jason signed.
You didn't know that, right, Just put me the genre you do.
It's called krung step. Yeah it's krungbin but you want to Yeah, you got it all? All right, that's gonna do it.
For this week's weekly Zeitgeist, Please like and review the show if you like.
The show means the world of Miles.
He he needs your validation, folks. I hope you're having a great weekend and I will talk to you Monday. Byepat