00;00;00;00 - 00;00;13;11 George You know the thing I appreciate about these Americans? We finally got an excuse to be genuinely pissed. 200 years of trying to be nice about it. And now they finally showed us what we all thought about those guys to begin with. Bunch of hosers. 00;00;13;13 - 00;00;15;22 Lowtax Well, buddy, what do you think we should do about it? 00;00;15;27 - 00;00;20;14 George Here's the thing. What's the one thing they won't expect us to do? 00;00;20;16 - 00;00;22;27 Lowtax Beat a Florida team in the Stanley Cup finals. 00;00;22;28 - 00;00;45;04 George Well, yeah, but. But the thing we're really going to get them with is a central banker. That's right. Guy who went to Harvard. Hockey player and monetary policy expert. Why not? A global demise of the dollar? More like rampage of the loonie. Nothing says elbows up like peace. Order, good governance and an overnight interest rate set at a level to encourage both moderate inflation and strong economic growth. 00;00;45;06 - 00;00;51;24 Lowtax You know, I agree, it's time to drop the gloves and go for a ten pin. 00;00;51;27 - 00;01;01;14 George Welcome to Normal Men, a podcast from four very normal men about a very not normal time to be alive and experiencing the world. My name is George. 00;01;01;16 - 00;01;02;27 Propter I'm Propter. 00;01;03;00 - 00;01;05;07 Lowtax I'm Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer. 00;01;05;10 - 00;01;07;03 GLHM And I am GOLIKEHELLMACHINE. 00;01;07;05 - 00;01;25;21 George And this week we've got an update on the story of killer Abrego. Garcia. We've got discussion of the absolute mess the federal government's entire existence has become thanks to Doge. And we're going to preview the upcoming Canadian election. So strap in. We hope you enjoy this, welcome podcast. 00;01;25;24 - 00;01;40;19 Propter So prompter here, I'm going to start us off with a little discussion about Kilmer, Abrego. Garcia. We didn't really set out to make a Kilmer Abrego. Garcia podcast when we started doing this, but that's kind of where the news is taking us. And so we're talking about him again this week. We have some good news for a change. 00;01;40;22 - 00;01;59;12 Propter Senator, Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, who is kind of the kind of the fed worker, senator, he's, a former fed himself. He's he's been around DC his entire life. Went down to El Salvador to try to get a good Garcia, his constituent, out of prison. I didn't think this was going to work. Maybe other people had more optimism than I did, I don't know. 00;01;59;14 - 00;02;18;20 Propter But after beating his head against against a wall for a couple of days, he got stonewalled by the Salvadoran VP. He tried to visit the prison and got blocked by cops on the road. The president of El Salvador actually produced Kilmer Abrego Garcia to meet with Van Hollen, in a restaurant down there, which is fantastic news because it confirmed that Garcia Tabaco Garcia is, in fact, alive. 00;02;18;23 - 00;02;45;26 Propter During that conversation, it became apparent that Abrego Garcia had actually been moved out of court to a different Salvadoran prison about a week prior. Which is somewhat in conflict with declarations that the State Department had given to the judge in the case. So that's going to be something to watch as we go forward. Because it suggests that Buchele is not necessarily keeping his American partners fully informed as to what he's doing with prisoners down there. 00;02;45;28 - 00;03;04;17 Propter This is this is obviously a case that was extremely high profile. By the time the members of the United States Supreme Court know a prisoner's name. That's something that if you're in Berkeley situation as a as a U.S. client, you might want to start paying better attention to in terms of how you treat the guy, because you might have to produce him at some point. 00;03;04;19 - 00;03;22;08 Propter And it would be a real problem for you. If anything had happened to him. So what it sounds like what happened from the timeline. Is that okay? We pulled him out of court and moved him to what we've we now have information on is is a private room at another prison to kind of keep him safe and segregated. 00;03;22;10 - 00;03;51;10 George It's also worth dwelling for a moment on the political showmanship that Van Hollen engaged in. Yeah. And I say that in complimentary terms. This was an effort to create buzz around a subject that needed attention and he was booked on what, I think six different morning shows on Sunday in the wake of this effort to generate attention and, you know, go and see his constituent in a foreign prison. 00;03;51;10 - 00;04;25;10 George And it was just so nice, so refreshing to see him pick up the same sort of mantle that we've seen. Cory Booker, pick up earlier this year with his, record breaking filibuster. He took out Strom Thurmond's record and what AOC and Bernie have been doing in terms of local rallies around the country. Just seeing people take advantage of an opportunity to get attention and and pick it up because that sort of that sort of self-interest is going to is what we need to see from Democratic Party politicians to actually push back in this instance. 00;04;25;13 - 00;04;45;19 GLHM Things are also about to heat up, I think, for for Buckley, because we've got more, Congress folks going down to El Salvador. So I saw that Maxine Dexter, who is East Portland's representative, is headed down. I saw that Max Maxwell Frost, is headed down, and I think I saw 2 or 3 other House reps are going. 00;04;45;19 - 00;04;53;26 GLHM So the El Salvador airport is about to or, about to get some visits from a number of different United States congresspeople. 00;04;53;26 - 00;05;10;12 Propter Yeah, I think I think the one thing that's happening here is that is the Congress people are realizing that this is this is a way to get that kind of media purchase. One of the major issues that the Democratic Party had in the last election and over the last several years is that our representatives and senators can can do anything. 00;05;10;12 - 00;05;32;27 Propter They can do a press conference, they can stand on their head, they can scream at the top of their lungs, and they don't get any media attention. All of a sudden, they have something that's getting media attention, that's getting press, not just, inside the party, but outside the party. It's driving significant fundraising, which is, I think, in this case, mostly useful as a barometer for attention rather than as the goal in and of itself. 00;05;33;03 - 00;05;55;26 Propter Chris. Chris Van Hollen is not up until 2028. He's got enough money to destroy whoever challenges him. He's not, in any meaningful sense, imperiled electorally. But he is going to have some extra dollars to splash around through with the his leadership PAC to other candidates that hopefully buys, his wing, his, his brand of foreign policy. A little bit of a bigger seat at the table. 00;05;55;26 - 00;06;11;08 Propter And for what it's worth. Van Hollen, I think has been very good on foreign policy from the dovish side. He was way out in front, on, Gaza relief, before in ways before I expected him to have given his constituency something I. 00;06;11;11 - 00;06;40;26 Lowtax I'd like to stress here. There's been a lot written in in the last 30 years that it seems Donald Trump has been in the white House, and a lot of a lot of pundits have been encouraging, Democrats to shy away from the immigration issue. Something I'd really stress is that the public opinion is is malleable. You know, what Van Hollen did here really brought attention, really changed the conversation. 00;06;41;02 - 00;06;43;29 Lowtax Good. Good on you, Chris. Keep it up. 00;06;44;01 - 00;07;07;00 Propter If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably somewhere between center and left. But one thing that I think the entire anti-Trump massive has been really thirsty for is wins of any sort. That right now it's just a relentless stream of extremely bleak news and every time we've seen hints of a pushback from the opposition party that's been really rewarded by voters and by eyeballs. 00;07;07;06 - 00;07;09;07 GLHM Not just wins, but just battles. 00;07;09;07 - 00;07;40;29 Propter Even in addition to public opinion. Moving on on the set of issues, maybe as a result of this, the other major development we've had in El Salvador, deportation, is that, Scotus, stepped into the fray again in a way that I don't think they expected to have, too. You may recall that a bunch of these cases had gotten punted out of out of DC area courts and over to Texas, in spite of the existing order from Scotus, to make sure that everybody who they're deporting in this way has habeas rights and so on and so forth. 00;07;41;02 - 00;08;04;05 Propter I tried to sneak what sounds like several busloads of Venezuelans onto planes, to El Salvador, to court, late last Friday night and in the middle of the night. I think this came out at about 230 in the morning. Scotus issued an order saying you can't do that. Don't do anything else with these guys until Scotus specifically decides further. 00;08;04;08 - 00;08;25;21 Propter This is not just highly unusual. This is this is a freak comet meteor event. This is a very, very, very rare thing. And I think it indicates that maybe the Supreme Court is waking up to the bad faith of the Trump administration. They're recognizing that they have to engage a little bit more specifically, if they're to get out ahead of bad actions. 00;08;25;22 - 00;08;46;20 GLHM I think that, it would be comical if if the results weren't so serious and so deadly, but just the idea of all of these busses headed to the airport, and then someone having to call bus drivers and telling them, no, no, no, no, no, turn around, come back. Is is absurd. Like, it's it's absolutely ridiculous. 00;08;46;26 - 00;08;59;04 Propter Yeah. And doctor machine's not speculating there either. Like, there's actually video of these busses headed to the airport and then turning right around, in time. In time. Let's go to issuing this injunction. Like, like that's actually a thing that verifiably happened. 00;08;59;06 - 00;09;10;07 George I mean, the context to the, order dropped at like 1 a.m. eastern time on, technically an hour after Good Friday ended, Easter weekend. 00;09;10;10 - 00;09;12;01 Lowtax Which Sam Alito was thrilled about. 00;09;12;02 - 00;09;32;07 George Exactly. They rushed it out before he could drag his feet permanently on, dissent. And they basically said, he's going to send that later. There will be a dissent from Alito, but he's gonna send that later. So he got to keep his law clerks, working all through the Saturday before, Easter Sunday, which, I'm sure made a lot of people very happy. 00;09;32;14 - 00;09;52;25 George I just like they they really took this seriously in a way that I can't recall the last time the Supreme Court, the Roberts court, taking a Trump administration situation seriously to the same degree. I mean, they treated it like it was, you know, a coal baron wanting to dump a bunch of stuff into a stream. It was really something else. 00;09;52;27 - 00;10;16;17 Propter I think we become very used to to go to slow walking the shadow docket and trying to provide every opportunity for the administration to do essentially what they want in that kind of interim period when there's still orders flying around. This was the opposite of that. This was this was Scotus moving very, very quickly in response to what I guess they saw as an imminent threat to something to either their authority or the rule of law or something. 00;10;16;19 - 00;10;33;24 Propter It was literally that same night that Drew Anson, who's a name you might recall from previous episodes, and I'm sure we're going to see him lying to a bunch of other courts in future. But he was in front of the trial judge that same night, telling the judge that he was not aware of any plans to deport people, that day or the next day. 00;10;33;26 - 00;10;39;05 Propter So the amount of bad faith here is really glaring and unavoidable. 00;10;39;07 - 00;11;04;01 GLHM That it feels like this is a situation that they can't continue to go on forever. Right? Because what we've seen multiple times now is ice. Presumably, if you give the best possible, like best possible faith to the Department of Justice, Ice lies to the Department of Justice, whomever it is, and it's usually Drew Hansen. But others as well. 00;11;04;08 - 00;11;26;21 GLHM They lie to the judge. The judge calls them on a lie. The DOJ calls back to Ice and tells them, no, no, no, no, stop. Whatever you were doing. It's such a ridiculous force of bad faith. And it feels like even even for the Supremes, this is something that that's just embarrassing to, to even try to play along with. 00;11;26;27 - 00;11;36;12 GLHM Unless you're Alito or Thomas who are embarrassed by nothing, ever. 00;11;36;14 - 00;12;08;25 Propter So anyway, as long as we're talking about Trump administration bad faith, we also put together a little whip around. Just a little update on what I think is maybe kind of the forgotten issue of the Trump administration, which is all these freaking cuts the DOJ's making to everything they can get their hands on, and, go back home machine, has been doing what I think is some super interesting journalism, not just opinion stuff, but actually going out there and talking to people, in the footsteps of Studs Terkel, on the job cuts particularly related to this. 00;12;08;27 - 00;12;12;10 Propter So, doctor machine, what do you got? 00;12;12;12 - 00;12;36;14 GLHM So it's all bad news. So, so there are a lot of different things going on, right? And, and one of the things that's a little bit difficult to try to pull apart is what is doge versus what is general federal incompetence versus what is OPM, because these are all three different things and they're different work streams. 00;12;36;15 - 00;12;58;22 GLHM But we're just going to kind of talk about Doge to begin with. The the U.S. aid cuts, I think are probably the most severe and the most substantial and the most disturbing things that Doge has done. Everything else is bad, too. But the U.S. aid cuts are are measured more in lives, than they are in jobs. 00;12;58;25 - 00;13;11;08 GLHM And so we're talking about literally millions, of orphans, and preventable deaths that will take place as a result of these U.S. aid cuts. 00;13;11;10 - 00;13;33;15 Propter So just just to give a little background on this to people who may not be intimately familiar with with, federal agencies, U.S. aid is essentially the humanitarian relief arm of the United States government. It's relatively small in terms of budget. Before the Doge cat started, we spent a little bit north of $20 billion a year on it. 00;13;33;17 - 00;13;58;27 Propter They tend to run programs where they're looking for the biggest bang for the buck, in terms of humanitarian impact versus money spent. U.S. aid has been criticized at various times as being anywhere from a American influence, up to being an outright CIA front. Believe the truth of those allegations alone. For right now, if U.S. aid was an intelligence app masquerading as humanitarian aid, then frankly, we should put the boys from Langley in charge of a lot more humanitarian aid. 00;13;58;27 - 00;14;13;19 Propter They've done a tremendous amount of good around the world, for a very long time. And, we've got some some ballpark numbers here. If, if Mr. Machine Esquire could, could speak to what those, those death towers look like so far. 00;14;13;21 - 00;14;39;20 GLHM So death toll is a terrible way to put this, but it's really the only way to put it. So there's an estimated 103 global deaths per hour every hour. Currently, we're looking at around 60,000 dead adults. That's what that breaks down to. And it breaks down to 140,000 dead children, for a un a total of around 200,000 preventable additional deaths. 00;14;39;23 - 00;15;06;17 GLHM And it's important to remember that these are preventable deaths. These are these are directly attributable to the cuts to U.S. aid. Health care resources seem to be the hardest hit when it comes to U.S. aid. And it's a little strange because, there are things that Doge didn't really touch a whole lot of in U.S. aid funding, but health care, they just absolutely obliterated. 00;15;06;21 - 00;15;28;11 Propter Yeah. So if you die, if you dive into the breakdown on the projections, we have something on the order of about about 20% of these deaths are coming from are coming from, papa, cessation. Papa is are the American program the great utilitarian triumph, under George W Bush where we started giving Aids and HIV medicine to to sub-Saharan Africa. 00;15;28;14 - 00;15;48;09 Propter And it's a huge success. It's one of these things that makes the, the the makes the effective altruist. Guys heads explode. Because if when you do the math on how many lives Papa has saved, it's phenomenal. It's, it's it's one of the highest impact programs in the history of the world. Anyway. So about 40,000 of these deaths so far are papa rolling. 00;15;48;13 - 00;15;58;18 Lowtax Although let's let's note that, unlike the effective altruism guys, Pep Far has not had a hot boy. Summer, as far as I'm aware. 00;15;58;20 - 00;16;22;17 George It's gotten it got so good in terms of how broadly we were distributing, HIV suppressing medication that it was conceivable that we were going to end HIV as an active virus in human populations in our lifetimes. Like that was that was reporting and studies were done around that in the past couple of years that were like, you know, obviously things can change, but this is the realistic trajectory here. 00;16;22;17 - 00;16;45;16 George The people that are most at risk get access to this medication. And our medication has gotten so good that, if you're on any of these drugs, you are zero risk of passing this disease to anyone else. So we will be able to extinguish it at some point. And Doge has gone from we are going to get rid of HIV, which is just an indescribable thing for someone who's my age. 00;16;45;16 - 00;17;11;02 George I was born in 1989 and it is indescribable. For someone who grew up with the backdrop of, the Aids crisis in the United States in the 1980s, with exploding numbers of cases worldwide in the 1990s and 2000 to now, this reality, it's it's just the grimmest thing imaginable that we went we were going to be on the edge of getting rid of it, too. 00;17;11;06 - 00;17;35;26 Lowtax It's I believe the fourth or fifth largest pandemic, excuse me, the fourth or fifth largest pandemic in human history. Ongoing. And we were we were on a path to finally conquer this and this. This Silicon Valley moron comes in and blows it all up. 00;17;35;28 - 00;17;56;03 Propter Yeah. It turns out that if you're HIV positive and headed for full blown Aids, a three month cessation in your medication is not great for your future outlook. So a significant chunk of these deaths are coming through that portal. There's also significant impacts in terms of other communicable tropical diseases. Malaria is taking a big chunk. 00;17;56;06 - 00;18;17;23 Propter And also we're literally starving babies to death. There was a lot of food support that we were doing in Sudan particularly. That is just not happening now. And there's no other food. The times has been doing some really good photojournalism on this that I would recommend if you're emotionally prepared. But this is really dire stuff. 00;18;17;23 - 00;18;36;29 Propter I mean, I think, I think we joke around about a lot of this, but of the various things that the Trump that the Trump administration has done so far, the scale on this, the scale of human suffering that the USA cuts in particular have caused is just my mind kind of slips right off it when I try to compare it to other sets of numbers. 00;18;37;02 - 00;18;52;09 Propter Because it's, it's absurd to me. It is. It is not. It is not comparable to any of the other, demographic or death data sets that we have that we have in front of us. It's just way larger. 00;18;52;12 - 00;19;24;20 GLHM Well, and I think that that that by the numbers, the, the the second part of this is also enraging, right? So when you look at what Elon Musk was promising during the Trump campaign, so, so just going back to what their original promises were, the the initial Elon Musk promise was that they were going to save $2 trillion, that that Doge was going to save $2 trillion through waste, fraud, abuse, efficiency, whatever you want to call it. 00;19;24;23 - 00;20;03;05 GLHM Right. So that was that was the promise during the campaign. Once Doge actually was formed as an advisory agency within the government that shrink down to $1 trillion. So that's an enormous, enormous, enormous difference, right? $2 trillion down to $1 trillion. The actual savings that are that are attributed to Doge right now. And it's really important to note that Doge are claiming credit for some things that are actually like Biden administration, like like they're they're claiming credit for savings. 00;20;03;05 - 00;20;38;00 GLHM They did nothing to actually garner. But the actual savings right now are around $318 million. So we have gone from $2 trillion to $318 million. And Musk himself now, generally says that their goal is going to be around $150 billion. So we just talked about the cost of this in lives. And we're looking at savings of maybe $150 billion by the end of this year. 00;20;38;02 - 00;20;40;29 GLHM And that's a very big maybe. 00;20;41;01 - 00;21;17;07 Lowtax At $150 billion is nothing to the federal government. It's a it's a, what, 6 or $7 trillion budget, right. Like what is. And the current number, whatever you said hell machine this 318 million, I think, you know, what is that George prop there? Like .05 percent of of the federal budget. So we're we're going to we're going to kill almost unfathomable numbers of people for what is what what almost doesn't even qualify as couch money. 00;21;17;09 - 00;21;19;01 Lowtax Yeah. Eternal government. 00;21;19;03 - 00;21;35;27 Propter And to be clear, that $318 million savings that's government wide, that's not just USA. So that's that's the entire the entire till for all Doge cuts to date based on what they put up on their website. I wish I could remember who said this to credit it, but somebody on this guy had a pretty good line. The other day. 00;21;36;00 - 00;21;46;26 Propter They said, the difference between $2 trillion and $150 billion is about $2 trillion. 00;21;46;29 - 00;22;00;26 George That's pretty good. Just for the record, trailing 12 months of the last year, the federal government has spent $7 trillion, $140 billion. Is is nothing. It doesn't matter. 00;22;00;29 - 00;22;29;19 GLHM So if the spending cuts that they are promising aren't delivering the savings that they expected, and we're killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people to achieve these cuts, are we actually at least saving some money as far as the federal government goes? And the answer to that is no government spending is now trending upwards. We're at about 6% year over year, higher than we were at at this point in 2024. 00;22;29;22 - 00;22;55;05 GLHM And this is this is a it's a pattern with Musk specifically, where Musk's Musk makes a promise about something, and then either totally fails to deliver it. So the, the Roadster is a great example of this or completely under delivers on what it was. That, that he said he was going to do. There's a great example of this with Tesla that dropped this week. 00;22;55;05 - 00;23;25;03 GLHM Just because we can tie these all into the same sort of pattern of incompetence, which is that, recently it was announced that Musk killed a study on the robotaxi, and he killed that because everyone he had studying told him it would lose money, and now they're going to delay the lower cost model Y. So at this point, they're, they're they're delivering cars that are several years past kind of their, their expiration date. 00;23;25;05 - 00;23;44;17 GLHM But the but just in general, this is this pattern that you would see with Musk and Tesla. It's a pattern that you have seen with Musk at Space X. And now it's a pattern that you see at the federal government. But now the cost is measured in in federal jobs and in lives and in federal capacity. 00;23;44;20 - 00;24;10;24 George And just for folks that don't intimately follow the swings in Tesla stock, they are down huge. Over the past, five months, four months, basically, and with the market as a whole, but but underperforming the market quite substantially as well. And one of the big selling point are the two big selling points for management has been we're going to roll out more affordable vehicles and we're going to roll out robo taxis. 00;24;10;27 - 00;24;28;03 George There would be a third thing in there with AI. But you know, as far as like the actual auto business we're going to and both of those things are now being delayed or monkeyed with very obviously by Musk. And it's just another example of just like he he runs out of rope and then finds a new lie or a new story to to to sell people on. 00;24;28;05 - 00;24;32;16 Lowtax Don't forget he's also got the robots. Those are going to be here any day now man. 00;24;32;19 - 00;24;36;15 GLHM No, those are well or the people in robots suits anyway. 00;24;36;17 - 00;25;06;22 Propter So it kind of looks like Musk's next line of attack or a line of credit here, is to in cooperation with several of the other tech billionaires, try to get into the defense contracting game. We've got reports that there's a large contract. The shape of which is somewhat atypical. They're saying that it's going to be a subscription service whereby the United States government pays for the set up of, missile defense for the continental United States. 00;25;06;25 - 00;25;24;24 Propter And then we pay some kind of subscription fee, to SpaceX and to Anduril, which is, which is Peter Thiel's outfit, and whoever else is involved to keep it running. I'm not quite sure what happens if we want the subscription lapse, but it seems like that might not be a great idea. 00;25;24;27 - 00;25;35;02 GLHM So do we call this like, mass, like missiles as a subscription? Do we call it base like bullets as a subscription? Like I can't. 00;25;35;02 - 00;25;51;08 Lowtax Wait. I cannot wait for my my Department of Defense that I pay $1 trillion a year for to, get bricked like it's, it's a frickin speaker system that you put in your damn kitchen or something. 00;25;51;11 - 00;26;12;10 Propter So like this, this is supposed to be Golden Dome, which is, I guess, analogous to Israel's Iron Dome, where it's supposed to be kind of a point defense system where it is preventing impacts from, I guess, mostly low tech rockets being fired into the United States, which we haven't had a lot of historically. If we actually if we actually do invade Mexico or Quebec, then yeah, this is going to be a bigger problem. 00;26;12;10 - 00;26;30;13 Propter I guess. But anyway, so so this is this is, this is a half trillion dollar project that it looks like it's not going to go through a typical bidding process. And it might be a lifeline for Musk in that way. But surely, surely, all of this Doge stuff is resulting in meaningful cuts to make government slimmer, more agile, more responsive. 00;26;30;13 - 00;26;30;21 Propter Right. 00;26;30;21 - 00;26;53;11 GLHM Well, it's it's funny that you mentioned that prompter because, governance in general is getting much worse under Doge as we go. So for example, there was a report last week and this for this report is is worth kind of seeking out and taking a look at where Gavin clicker or clicker I honestly I, I don't care what his last name is because he's an awful person. 00;26;53;14 - 00;27;25;07 GLHM He's one of the white nationalist doge boys, who originally got fired and then got brought back in, was responsible for the firings at the Cfpb, at the Consumer Financial Protection Board. They apparently did this in some kind of presumably amphetamine fueled 36 hour ramp age, to which a Doge worker actually testified in a, in a statement that was admitted in court. 00;27;25;10 - 00;27;41;15 GLHM He apparently spent a lot of his time screaming at all of the Doge workers to make sure that they would actually get these out on time. Which is one of the more insane workplace horror stories I've actually heard in a while. Yeah. 00;27;41;15 - 00;28;08;13 Propter And again, if you're not intimately familiar with, with the various lettered agencies in DC, Cfpb is Liz Warren's, brainchild. It's designed to be a standalone bullet proof as possible, agency that exists to work on behalf of the American consumer. So what they do is they go after fraudulent business practices, and also they put a fairly sharp elbow into the ribs of businesses to just be better. 00;28;08;16 - 00;28;26;15 Propter They've gotten a lot of, a lot of flak from the right for that. And I don't think it's exactly a secret that one of the reasons why Trump and Doge are going after Cfpb is because it's it's an agency that is largely made up of liberal players who want to make the world better. Trump sees those as his natural enemy, as does Musk. 00;28;26;18 - 00;28;55;06 Propter I think it's a major tragedy that that it's that it's getting touched at all. But they're really trying to gut it as much as they can under statute, which in this case is, approximately 1500 of the 1700 employees. Got got a reduction in force notice in the last week. So it's really it's really a bloodbath for something that is enabled by statute and therefore is not, in theory, under the purview of the executive at all. 00;28;55;08 - 00;29;18;17 GLHM And I'm going to show my age here and pull the sham. Well, guy. But wait, there's more. But in terms of other agencies that Trump and Musk both hate, the IRS has been an absolute mess this week, too. So there was a real interesting story earlier this week where Musk was apparently responsible for getting the IRS commissioner hired. 00;29;18;20 - 00;29;45;29 GLHM And Trump had no knowledge of this, or the acting commissioner, appointed to the position, which Trump had no knowledge of. And apparently when Trump found this out, Trump went ahead and fired him, which means he actually lasted less time. That Scaramucci from the first administration did, once he was fired, clear cloggers access, was cut off. 00;29;46;01 - 00;30;12;15 GLHM And which sort of brings up an interesting question that I feel like has gotten dropped from some of the reporting a little bit, which is what what does Doge need this access for? So there have been stories from multiple federal agencies. So the IRS is one. They're, the DHS has one, and there's there's another one that I read about. 00;30;12;15 - 00;30;44;10 GLHM It's well, where, gosh, want unfettered access and they want essentially top, administrator access to data in each of these federal agencies with no real, no real explanation of what it is they're actually looking for. Which, which violates if you're not familiar with, like, the the least privilege model. This violates information security principles in about 100 different ways. 00;30;44;12 - 00;31;03;18 GLHM Ideally, you do not have access to information that you do not directly need in order to do your jobs. Doge have gone through and demanded access to all kinds of information that there is there's there's no defensible purpose for them having access. 00;31;03;20 - 00;31;20;06 Propter There's a lot of question as to what they're trying to do with all of this data. Are they just kind of trying to stick everything in a data lake so they can draw from that for whatever other purposes they think of down the line? Is there something where they're trying to feed it all into grok, and hopefully that solves everything for them? 00;31;20;08 - 00;31;40;26 Propter One thing that kind of seems clear to me, looking at the work product that we have seen from Doge is that they're not actually using AI all that heavily because it's it's full of mistakes that are very human, but that AI doesn't really make like like you've got you've got terrible, you've got terrible syntax, you've got terrible spelling. 00;31;40;29 - 00;31;58;25 Propter That I wouldn't be doing. You've got, you know, copy paste mistakes that don't make any sense for, gen AI output. So it's not totally clear to me what their relationship with, with AI is, but that's been one of the prevalent speculations for what they're doing with it. 00;31;58;27 - 00;32;06;24 George There was one high profile incident on Twitter. I refused to call it. The other thing, it's Twitter. There was one high profile incident on Twitter where. 00;32;06;27 - 00;32;08;20 Lowtax The everything app. 00;32;08;22 - 00;32;34;16 George No, I don't know what that is. It's Twitter. One of the Doge staffers complained of. They melted down their laptop by trying to run through a 60,000, entry table as part of their Doge Safari into some question somebody asked. And if you're actually at the cutting edge of I mean, anything really 60,000 entries is is nothing. I deal with more data than that in Excel on a regular basis. 00;32;34;16 - 00;32;40;28 George So, I mean, these these are clearly not very competent people, even by any technical standard. 00;32;41;01 - 00;33;24;08 Lowtax Yeah. I think 60,000 is about the max of Excel 97, though, if I remember correctly. That is correct. That is now nevertheless, as you said, George, 60,000 rows is nothing. Just to give you some perspective, I work in data. I'm a programmer. I do it every day. I spend my days in SAS and SQL, and a lot of the data I pull in is student and teacher data, for which I have tens of millions of rows, and it will run the entire thing in maybe two minutes for an extremely large data set like that. 00;33;24;10 - 00;33;42;10 Lowtax How you could claim to be, I think I think her name is the Data Republican or something. How you could claim to be a data person and get tripped up over 60,000 rows? No, you're not a data person. You're a fricking moron. 00;33;42;12 - 00;33;57;06 GLHM All of this makes a little bit more sense, though, when you remember that all of the Doge people are in a cargo cult, and Excel 97 was probably the last time that Elon Musk actually touched any actual data himself. 00;33;57;08 - 00;33;59;00 Lowtax Yeah, that's probably true. 00;33;59;02 - 00;34;16;28 Propter Yeah. I mean, like, there's there's there's this deep contempt for expertise that is a through line for a lot of this, that DOJ's basic, basic lens through which they view the world is that they can understand anything within five minutes of looking at it. And if they can't understand it, within five minutes of looking at it, that must be because it's wrong. 00;34;17;00 - 00;34;46;15 Propter It's it's wasteful, it's deceptive. It's somehow someone is trying to put something over on them. It is in some way fraudulent because it is not immediately legible to them, within the first superficial interaction. And I mean, frankly, like that's, that's a very micro-blogging way of approaching the world. Right? Like that's that's kind of how Twitter runs. You encounter something, then you scan it for maybe three seconds and either you understand it or you don't. 00;34;46;15 - 00;35;37;29 Propter And if you don't understand it, you get angry about it. But that's not the way any organization that involves expertise runs, because that's the opposite of expertise. That's that's that's kind of ignoring everything that anyone has learned over the course of their career, ignoring anything that is subject matter specific, experience or expertise and trying to feed things back into this kind of pre-processed, vanilla regurgitated pap so that a incurious idiot who who is in this case, probably Elon Musk specifically, can understand it, and not even so that he can understand it with somebody explaining it to him so that he can understand it instantly when he first pulls up the Excel file 00;35;38;02 - 00;35;41;01 Propter and tries to understand what's going on. 00;35;41;03 - 00;35;44;03 George Functionally indistinguishable from nihilism. 00;35;44;05 - 00;36;13;01 Lowtax The man thought Social Security was a bunch of fraud because the table he was looking at in the database was not unique on Social Security number. Now, I'm sure the Social Security Administration has many databases, and each of those databases probably has 30 different tables in it. There's a zillion reasons why a table might not be unique on Social Security number. 00;36;13;04 - 00;36;35;11 Lowtax It could be the table has a record of every job you've had. So that Social Security can keep track of it and keep track of the credits. Towards your retirement, the man is held up as this tech genius. But this is like the equivalent of elementary school shit. Like, how do you not know this? 00;36;35;17 - 00;36;43;04 Propter Right? Like, these are. These are mistakes. These are mistakes that everybody who works in the industry made in their first two weeks on the job, right? You know, these are the. 00;36;43;05 - 00;36;44;18 Lowtax Mistakes you made in college. 00;36;44;18 - 00;36;58;17 Propter Yeah. These are these are mistakes that you expect to have to warn your junior employees away from, because otherwise they're going to fall right in the manhole, just like their predecessors have. But instead, we're doing it at the highest level, with negative results for all of us. 00;36;58;20 - 00;37;28;24 Lowtax As for why he is, why they need access, need all of this data. My my guess is still that they're they're feeding all of this into grok, because Elon imagines that this is somehow going to give him a leg up over this trash that Sam Altman and open AI and Google with this ridiculous Gemini thing that they put at the top of your search results. 00;37;28;24 - 00;37;56;20 Lowtax Now, what all these guys are doing, because everybody in the Valley seems to it's it's almost become a religion at this point, right. That that AI is going to be this, this thing that upends everything as we know it. And it's, it's I've said before, I think there are going to be useful things from AI. There already are useful things from AI. 00;37;56;22 - 00;38;13;12 Lowtax It's we're not going to get to a stage where the robots are going to eat us. It's like, these guys aren't that smart. You guys have have an arrogance that I almost can't fathom, right? Just just sit down. No. 00;38;13;14 - 00;38;47;14 GLHM Well. And Musk Musk's problem in particular is that Musk started a day late and a dollar short, compared to everybody else. And so it would not it would not come as a surprise to me if the reason that you've got these cargo cultist, amphetamine, doge capos, going through from agency to agency and trying to rob data stores is because Musk understands that he is behind, he is behind OpenAI. 00;38;47;14 - 00;38;57;26 GLHM He's behind Google, he's behind anthropic. He's behind everybody. And and is running out of runway. He's got to do something soon. 00;38;57;28 - 00;39;19;17 Propter So so Musk is in the position where he has to cobble together not necessarily a better product, but at least something that is an argument that he might in future have a better product, for something, whether it's whether it's AI, whether it's robotics, whether it's robotaxis, what have you. But in the meantime, he's he's still doing just a tremendous amount of damage on an agency by agency basis. 00;39;19;17 - 00;39;46;13 Propter I don't think there's I don't think there's hardly any, any agency that I see that I have friends working in here in DC or that I or, you know, that I, that I've casual acquaintances that I see walking around, town that hasn't felt job cuts and and go like hell. Machine has been doing some really interesting work talking to people who are either already out or people who are hanging on by their fingernails within the federal government. 00;39;46;15 - 00;39;48;18 Propter Can you tell us a little bit about that? About that? 00;39;48;21 - 00;40;19;16 GLHM Yeah, absolutely. So, I have been doing a project called DOJ's for letters, wherein I interview either current or former, federal workers, just kind of about the work that they are doing, why they got into it, how they got into it. All that, I would love to hear from you. So if you are a federal worker out there and you were listening to this and you you have not talked to me already, please go to go like hell machine.com. 00;40;19;18 - 00;40;42;18 GLHM And just click. The Doge is four letters link. You will find instructions on how to contact me. I conduct every interview via signal. Everything is anonymous. Everything is all text, so you don't even have to call me. It's five questions. It'll hopefully take in no more than about 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes. But I really would like to hear your story. 00;40;42;18 - 00;40;47;26 GLHM And I'd like to, as I, I'd like it if you would allow me to help you tell it. 00;40;47;28 - 00;40;54;24 George And that'll be linked in the show notes as well. If you want to just click over to your podcast app while you listen to us and and click the link there. 00;40;54;27 - 00;41;09;03 Propter And I have to say, the reading through one of the, the reading through some ago, like I was machine worked there interviewing, interviewing feds. The thing that comes through is how much people care about their jobs. This is a business that people get into, mostly because they want to do good, rather than because they want to just plug in somewhere. 00;41;09;05 - 00;41;20;13 Propter And there are a lot of people who are now fighting a war that they never thought would come. 00;41;20;16 - 00;41;23;20 Propter Speaking of wars we never thought would come. Oh. 00;41;23;21 - 00;41;25;15 George Look at that. 00;41;25;18 - 00;41;48;16 Propter We've got a, we've got, a little information and analysis prepared for you on our neighbors to the north who are undergoing, something of a political reversal, compared to where the polls looked like a little bit ago. And as it happens, George is himself a Canadian, so we thought it might be nice to have him speak on this a bit. 00;41;48;18 - 00;41;53;23 GLHM Wait wait wait wait wait. I did not agree to do a podcast with the Canadian. 00;41;53;25 - 00;42;28;25 George And that's how I gotcha. Yeah, that that dual citizenship action, baby. We love to see it. So yeah, I was born and raised in British Columbia and I tend not to follow Canadian politics closely because Canadian politics is in general, incredibly boring. It's a very well-run country. It's a country where the social consensus is strong, and there are not that many situations where a lot of people are going to either be much better off or much worse off based on an election. 00;42;28;28 - 00;42;48;06 George Obviously, every democracy has its ups and downs, and, voting is important wherever you live. But in Canada, the divide between good policy and bad policy is much narrower than it is in the United States. The terrain that's fought over as much narrower. 00;42;48;08 - 00;42;57;23 Lowtax There, the, the low key, least poorly behaved child of the British Empire motherland, I think. 00;42;57;25 - 00;43;05;07 George Yeah, it's either them or New Zealand. I'm not it's tough. It's it's a tough battle between those two in the least of Calgary. 00;43;05;12 - 00;43;18;07 Lowtax I might have said New Zealand. Until when was that election? They just had like two years ago. Where they elected the far right there. Yeah. I mean, Congress is clearly the worst, but. 00;43;18;10 - 00;43;20;25 George South Africa is is has some questions. 00;43;20;28 - 00;43;26;01 Lowtax I do not recognize South Africa. It. 00;43;26;03 - 00;43;52;03 Propter So it if you are like me, an ugly American and you are used to the cadences of American politics, you may not be accustomed to the way that most other countries in the world schedule their elections, which is to say that they don't until right before the election. What that means right now is that very recently, Canada called an election, and I believe they called it, what, about three weeks ago and not election March 23rd. 00;43;52;06 - 00;43;54;15 Propter March 23rd. That election will take place. 00;43;54;17 - 00;43;57;29 Lowtax On my birthday. You are welcome. Canada. 00;43;58;02 - 00;44;18;11 Propter So that election will take place on April 28th. That means that instead of, you know, the year and a half cycle that we have here, leading up to the big election, the direct campaigning, here's the election. Right, right up, right up in front of you face. Is is only a couple of months now. There are restrictions on when you have to call an election. 00;44;18;17 - 00;44;29;03 Propter So it's been known for a long time that an election was coming sometime in here. But the specific date of it was not a thing that was anticipated until very recently. 00;44;29;05 - 00;44;41;13 GLHM So I am an uglier American and I know absolutely nothing about the Canadian political system. So. So what's what goes on in Canada from a politic standpoint? 00;44;41;16 - 00;45;01;23 George So at the provincial level that that's like their states, it gets really strange, very regional. We're not going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about federal government politics. So at the at the federal level, you've got one regional party that is quite strong in Quebec. Typically, their whole thing is breaking away to become an independent country. 00;45;01;23 - 00;45;21;27 George They are a sideshow. But they do occasionally steal votes from other parties in ways that make coalition forming and parliament kind of interesting. The hegemonic party for basically all of Canadian history is the Liberal Party. They are a centrist party. You could call them center left if you wanted to. You could argue their center right. It depends on the area you're in. 00;45;21;27 - 00;45;53;20 George It depends on other context. There are centrist party the they're there now the Progressive Conservatives are the Tories is how I refer to them. Just because I'm brain poison that way. But, the Tories are the right wing party. You have seen fractious sort of MAGA equivalents. I guess you would call them in Canadian politics start to spring up to the right of the Tories over the past ten years, but they are not really relevant in national politics. 00;45;53;23 - 00;45;58;28 GLHM Are those like the, the, the, the Rob Ford or the Doug Ford guys? 00;45;59;00 - 00;46;18;03 George No, they're they were, provincial, politicians in Ontario. So they weren't national politicians. I always get them confused. Doug Ford just won reelection as the premier of Ontario. In an election that, took place in February. So, 00;46;18;06 - 00;46;22;16 Lowtax Yeah, Rob is the crackhead. Doug is the one who wants to fight all the Trump people. 00;46;22;17 - 00;46;53;26 George Bingo. That's right. So, yeah. So anyhow, Ontario is the most populous province. It's incredibly important for federal politics. But, they have a conservative, the Ontario Conservatives are the hegemonic party in Ontario, in Ontario, in federal politics, they tend to vote liberal. Now, the backstory for this, this snap election campaign is that, like almost without exception, every government in the Western world, or in, in the world entirely. 00;46;53;26 - 00;47;30;10 George I'm sorry, not Western world. In the world entirely. Over the last two years, there's been a huge shift against incumbents. Right. So incumbents have underperformed polls or had big swings away from them in terms of vote share or lost power or however you wanted to find it everywhere. This reached a, crisis level in Canada, late last year and early this year when, the Trudeau government, Justin Trudeau, who is the son of poor Elliot Trudeau, who was one of the most famous prime ministers in county history, he was he was a multiple, term prime minister, and his son has now been in charge in Canada since, 2013. 00;47;30;11 - 00;47;48;13 George If my memory serves, a long, long time prime minister in Canada, basically Covid backlash, right? Like high inflation. Just social disruption, etc. big backlash, very similar to what we saw in the United States, very similar to what we saw in the UK, very similar to what we've seen in Germany, in India, I mean, you name it, right? 00;47;48;13 - 00;48;11;23 George Like it's everywhere. This backlash put the liberals, who again, historically have been the natural party of government in Canada at their lowest polling result ever, essentially Angus Reid, which is a very respected polling outfit up there, had them at 14% in early January. That would have been their lowest vote share in any election if it if they had gotten that in the election at 14%. 00;48;11;25 - 00;48;36;08 George Trudeau, had been scheming to get this guy named Mark Carney involved in his government. He had asked his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, to step down. She eventually just quit, which was a whole drama in Canadian politics. In December. And, shortly thereafter, it became clear that Trudeau couldn't continue to lead the party. He lost confidence and he was resigning. 00;48;36;11 - 00;49;00;08 George That meant a leadership race, and Chrystia Freeland and Abss ends up teeing off against this Mark Carney character. So. So who is Mark Carney who ends up winning 86% of the vote in in the the Liberal Party election to determine who their their prime minister will be. He's now serving as prime minister because Trudeau stepped down. He's he's the prime minister and he's going to contest this election and will be reelected prime minister if the liberals win. 00;49;00;10 - 00;49;13;05 George Carney is the leader of the Protocols of the Elders of Galloway. He is a Northwest Territories born, a Harvard educated central banker who has run the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, he. 00;49;13;05 - 00;49;17;24 Lowtax Is the only good Harvard and Oxford alum in human history. 00;49;17;24 - 00;50;00;20 George He wrote his master's thesis at Harvard about economic competitiveness. He is a classic in the genre of boring central bankers, in how he talks and delivers. And I just spend some time on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, search Mark Carney and listen to this guy talk. As an American, you will be shocked that this person is is generating appeal, but appeal he has generated and the combination of his his obsession to running the Liberal Party and the fact that the Tories have been tied to Trump, means that the polls have swung from like a 45% vote share for the Tories to like a 24% vote share, and the liberals have gone from like, you know, 00;50;00;20 - 00;50;23;04 George mid-teens or just below 20 to like more than half the vote. In, in, in polling over the past two months, which is a world historic vote share shift. I mean, that that it's the equivalent of, Republicans polling it, I don't know, like 60% and then falling to 40% over the course of September to no October of an election year. 00;50;23;06 - 00;50;38;25 Propter Yeah. This looks like this looks like one of these win probability graphs at the end of a game where there's a big comeback and things just fall off a cliff for the team that is ahead. This looks like this looks like, this looks like the Patriots coming back on the Falcons. This looks like 28 three. 00;50;38;28 - 00;51;03;21 Lowtax Oh don't say that man. Come on. We got Atlanta listeners here just catching strays out here I like that Carney is as George said he's very boring. He's he's almost monotone and stuff. My man has had it with the United States. My man is just like, no, we're we're gonna move on to other trade relationships. Other defense relationships. 00;51;03;28 - 00;51;14;00 Lowtax We're going to we're going to mark the Yanks. And and I'm just kind of like, you go girl. Fuck us up. Mark. 00;51;14;02 - 00;51;46;03 George Yeah. It's really that both in the Ontario we mentioned the Ontario provincial elections in, earlier this year in February and, the current iteration, this is happening with a backdrop of the Trump administration talking about making Canada the 51st state. Obviously, opening up the trade war against Canada and Mexico is the first targets, since then it's it's shifted a bit, but but initially in the first two months, the Trump administration, Canada and Mexico, where the targets and the response has been overwhelmingly from Canadians, just like absolutely not. 00;51;46;03 - 00;52;01;21 George Like we you we finally have an excuse to be honest with you people, how we feel about you and Canadian politeness is done and an elbows up is the is that is the national slogan at this point, which is a reference to hockey, fighting and hockey. 00;52;01;23 - 00;52;19;27 GLHM By the way, just if you happen to be listening to this and you are in Canada and you are a musician, I really want you to use Merck, the Yanks as your group name. Whether it's a punk band or a hip hop trio or anything else. Merck the Yanks is great. 00;52;20;00 - 00;52;40;19 Propter Anyway, this is now Become It released on the trade front, something of something of a contest of national identity and the Red party. And that's that's the that's the liberals up in Canada. Running away from it is my sense, on the nationalism issue, which is kind of a reversal of what I maybe would have expected given how nationalism is normally associated with conservative parties. 00;52;40;26 - 00;53;07;04 Propter You hear these things about about Canadians moving US products off the shelves and grocery stores, because they don't want to buy anything that comes from America. We have really, really, really insulted and angered our northern neighbors here, who have been friends and allies for my entire life. My dad's entire life, his dad's entire life, going all the way back to before my family immigrated. 00;53;07;07 - 00;53;12;29 Propter And it seems like a major mistake. But it is having a profound effect on Canadian politics. 00;53;13;01 - 00;53;45;23 George There's a really useful concept, from David Graeber's final book called Sigismund Genesis, which is basically, I define myself as being not you. So like my, my identity is just whatever the opposite of your identity is. And Canada's relationship to United States. And again, I grew up in Canada. I still have family there. You know, I'm intimately familiar with this, you know, on a personal level that the there is an overriding sense that we as Canada are Canadian because we are not Americans. 00;53;45;25 - 00;54;11;17 George There was a really wildly popular beer commercial when I was in middle school that it's just a guy on a stage talking about what makes him Canadian, and it was a cultural icon for a certain sort of Canadian person that that was watching the hockey game. And, you know, probably a man and drinking a lot of beer. 00;54;11;19 - 00;54;36;28 George The I am Canadian speech is something you could probably find a random sampling of people and find, you know, 10 or 20 of them out of 100 to just be able to recite from memory. I mean, it's like a it's like a total icon and that sort of self-definition against the United States is has been activated to a degree that I that has never been true historically, ever. 00;54;37;01 - 00;55;13;07 George It's it's taken the most sort of normie, middle of the road type opinion in Canada and turned it into the sort of stuff you would hear from the bohemian, you know, far left type, folks that I grew up in, in my very unique Western Canadian small town. And it is why failed to see and I think also as both a Canadian and an American, they are so justified to feel the way they feel about all this, and it is the most understandable thing in the world. 00;55;13;07 - 00;55;42;14 George And I don't have, you know, like, obviously we give Canadians a hard time as Americans, but I don't have any resentment whatsoever towards Canadians for feeling this way because, the partnership that they have anchored their entire national well-being to through economics, through national security, through culture, has just flipped them the bird and started throwing stuff at them for no reason whatsoever. 00;55;42;16 - 00;56;15;11 Lowtax No. And you have you have the president of the United States implicitly threatening to annex you like I think the four of us probably would agree that that's it's highly unlikely that Trump is going to start, you know, lining tanks up at the, the Ambassador Bridge or something. He could, though. And if you're Canada, it's a threat that you you have to take seriously, right. 00;56;15;13 - 00;56;47;02 Lowtax You know, your, your big, nasty neighbor who's a lot bigger than you and a lot Richard, new to the South, is threatening to come and take everything from you, for no reason whatsoever. You know, going to George's point. Look, we've obviously like War of 18, 12 things like that. We've fought wars with Canada, but we've been, you know, very friendly next door neighbors for a very long time now. 00;56;47;04 - 00;57;13;19 Lowtax You know, our all of our grandparents were on those beaches in Normandy, with folks in Canada. They have always been at our side. And it's this is one of the most baffling, disgraceful things I have ever seen in politics. 00;57;13;21 - 00;57;40;06 GLHM Well, I think the so the thing is, is that, like, on the one hand, it seems so ridiculous, right? Like it's the kind of thing that you don't want to take seriously. Like the United States is going to annex Canada. It it's it sounds like a joke, right? It sounds like the premise of a bad like Saturday night Live movie or skit. 00;57;40;08 - 00;57;41;28 Lowtax It literally is. No. 00;57;42;01 - 00;58;16;14 GLHM Yeah, but but at a realistic level from a political standpoint, if you are Canada in this situation, you have to take it seriously. And like we have to take it seriously as well. It's it's like it's completely bizarre. It of all the weird things, that Trump the Trump two administration has gotten weirder about, this is one of the things that they have gotten much weirder about. 00;58;16;17 - 00;58;38;15 George It's one thing when the bully next door is trying to shake you down for lunch money, it's another when the bully next door has nuclear weapons and spends a lot more on defense than anybody else in the world. So yeah, I mean, I from a strictly rational perspective, Canada completely reevaluating its relationship with the United States is totally understandable. 00;58;38;15 - 00;59;14;28 George And it an obvious conclusion, I think also to, speak a little bit about the politics of the Canadian election. I think one of the things that's interesting is, is watching the Canadian conservatives try and import tactics and language that have been quite successful in the United States conservative movement. The new right dynamics of sort of like grippers and proximity to anti-Semitism and abrasiveness and brashness that is such a hallmark of the second Trump administration. 00;59;15;00 - 01;00;01;23 George The, the, the Canadian, the Canadian conservative movement has imported and among its most aggressive sort of characters, they're outside of the political mainstream. They thought that they but but the but the ones that are inside the Conservative Party thought that they were going to ride this same strategy to a massive election when, just like Trump did, and they got confused between thermostatic public opinion, backlash against the incumbent and their strategy and their their communication framework actually working, and what it turned out was the case was, no, that nobody actually liked this stuff or very few. 01;00;01;24 - 01;00;21;21 George You know, a rump of Canadian politics likes this stuff or the Canadian electric like stuff, but it's small. What the Canadian electric electorate was mad about was inflation and a long term incumbent. And when you wipe those things away and you create a circumstance for people to reset around, what am I deciding between the United States or Canada? 01;00;21;21 - 01;00;39;20 George They're going to pick Canada every single time. And so Carney coming in has been transformative, not because he is a transformative candidate in his and in his own right, but because he has been sort of a cipher that people can. He's saying the right things, but he's been a cipher that people have been able to say, okay, he's going to be a representative against the bully. 01;00;39;23 - 01;01;12;11 George Whereas the guy that uses the same language is the bully, and that is, you know, clearly taking his cues from the bully. We don't want that. So that I think, I think there's something interesting for us as Americans to take away from that, that political dynamic where, that there is a confusion between the fundamentals or the larger picture that's driving the electorate, as opposed to a specific communication strategy that seems to have been working, but it's just spurs correlation. 01;01;12;13 - 01;01;43;09 Propter Well, and George, earlier you said that Canada has been governed for a very long time within a within a narrow band of possibility that that, you know, there wasn't really a great deal of radical change in, in Canadian politics, maybe setting some things related to Quebec aside for a long time. Is it possible that the election of Donald Trump is kind of thrown into high relief, that there are outcomes outside of that narrow band that are possible, and that therefore the electorate needs to start paying attention to those kinds of outcomes? 01;01;43;12 - 01;02;08;13 George Yeah, I think within the valence of like Canadian domestic politics, Carney is not transformative in the sense of like he's going to change the distribution of outcomes dramatically. He's he's a status quo candidate, right. Like they he's got ideas about how to deal with this current situation. But the endogenous dynamics in Canadian politics aren't going to shift much. 01;02;08;13 - 01;02;32;13 George It's it's all about exogenous. And I think, you know, from the perspective of, of Canadian voters or Canadian politicians, nobody could have prepared the country for the shock we've seen from the second Trump administration without completely revolutionizing how the country operates. They were never going to do that on their own, and it would have been silly to do so. 01;02;32;13 - 01;03;01;03 George So I think, there is a I have a lot of empathy for people in Canada whose livelihoods or employment or, various forms of security are being imperiled in this moment because they did everything right and were thrown under the bus by about one third of the United States voting to support, President Trump. And in the past, presidential election here. 01;03;01;07 - 01;03;43;15 Lowtax One thing I, to propres point about the the narrow band widening, you know, this may in some ways be a one off in that Donald Trump and his his ridiculous, idiotic threats towards Canada may have, you know, kneecapped, the Tories in Canada and enabled, you know, boring establishment Terry and Mark Carney to come in and save the day because everybody was sick of, the, the prettier Emmanuel Macron they had before. 01;03;43;18 - 01;04;23;17 Lowtax But the, the sort of evolution of the Canadian. Right, into this, this gripper weirdo, attitude, may well come back if, if Carney, you know, falls on his face. I mean, we're watching this potentially play out in Britain right now with Keir Starmer, where the Labor Party has basically spent its every waking hour since they took office, chopping limbs off themselves. 01;04;23;20 - 01;04;47;25 Lowtax And we're now seeing parties like reform, you know, leading in the polls. And I, I very much remember, on Inauguration Day in 2021 thinking, okay, this is finally over. He's he's he's gone orange, man. Bad. He's gone. We want to have to deal with this anymore. And now we see where we are today. 01;04;47;27 - 01;04;54;12 Lowtax You know, the the ball keeps on bouncing, right? We we don't know how this how this all shakes out. 01;04;54;13 - 01;04;58;09 GLHM You clearly have not watched enough horror movies. 01;04;58;11 - 01;05;03;02 Lowtax My wife will not let me watch horror movies. She she does not do horror movies. 01;05;03;02 - 01;05;29;00 George I think that's exactly right. The the ball keeps bouncing. And you know, in our last episode, I talked about economic and political processes that don't have a beginning, middle and end. They're a constant, thing in the background forever. They're a constant negotiation. There is no final outcome. And I think that's very, very true in the UK, given the specific political coalitions that that exist there. 01;05;29;00 - 01;06;05;04 George I mean, it's very easy to imagine a couple percentage points move or difference in, opinion between reform, the Tory, the UK Tories and the Labor Party dictating one of those three becoming a majority government and the rest being, you know, small minority opposition parties. Whereas in Canada, I think that the, the electorate has set up such that they're just, it's always going to be the liberals as the odds on favorite all else equal versus everybody else. 01;06;05;04 - 01;06;30;16 George And it's probably going to be the Tories because they're the biggest rump. But you could imagine a scenario where the right fractures further and reinforces liberal hegemony after this election. Even even if Carney doesn't handle the US stuff very well. So yeah, I it's going to be interesting to see. I think, polling has gotten a little less extreme in favor of the liberals. 01;06;30;16 - 01;06;36;18 George So hypothetically, you could see a tightening race and a and a closer outcome. But, 01;06;36;20 - 01;07;00;16 Lowtax I think it helps. It helps. Right, that the Liberal coalition is pretty efficiently distributed from what I've seen that, you know, you go back to the 2021 election, the liberals actually lost the popular vote. That that doesn't matter. In, in a Westminster style system like they have, they lost too much just. 01;07;00;16 - 01;07;18;17 George To give folks a feel for, for how that works, like the the way their system works. Imagine if the speaker of the House was the president. So you've got your, ridings across the country. There are now just two congressional districts in the United States. Each one elects one person. It's whoever gets the most vote votes. It's first past the post. 01;07;18;17 - 01;07;40;20 George It's not. It's not. You don't have to get 50%. So you could have five parties competing and one party could get 30% of the vote and win. And, and because of that system and because of the specific ideological distribution and geographic distribution of the Liberal Party, they did way better than they should. Who should have based on the on the majority of it, on the, percentage of vote share. 01;07;40;22 - 01;08;11;02 Lowtax Yeah, yeah. And there I think the last polling average I saw had them up, 43 to 38 or so, with, with I believe it was a 90% chance of winning the most seats and about a 70% chance of winning an outright majority in the Parliament and not having to go into not having to seek out a coalition with the, the New Democrats. 01;08;11;05 - 01;08;20;25 Lowtax Or I don't imagine they would go. You can correct me if I'm wrong, George. I don't imagine they would have a coalition with, the bloc Quebec. 01;08;20;27 - 01;08;47;01 George I don't think that's particularly likely. So right now, 338 Canada, which is sort of 538 but run by Canadian. So we don't have to deal with terrible punditry emerging from that universe. It's it's great. I mean, they do a really good job collating the polling data and analyzing it. Their current vote share prediction projection is 43% for the liberals versus 38% for the Tories. 01;08;47;04 - 01;09;09;07 George That is just barely outside the margin of, error in favor of the liberals or sorry, it's not just outside the margin of error, it's right at the margin of error line where the liberals are locked in to win. In terms of seat projections, the sort of best case for the Tories in this model is 161 seats. 01;09;09;09 - 01;09;22;29 George And the worst case for the liberals is 149. The modal outcomes, or the median outcomes, are much, much higher than that. I mean, the liberals are very, very likely to win a majority government based on the polling at this point. 01;09;23;01 - 01;09;40;11 GLHM All right. Well, we will see what happens with that. And, I think with that, we've probably got everything, everything covered here for this week in normal math.