Transcript
James: We've got to find our old music.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We missed the old intro music so much. Adding drums to the sad piano music doesn't make it any better, but it does make me laugh.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah Welcome to Oh Brother News. I'm Gabe.
James: I am James.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And we we're brothers. And Oh Brother, have we got some some news for you this week.
James: Crazy shit. Hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: uh okay here in episode 10 this what we're going to talk about or some of the things we're going to about mike and i get to all of them uh what the democrats need to do a rant uh a tale of two pro a tale of two protests uh we're going to talk about the ukraine ceasefire talks uh or you know zielinski calling the russia's bluff the economy nose diving and tariff talks um i'm quote some stuff from a Ezra Klein interview with an economist. thought that made some pretty good points.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We'll have the link to that video in the show notes. We're going to try out something new. We're going to try an Instagram and response section. And now in an ideal world, we would have video and we play the video.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: you guys would watch it with us and then we talk about it. But because we don't yet have video, what we're going to do is we're going to pause.
James: Oh
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We're going to tell you which video we're watching. We're going to go watch this like one to two minute video on Instagram. they we're going to come back and we're going to talk about it. um and the future in the future of this section, there'll be you know we'll play them. There are several topics for that. We probably won't get to all of them, just to read through um what we have lined up.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We'll see which which ones we choose. We have one about egg prices. We have one about how war starts in policymaking. We have corporatists versus oligarchs.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Doge, follow the money. um Inspectors general are the ones who actually save us money, kind of related to Doge. We have the difference between MAHA, which stands for make America healthy again, um and what it actually is, which is more like MAGDIA, make America go die in a hole.
James: Hm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah We've got the Republicans altering time, which is a fun one.
James: Hm. Hm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We'll wrap up by doing a shortened version of the game we didn't get to last week. How might we all die? We'll make some additional prediction predictions about what the future holds.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um Now that you know our predictions about the economy taking a nosedive have ah seemingly come true, so we'll make some new predictions.
James: Parker.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah We will talk about what could go right and you know do our closing thoughts after all that. So let's get to it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um What the Democrats need to do, or rant. I'm just going I wrote this, was talking to my wife and she was like, well, what do you think the Democrats need to do differently?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And think this was kind of a day after the last podcast and, or actually no, it was the day after the last time I protested and I was particularly upset, you know, she said, well, okay, they didn't do what she thought in the protest. what do you think they should do?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And um ah ranted and then i was like, oh, I think I made some good points. So i wrote it down. So here's my, what the Democrats need to do. They need to pick the top three messages and all of them need to boil down to Trump is destroying America.
James: Thank you.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. Three messages are Trump and Elon are destroying America because they're rich people stealing from the poor. Trump is destroying America because of pick a foreign policy. Trump is destroying America because of pick a domestic policy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, and when you are, ah when you are an elected democratic official, okay, you're a member of the party and you're elected. Anytime you open your mouth and another person is around, you need to begin with Trump is destroying America.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Not hello, not my name is, Trump is destroying America. When you order Starbucks and the barriska the barista asks your name, your name is Trump is destroying America. When Trump says we're going to invade Canada and they ask your opinion, you will begin by saying Trump is a destroying America.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And like the place that I'm pulling this from is is Trump's playbook. Okay. So like yeah after Trump lost the election, he spent four years going sleepy Joe Biden is destroying America because of the immigrants.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Sleepy Joe Biden is destroying America with his ah you know, this bill, that bill, whatever, pick the pick a foreign policy, pick a domestic policy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Joe Biden is ass destroying America. That was his message. And he banged that drum. and Every single other Republican did the exact same thing. And they all banged that drum over and over again, every day, everywhere that they went for four years. And the Democrats are doing this thing now where everybody's got their issue. These people are like, oh, women's rights. And these people are like, let's not invade Greenland. And these people are like, but it should be called the Gulf of Mexico. And these other people are like, but Guantanamo Bay. And like, ah, but the National Institution of Health.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, but he's destroying the Department of Education. They're just taking all the bait. And so like, nobody's able to get like a single message. It's just like, it's just noise. There's no signal.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So we need to copy off of them and bang this message. Okay. So there's 300-ish elected Democrats between the Senate and the House, they need to have a single mission to repeat the three party talking points as many times as possible, as many different rooms as possible to as many different people as possible.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Bernie's doing a great job of this, by the way. um And I've seen some other people too. I saw um saw Tim Walts actually just today was talking about how Republicans are holding town halls. He's going to go do it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: This is that. ah They need to tour every podcast, right? left, center, foreign, film festival. Everyone who will give you the mic, pick it up and repeat the three versions of Trump is destroying America.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: They need to do town halls. They need to go and talk to voters. If it's in your district, great. If it's anywhere else in America, that works too. Every elected Democrat needs to do two in-person events and two digital media events every week from now until forever.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That's the job. Like previously, it's been You know, you make some soundbites, comment on the news, you send out a newsletter, you know, you make a speech on the floor, you spend the rest of your time doing fundraising with like a little bit of policymaking.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: This is what you have to do now. You need to be, you need to be ever present. Everywhere that people are consuming media, they need to see you repeating your message. and Every Democrat needs to have the same message.
James: Thank you.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. Like this is, this is exactly what Trump did to Biden. He went on tour, he went on every TV show and podcast, and he got every Republican pounding the same three talking points. When you get in a room with someone, and I remember this from being at the protest and seeing, you know, my senator and my congressional representative and another congressional representative, like i stood next to them as they gave speeches, and it humanized them.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And this is like part of the popularity of Bernie. Bernie's going to all these places, and he's sitting in a room and talking with people. And this is like the part of the brilliance of what Trump did, where he was like, you know, it's this weird thing.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, why is he holding rallies every every week while he's elected?
James: e
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Why is he holding rallies all the time when he just lost the election? This is the reason you go on tour, because when you get in a room with someone, it changes everything. It makes you a human being.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It makes you real. It makes you a person they kind of know, not just a clip of news on TV. right It makes you the person they were in the room with. So you're their guy because you told them personally to their face that you were going to help them, that you cared about them, that you saw you know the things that were hurting them and you have a solution and you explained it to them.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You need to be, if you're a Democrat, you need to be like stink on shit, unmissable everywhere all the time.
James: Thank you.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: okay You don't take any bait about Greenland or whatever his lie of the day is or any of his other bids for distraction. You let him throw out a million different tiny threads of nonsense and you stick to your three talking points.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: If he gives everyone a million dollars and cures cancer and starts flying around like Superman and and everybody gets a pony, okay, you stick to your three talking points.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Then you shut down the government by not making a deal with the Republicans. You make no deals ever at all for anything ever. at all for anything. This is the McConnell plan. This is the obstructionist party.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: If you're not in the majority, your your job is to be the obstructionist party. Your job is to make everything more difficult.
James: Where?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You delay everything. Use every procedural thing that you can to add five more seconds to everything, every time, every time, every person, every time. You sue over everything.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You make everything hurt everyone as much as possible. And you stick to your talking points because whoever has power gets blamed when things go sideways. And boy, are they going sideways right now.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You don't ever talk about policy you would use. Talking about policy to this American electorate is like
James: so
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: is like begging people to not listen to you and to think you are you are a stupid elitist part of the deep state.
James: It's like...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's just begging them to to hate you.
James: Yep.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: okay You speak exclusively about outcomes. ah No one cares about the policy. They care about how you about where you're going to go because of the policy.
James: Because...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: okay
James: What are you thinking about?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We're all going to be rich. We're all going to be healthier. The food's going to be cheaper. The food's going to be healthier. Everyone's going to lose 10 pounds.
James: it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We don't need to talk about how like in order to do that, we're going to fund healthier school lunches with this you know tax policy. We're going to stop buying potato chips for kids. So it's going to hurt the potato chips people a little bit.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like you don't talk about how it's going to require exercise. You just talk about the outcomes. This is what Trump does. Oh, it's going to be so great. It's going to be the best ever. Like half time, he doesn't even talk about, about the outcome specifically.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: He talks about the relative ranking of the outcome to any other outcomes. And it's always the best, the most, the goldest,
James: or or Or it's going to be or it's going to be is's going to be excellent because of a non sequitur.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Or yeah, or it's going to be excellent.
James: It's
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, yeah, exactly.
James: and
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. If people are simple and tired and stupid and uneducated, then the game of politics gets really simple. Okay. You need to be in the room and on the podcast and on the TV every time they turn it on.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And you when you're there, you need to be repeating the same message so often they hear it in their sleep. So often they start humming it as they walk down the street. So often it becomes an absurd challenge to common knowledge to think anything else.
James: yeah see I don't disagree with any that I don't disagree with any of that oh okay okay
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Everyone already with you is with you.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Hold on, hold on. america i met it let I'm at the finish, okay? And for fuck's sake, for fuck's sake, whatever you do, do not say the words trans, pronouns,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: or DEI. If you give half a fuck about anyone these would help, keep the name out your motherfucking mouth. This is how you win.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It is that simple, but fucking it up is just as easy. See Hillary and Kamala. And when you win, you better immediately and massively transfer wealth from the rich to the poor.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That is the only mission. You bang your drum, you know impersonate Robin Hood, Day in and day out. Maybe stretch goals, something for climate change, and you use some power to hurt Russia for the sake of hurting Russia because they are coming for your neck with every resource they have.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Take away their tools. Be vicious. Be single-minded. Wheel power, not promises. Okay, now, thoughts.
James: Well, a couple things. One, I don't necessarily disagree with much of that, right? I think they should be doing the town halls. I think they should be going on the podcast. I think they should be doing all that, right?
James: I think they should be doing all the court stuff, right?
James: And I think they are going to be doing the court stuff. And I think they are going to be trying whatever procedural stuff they can do. And they are. But here's why... I'm not saying i necessarily agree with it, but I think the reason why they're not out there, which is a I think is a mistake a little bit. it's it's a if you're let If your enemy's hanging themselves, right, what are you going to do
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: but You're going to give them some rope.
James: Give him some rope, get out of the way. If you become ever-present like stink on shit, right, and you're everywhere banging the drum about why he's so bad, you're making yourself a foil, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: No, you're just the, you're the guy, you're the guy with the message.
James: Well, yes.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like Trump didn't even, Biden didn't even do bad.
James: Yes, but you're the one.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Biden didn't even do bad.
James: I know.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Trump just said he did every day. And people was like, you know, lost track of reality that like things were worse under Trump.
James: That's true.
James: I know, which is embarrassing. But
James: but I think what they're doing is, and I think it will ramp up and get more and more like that. I think they're starting slow because, you know, when the and any new administration starts, even Trump, man, I mean, shit, he started off with like a positive, you know, a couple points, but like eight point positive, you know, 50 something percent approval rating the day after being elected. he hasn't done anything yet. Right.
James: And usually they have that quote honeymoon period. Right. Which is dwindled away already now. But. I think what you don't want to do is immediately start making yourself out to be the the party of obstruction when they are doing just fine about imploding.
James: If they're being very unpopular, they're kind of thinking, okay, shit, let's stay out of the way a little bit. He is hanging himself here. let's we'll keep doing the procedural stuff, we'll try this, we'll try that, you know, but let's just stay out of the way for a while because he's going he's getting underwater on his own, and once he's maybe 5-10 points underwater, then we can just stay piled on for the rest of the term.
James: You know what mean? i think that's maybe more their a strategy. let it let it Let it become more like an organic thing when the Democrats start screaming every single second of the day how he's destroying America.
James: Wait until the majority of America is kind of already there, that way it's easier to not be the, just the obstructionist party, you know?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's not what that's not what McConnell did with Biden, or I'm sorry, with Obama. Like, they were the obstructionist party from the moment they got power in the midterms. They were, like, this, i'm I'm directly cribbing the playbook from the Republicans.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's exactly what they've used as, like, the, like, for a long time, they've been, like, the thought minority party, right?
James: yeah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, in terms of, like, public opinion, what How do people feel about the issues? The Republicans have been in the pocket of of of oligarchs for a long time, right?
James: I think so are, yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And like the things that are good for oligarchs are not generally good for for the small guy. Like the little guy needs to be able to get a student loan.
James: ah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The little guy needs for like the roads to be good because he doesn't have a helicopter he can fly on. You know, like all these all the small stuff adds up for the little guys.
James: um
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The big guys with billions of dollars don't care. But it's difficult to win an election when you are like, what if we took all the money away from everything that we do for poor people and just sold it back to you so but the rich people could get richer?
James: selling cancel that you can't sell that
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Wouldn't that be cool for them? Not you, but for them.
James: well
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's like, right? America, yay. You know, like in order to pitch that, like you have to yeah to lie. And so like for a long time, the Democrats were the popular party.
James: so
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And they got so used to being that they lost, they lost, um you know, they put down their knives and they stopped being knife fighters.
James: I don't remember when that was. I don't remember when that was, honestly. I don't remember when they became the popular party. It's been...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The Democrats, feel like the Democrats have been, have been on the right side of, of popular opinion since Clinton.
James: Yes. I don't remember that time.
James: Oh, they've... Yes, they've been on the right side of popular opinion on issues.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: Doesn't mean it's ever helped them.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Since Clinton.
James: Doesn't mean it's ever helped them. Doesn't mean it's ever helped them on anything. Doesn't mean they've ever had majorities for it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I'm...
James: Doesn't mean voters vote the way they feel about issues.
James: it's been It's been neck and neck, God, decades, man. Decades. And yes, on issue after issue after issue, people like the Democratic point of view on the issues. They just don't vote that way.
James: Which is sad.
James: They don't vote that way. You know, they... they ah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I think it's because like they they vote based on this, like, the vibes.
James: like It's like this election right here. All the women... Yeah, it's this election right here. It's like all the women who... you know i I want a right to choose. I disagree with Republicans on this and this and this.
James: I'm going to vote for Tammy Duckworth and Donald Trump. What the hell is wrong with you? you know Those people. you know Those people are... you know i'm going to vote for AOC and Donald Trump. I'm going to vote for Donald Trump at the top. They're voting...
James: you know it's they're voting against their interests because probably from but the beginning part, you know, the sound bites, the little clips. Hey, your life is bad. I'll make it better.
James: That's it. That's your selling point.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yep.
James: That's it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yep.
James: Just leave it at that. He sucks. God, he's ruining everything. He's bad. I'll fix it are you going to fix it? It'll be easy. Just watch. There you go. That's your answer.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Exactly.
James: Just watch. Yeah. That's what he did.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Same, same message. They're, they're ruining everything, you know, and I'll fix it.
James: Yeah. So,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It'll be, it'll be easy. It'll be great. You'll love it.
James: Yeah. So, we'll see. I'm hoping they... I'm really hoping they do get out there more, man. um I live in a little rural town of Red Indiana, and...
James: I would be shocked if I ever seen ah democratic politician. I'm not some local guy from, you know, that another neighboring town, you know, I'm talking about like any kind of statewide office holders, anybody coming anywhere within 50 miles of this place.
James: I'd be shocked.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I don't even know if there are democratic leah Democrats who are elected to government in Indiana. I mean, maybe in like state government, there has to be some, right?
James: There's a, there's some, there's some, yeah, I mean, it's,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I mean, Buttigieg was from Indiana.
James: state legislature people. Yeah, state legislature people and like around Indianapolis and some of the big towns. um Not enough to do anything. mean, you might have a mayor or some other of town, but you're not going to have like, i don't think I don't think that i don't know if there's any statewide office, you know, statewide.
James: um Democrat, and like office holder in Indiana.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So let me continue this. I feel like this, what the Democrats need to do dovetails. Like it's just, it's very intermixed with this tale of two protests.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So let me tell you a little bit about protest pamphlet and about the, the last two protests that I went to.
James: No statewide office. Okay.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So, uh, a couple weeks ago after the, after Zelensky got ambushed in the oval, there was a protest, uh,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: think it was that Saturday, you that Saturday or Sunday in Chicago. And the Ukrainians have been protesting for a long time and I've been going to Ukrainian protests for over a year.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah And so i over that time, i started to notice like, these are the ones that are good. These are the ones that are bad or I guess less good, but you know, these are the the things that make them better, like that you need to try to do in your protests.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And, you know, these are things you need to avoid. ah So I took some of that stuff and I spent a little bit of time. i mean, I spent like a little bit time and I wrote like, these are all the things I should write in this thing.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And then I took a few of those things and I actually kind of wrote them out. That's protest pamphlet. And there's a kind of like a, some of that stuff was distributed to the people who are, you know, organizing and leading these Ukrainian protests. And a lot of the things that are in protest pamphlet happened at this Ukrainian protest. So some of those are,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: When you're protesting, you're trying to draw the attention of everyone around you. Ideally, you're going to get the news media. You're going get some social media coverage. But youre you absolutely have the attention of everyone who like drives by, everyone who walks by, everyone else who's on the street at the same time.
James: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Because you're out there holding signs and yelling, right? and You're giving speeches and using blowhorns and you you have a microphone. So in the case of this particular Ukraine protest, like we had thousands of people We had ah three elected representatives.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: and We had like four different news agencies that were there covering it. um So like that already is like, you know, making it kind of like a success. But the thing that like that happened over the course of the protest, right, is that they had six different messages.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And I saw the people with the blowhorns had them written down on paper. That's one of the things in protest pamphlets is like, know what you're know what people are going to chant. And you want to have a small number of those, like you want to have between like five and seven ah different chants, like different messages.
James: oh
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You want to keep each one of those short so that if one person yells it, everyone else can remember it. you want to You want to keep them all serious and on the same topic.
James: Stay on message.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Stay on message, right? Like you can't, like if every single time someone goes to yell something, it's It's a different number of times. The other thing is like you want to say the you want to say it three times, right? Like say this thing, but but the the you have like a a leader and then a response, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like there's kind of two ways, right? One person can say the whole chant, everyone else can repeat the same chant or someone could do a call and then there's a response. I don't love the call and response. I like it better when it's just, you know, one chant because it keeps everybody aligned.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The thing that you do when you keep everybody aligned is you build the energy. Everyone goes, yeah, this is the message. This is the thing that I agree with. And it builds the energy. The other thing that it does when you have a small number of messages is that after you've been yelling the same things for five, 10 minutes, everybody knows them.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So when somebody's voice is tired or you're too far away from the guy with the mic, somebody else can take it up. And if you always know it's going to be, we're going to say this three times and then we're going to move to the next one.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Then you have this like natural order. You're going to say it three times and then someone else will pick the next one. And that was happening at the, at the Ukraine protest. The other thing you want to do is you want to be clear about, you know, what you're going to do. We're going to be at this place at this time. We're going to have speeches for about this long. We're going to walk to this other place.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We're going have more speeches there. That's going to be it. um And you do that, that allows everyone to like to gather, to show up, to know what's going on. If you are like, oh, be at this place at this time and we'll tell you more when you get there.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Everyone who can't hear you and it's often really difficult to hear if you're not right next to someone, even when you have like, you know, a mic blowhorns, if you're 30 feet away, you're in the middle of the city, it's hard to hear.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Right. So have your plan, communicate your plan, small number of chance. Um, You do all these things, you build the energy over the protest. And so what happened at this protest was the energy just built and built and built until everybody, like nobody wanted to go at the end.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like we we ended up in like a a larger area. The area was full of people. ah They were making up impromptu speeches. They were going over all the information in the in the QR codes for like how to um how to donate or next steps or like social media links.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Um, so like everybody, everybody was hyped up, right? Everyone knew the message. Contrast that with, uh, this Tesla protests that I went to, uh, more recently a week after that, you go to the Tesla protest and.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like they don't have a clear plan for what we're going to do. And like, they spend some time being like, oh, we didn't get the permit. We're not going to March. and then they're like, oh, wait, no, actually we are going to March after like 20 minutes of people yelling.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The signs aren't consistent. Some people are like, Elon Musk sucks. And like like, this is the difference. Like the Ukrainian protesters, right? They're protesting this specific thing. They don't want the war. They don't want the the minerals deal.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: They want they want justice.
James: Maybe sold out, you know, to prove.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, they like they don't want they don't want Russia. Russia's a terrorist state. They have clear messages. Everything is serious. But this this like Democrats, it was a um Indivisible Chicago against Tesla.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It like is so... it's just a mess. Like some people are dancing. Some people are banging on pots. Half the signs are just like, who can make the funniest meme? Like, ah like, but, but none of them are on brand. None of them are on point. There's no consistency. Like there wasn't one person who made like 50 signs, you know, it's all different, different people. Everyone's got their own sign, their own message.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Some people are talking about Ukraine. Some people are talking about how, you know, we don't like, like Elon's not an elected official. Some people are like, Oh, we don't want, we don't want Trump. Like it was a million different messages.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: There were a bunch of like, of like pussy power but messages.
James: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: There was like a very explicit, like, like pussy power sign with like a three dimensional paper mache, you know, vagina vulva and like, like pubic hair, like coming around.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It was like a whole, was a whole production of like so many different ridiculous things. And some of them were funny, but then like you get to the chants and like one of the chants was like, this is, this is literally what the chant was.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And she like, even the person who did, who introduced this chant is like, all right, so look, this chance a lot, but like, stay with me. Here's what, here's what it was. Oh, Canada.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Viva, viva, Mexico, Trump and Elon have to go. Oh, Canada. And it's just like, that is not like, that's a song.
James: round.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's a, it's a terrible song, but it's a song. It's not a protest chant. And like the message like doesn't make any sense. Like you're just, just cobbling together a hodgepodge of like of things in the news.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like. ah It was just and like that was like the theme of the whole thing was just sort of like no consistency. So you had people yelling like whose streets are streets or show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like. And I'm sitting there thinking like this isn't what democracy looks like. We're not going to vote.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We're opposing our own democracy because we don't like the things that they're doing. This is what protest looks like. This what civil disobedience looks like. And like the idea of like of like the you know who streets our streets, that goes back to like the Black Lives Matter movement, where like they're trying to say, we're claiming the streets because this is a place where we are safe, where we can exist.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: This isn't your place that we're not allowed to be. This is our place that we are allowed to be. Public is the place that we're allowed to be and allowed to be safe. like Like there was a specific political message behind that chant.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And here we're appropriating it with like no context, no like understanding of what that is. And the chance would just go on and on and on. Like sometimes it'd be like 10 times and then someone would make up a new one.
James: Yep.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like it was chaos. And at the end, like and even in the middle, you know, people were just like walking away, wandering off like, oh, we're not doing that. the People are asking like each other like, oh, what are, oh, are we marching? We're not marching. Oh, okay. Some people left.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And then you're like, you're, then there was a march.
James: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And then it's, the end of the march, people are like, okay, well, we marched, like, that's it.
James: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Let's get out of here. Nobody, nobody had the beat, right? Like nobody knew what the point was because the organizers didn't know what the point was. And like, this is the thing that I'm,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: that makes me so passionate about like what the Democrats need to do. It is because it's the same thing. Like an election cycle is just a protest. Like it's just a massive nationwide protest where you're like the people who, who have party right, who have power right now shouldn't.
James: organizing events.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And here's why, you know, like, so you have to have a ah simple message that you repeat over and over again. So everybody can get behind it and get hyped up about it.
James: It's all about organizing. It's basically just organizations. were talking about the message. It goes back to the same thing. Your protests go back to the same thing. top follow but Here's what every Democrat needs to do. Stay on message. Here's what they all need to be doing. They need to be organizing everybody. Everybody needs to on the same page.
James: Get everybody on board on the same message. And, yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: Yeah. I mean, it falls in protest. Like got when Gabe was telling me about this a little bit ago. made me think of a West Wing episode. Season two, episode 16, by the way, I figured it out while we were talking about it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Nice. Nice.
James: The name of the episode is Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, right? And it was pretty classic because it's all about, you know, they were having like a, I think as a World Trade Organization, like event or something.
James: It was a bunch of Democrats, bunch of random groups of people come in to, you know, demonstrate against these global elites. Right. And of course, in the episode, all these people protesting, they can't articulate anything. They're all over the place. They're all shouting different things. they There's no cohesion to it. you know but And a lot of times that's the way, unsadly, that's the way a lot of protests go.
James: ah You know, that's way a lot of them go. It's kind of hard to get everybody on the same page. But the hope is at least we can get everybody on the same team. Even if everybody's not on the same page.
James: But it's hard to do when everybody has no idea what the message is or what the real protest is.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, totally.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And I mean, at the same time, like, so like it, it was a real contrast, you know, and it was kind of frustrating and it like highlighted the and need for someone to like, you know, add some organization and some experience.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Um, I have, uh, I've been kind of sick, so I haven't done it, but it's definitely on my to-do list to contact Indivisible Chicago and then to put some more work into protest pamphlet.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I'm probably going to start attaching it in the show notes also. It's like a read-only Google doc.
James: Thank you.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um But, you know, it's not just me. Anyone else listening to this can, you know, take some time, do some organizing, figure out what what what the message is, what they want to put in a sign, come up with something that can be the slogan. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: you know, all the contributions are still contributions and they all help. And even like ah wildly disorganized group in the street protesting is still a signal to other people that you're not alone in, in feeling afraid, in feeling angry, in feeling like your country doesn't reflect your values, in feeling like the idea of what your country is, like that you've had your whole life, has been stolen from you and bastardized.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And it's now this mutilated thing that you don't recognize and that you don't agree with and that you cannot stand. Like, you know, even being out in the street dancing with ridiculous protest slogans, you know, like there's still something like really inspiring and really beautiful in that because it's people willing to come out and do anything because they're so upset.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: They have to do something. You know? It's like, you can tell these people aren't out here protesting often. These people aren't organizing protests often. Like you can tell that they're new to it, but that they still care.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So even like a bad protest is still like, it's still better than no protest.
James: know. don't know, Persis.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Absolutely. And like, you know, every, every episode of somebody's first episode, Every protest is somebody's first protest. You know like you got to start somewhere. and And like ah like everything else, you know the willingness to to fail bigly ah is what eventually gets you to succeeding bigly.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: OK, let's talk about tariffs and the economy.
James: who
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Your thoughts.
James: Oh, let's see Well, I guess my first thought would be, ah it's a ah quote from Cornelius, don't even know how to say this, I'm not French, Cadrianu or something, from my Legionnaires.
James: And he said, the quote is, the first and fiercest punishment ought to fall first on the traitor, second on the enemy. had but If I had but one bullet and I were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, i would let the traitor have it.
James: and And that is not and is not a call to the Secret Service.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Hell yeah.
James: But I think it's pretty obvious that we have a traitor the Oval Office who is ah
James: at I don't even think you can say at best incompetent. I mean, it's a given that he's incompetent. But i I mean, the tariffs combined with everything else, I really do just think that Trump is ah traitor.
James: He's a plant. He is an enemy of this country at the highest position in the country. And the terrorists are just another way to do it, man. You know, he declares emergency powers, an economic emergency upon taking office, you know, days and weeks after newspapers are talking about our economy is the envy of the world and how we have the absolute best recovery post-COVID. And man, oh my God, we're in for a gilded age. that's I mean, this is literally the papers that we talk about our economy.
James: When he comes in, they said, we We are on pace to have a gilded age, like like rivaling the roaring 20s about how much our economy is firing in all cylinders. It is just booming.
James: It is just in the black as far as, you know, profits go far as eyes can see. Wow. Look at America. And he takes over, declares a national emergency that gives him the ability to tank that shit, kill the economy.
James: tariff everything flip flop back and forth on tariffs and nobody knows what you're doing um part of it is just to make a lot of noise and attention about tariffs say I'm going to tariff everything under the sun just so people talk about that so they're not paying attention when you're shredding documents you know and trying to go around the courts or I'm going to put it I'm going to 50% tariff on Canada if they don't agree to become a state and they get people to ignore the fact that you know um
James: you spent $18 million dollars so far golfing of their money. He is on pace to get to, to build America for three times as much as he did the first time around, which was really expensive.
James: He's on pace to spend over $400 million dollars of taxpayer money on himself at his own property. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: 14 of 52 days in office, he has spent golfing. 26.92% according to Trump Golf Track.
James: Yeah, I mean, it's if you're if you're acting like you're just crazy and a hothead, going threaten tariffs left and right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: trump golf track
James: That's one big news story that's going to rock the economy, right? And tank markets and flip-flop markets and everything else, you know. and But it'll take pressure off of, you know, the minutia of, oh, wow.
James: he He just wasted $18 million dollars on 30 migrants that they tried to put in Guantanamo and then turned around and had them all come back because it was a stupid thing that wasn't going to work. and We're not really having these mass deportations that I promised.
James: so But the the tariffs, I mean, everything he's done so far is destroying America. Tariffs are just one more. I think he's a traitor. So, let's rest him.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So to cover a response to the original, I listening to you. So like your point about incompetence, Bush was incompetent, you know, Bush too.
James: Bush 2. You're talking about Bush W.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: yeah He may have been incompetent, but he had people.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: W. yeah W was incompetent, but he but he was a patriot.
James: He had...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That is an incompetent patriot. And he did have the extremely potent Dick Cheney.
James: And he had people that, although I disagree with them to my dying breath, they, for the most part, were competent, even if their ideas were flawed.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: And You know?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And then, like, the other thing is, like, To your point about how um then like the the the idea of like the relationship between the state of the economy, who has power or is about to have power, and the way that it's covered in the media. right like if you're looking at If you're looking at right-leaning media before Trump gets elected, they're all they're all echoing Trump, which is to say,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: this is the worst economy ever. Everything is so terrible. Biden is ruining America.
James: Until weekly.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: he's he's destroying the country. Everyone's so poor.
James: Maybe he kind of screwed himself a week after the election saying how he fixed it. Because he did declare that they fixed it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Then, then like as soon as, yeah, like as soon as he wins, right. There's like all the tech companies and Elon get their big, their big bump, which by the way, all of that is gone now. Like Elon's down $148 billion, $118 something.
James: Okay.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: billion dollars hundred and eighteen billion dollars some Over $100 billion. dollars So, you know, I stopped counting after that. um But he's down on paper and in value. um But like the, you know, the left-leaning media was like, oh, look, the economy is doing this. These are the numbers. These are the statistics. Oh, well, look, the unemployment is super low. The inflation is coming down. the This is the amount of stagflation. This is the amount of, God, what do they call it? They called it like,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It kind of inflation that was like the businesses are giving you less stuff for more money or the businesses are just charging more money.
James: Oh, shrink like the shrink shrinkflation.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Shrinkflation. Yeah, like the bag of chips now has like five fewer chips in it.
James: Tic Tacs. Remember, Donald Trump sat there for five minutes holding up two different packages of Tic Tacs to show you what inflation is.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yes, exactly.
James: um Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, you know, they were just yelling about how bad the economy was as literally we were drilling the most of any country in history. the stock market was setting a record by going up another thousand points like every other month or like every month, I think like it was just like, like weeks and weeks in a row of, of continuous like record setting growth.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um Meanwhile, like Trump in the right early media is saying, oh, it's terrible. And as soon as he wins, like, like he didn't change anything, but now it's like, oh, look, the market, everything's different.
James: So, great. Fix it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Everything is good now. Like nothing changed. And then now here we are on the other side, right? So first Trump comes in he's like, see, I fixed it. ah Because people were like, oh, look, we got Trump now.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Everything will be great, I'm sure. Because surely he won't do all that dumb nonsense he's saying about the tariffs. And surely he won't like deport all the people who, you know, make all of the all of the food or build all of the buildings.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Surely he won't spend, you know, government money on this.
James: or clean all the Trump properties.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Surely he won't you know fire tens of thousands of government workers and you know take away all the the money from all those, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the things that he's done, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And so then and the market sees that he's doing all of that and the Dow just starts to eat shit.
James: You can't run off that.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: you know And we looked at it. If you go back one month, it's down 3,897 points. That's in the past month.
James: Yeah. Yeah, almost 9%.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And if you go back a little further, it's even worse.
James: Yeah. Yep.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's just been going down since he got elected. It's been straight fucking nosedive, accelerating the the further away from him getting elected that we get. And it's because he's doing all of this wildly chaotic shit.
James: yep
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: and the The thing that I want to point out is this Ezra Klein video where he was talking to an economist. And there was some stuff in there that ah that i'm I'm going to pull from memory.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I'll link this thing in the show notes, but I want to talk about some of the stuff that was in there because i thought it was really interesting. So they talked about like the idea of tariffs, right? Like just like generally, like not even like this ah implementation or execution or like some other one, but just like the idea, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The idea of tariffs is kind of like, it's going to give you two tools. One of them is to rearrange your economy by saying, you know, we're going to, we're going to do We're going to make more of these things here and we're going to make them more competitive in the short term so we can retool our economy to do them here. Like maybe we want to do more farming. Maybe we want to do more mining. Maybe we want to do more um manufacturing.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. So we're going to say things that come from other places are going to be more expensive, which is going to allow us to have, you know, here in the American economy, we pay people a better wage because the cost of living is higher.
James: Targeted. I'm going to target
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Right. So we're going to like we're going to make it so that those goods, they can't just be cheaper because the cost of living is cheaper somewhere else. So that's how we're going to allow the American companies to compete as they're building up their infrastructure.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: But to build up the infrastructure, it takes a long time. like Say you're doing something like building cars, okay? So like if you're BMW and you're building cars in Germany, you have your factory in Germany, you have your workers in Germany, you're always gonna ship your car over and just pay a tariff when it comes in, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: But if you're building a car in America, the way we set this up with what what was hailed by Trump, in fact, as, yes, negotiated and hailed by Trump as the greatest ah trade deal ever
James: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
James: Renegotiated by Trump.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: from when he was in office previously. Now he's calling it the worst deal. Only who are these idiots who signed this thing? You, sir.
James: its
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You're you're the the idiot who signed it.
James: but ah who was Six years ago, something like that.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, it was in 2019. it was like six years ago, five and a half years ago.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like that deal, the way that the economy works for for selling cars is like different parts go through, like materials will come in from out of the country, right? Some of the steel we make here, some of the steel we import.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We import a lot of steel because other countries make it more cheaply. we import a lot of steel. Then we turn that steel into stuff here in America at a factory. Then we send it off to Canada, which does something else to it, adds something to it, makes it into something else, whatever else.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Then they ship it back into America and then through America down to Mexico where some other stuff happens down in Mexico.
James: or symbol.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And this happens like for some parts as many as eight times where it goes in and out of America eight times. Okay. Okay. And eventually it gets assembled in America because we've set up this system of free trade where like ah things going across the border doesn't increase the cost beyond what it costs to ship it around.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And the reason you do that is because it's really difficult to go how much value was added here, how much value was added was added there, what steel went and became this type of product, what steel went and became that type of product. It's really difficult to manage all of that. But if you want to be able to take advantage of like,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: different workforces and different environments and like different tax incentives in all these different places, you know, then you spread the manufacturing process around.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And that's what we've done. like the idea that we're going to like suddenly switch to like, you know, oh, okay. Everything that comes in from Canada, everything that comes in from Mexico, we're going to put a tariff on it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like you're going to make American manufacturing so much more expensive because
James: yeah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The stuff that we build here, we either, we build with with raw materials that come from somewhere else. Like take wood as an example, okay? So like most of the lumber that we build houses with, we want it to come from up north because when it's it grows in a colder temperature, it grow it grows slower and because it's colder, it grows harder.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So the wood from up north is much like more sturdy. It's better for houses, lasts longer. It's better wood. That's why we import the wood from Canada. And like the wood in America, like for one, there's not even close to as much wood in America. There's dramatically less, but it's all this like softer wood. That's not as good for building.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And the idea that we're going to like start making trees, you know, to try to like compete with Canada, like for years away from being able to have the trees, but like, we don't even have the right climate in America to build the trees anyway.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That's why we were importing the wood from Canada to build houses. So like, You know, like take something like like um like housing prices, right? Like he it's a double whammy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like one, we can't get the wood from Canada that we need. So we're gonna use less, we're gonna use the more scarce, less good wood.
James: See you, Erwin.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's not gonna last long. So produce lower quality houses at a higher cost by by just using our own wood. ah But we're also removing a lot of the immigrants.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Well, what are some of the really common jobs that immigrants do? It's food service, it's farming, and it's construction. Because those are like the difficult and often low paying jobs that a lot of people don't want to do.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So you're you're removing the people who would do the building, you're increasing the cost, ah or lowering the quality or both of the goods.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And the other thing that happens when you when you have a tariff, okay, is if you like, say you're like Joe lumber guy in America, you know, and you're like, oh, well, Canadian wood is more expensive now. Do you just keep selling your wood at the same price?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, no, you don't. Of course not. You raise your price to just a little bit cheaper than the Canadian wood. So now you're only a little bit cheaper because you would like to make a little bit more money. So like, this is the other thing that happens. Like you raise the price of the, of the other country's goods. Well, the American goods also go up in price anyway. So the consumer just has to pay more. That's the only option.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You just raise the prices, right? Then you're shrinking the labor force. us So we were at like 4% unemployment, but now we're getting rid of, we're getting rid of all these farmers and construction workers.
James: That's higher.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So housing is going to even more expensive, not less food is going to be more expensive, not less. And on the topic of food, eighty percent 80% of American farms uses a fertilizer that comes from Canada.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: 80%.
James: Yep. Yep.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So we're we're we're charging more for the for the import of this fertilizer. And we get the fertilizer from Canada for the same reason we get the trees there, because we don't have it here. We can't just like, you know, you can't squeeze water from a stone.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You can't make up new fertilizer to be here in America when the the but the things that make the fertilizer aren't here. so So the cost of of of housing is more expensive, double whammy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The cost of food is more expensive, double whammy. And the idea that like you're going to bring them to be American industries is so far-fetched because it takes years of like investment and time for that to happen.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: and like people are like And the other thing is like Trump is changing the tariffs by the day sometimes. you know it's like It's wildly up and down this way and that way.
James: Yeah. Yeah. Tuesday. Yeah. Tuesday. He announced a 50% tariff on Canada and Mexico or Canada. If they don't agree to become the fifty first state Wednesday, wednesday but they He backs down on that, you know, and they they credited Howard Lutnick for, you know, making a deal, talking to Canadian Premier, you know, ah Ford, whatever, you know, talking, you know talking to him and making a deal. where And he got Trump to not do that 50 percent tariff six hours after he said he was doing it.
James: You know, that's how rapidly it changed. Six hours later, they called it off, you know. said no, we're not going to see those 50% tariffs tomorrow. But he already did the damage. i mean, he tanked the stock market 500 points that day.
James: And then the fact that he, six hours later, changes his mind doesn't exactly bring all that certainty back to the market. It's like, oh, good. It's off again. Buy. oh it's on again. Sell. You know what They're like, well, let's just hold on, man.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah huh
James: You know? earth
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like whether it's a ah a bid to like to rearrange what gets made where or if it's a bid to like negotiate in the short term for whatever things you know you want to be different from another country, it it's not working.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: in either case, like in either case, it's not going to be good for America short term, you know, and like, it's not clear if the, if the, the, the tariffs are going to like last long enough because Trump is just so chaotic in order for you to like be a business that's going to go, okay, well, we can't build, um,
James: And
James: and it's even worse long term.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: you know, okay, we won't build a new factory in Mexico because then we're going to have to have tariffs. So we'll build it in the USA. But because like ah it takes, it takes ah huge amounts of money and long amounts of time to rebuild those industries. Like if we're going to rebuild the steel industry. We're going to, we're going rebuild the farm industry.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like in America, like, you know, it's like 70% of avocados come from Mexico. Like we're just going to start growing avocados in Mexico. Like we don't really have the climate for it. And we don't have the laborers for it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We only have 4% unemployment. so i don't know who you the fuck you think is going to go and like pick avocados, you know, or how long it's going to take for the avocado farm that they're going to start building now to pay off or why someone is going to feel confident investing in a massive American avocado farm when the tariffs change every other day.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like all of this together,
James: about those bananas with coffee?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: When we said if if Trump gets elected or when Trump gets elected, the economy is gonna go to shit. This is what was in our minds generally when we made that prediction.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like this will be a shit show. And here you see how it is an absolute mess.
James: Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, so that there was more that I can't remember that was in it was like an hour long thing with an economist and the he has this cool thing that ah i I would love to do, but, uh, it's always the two of us. So like he'll have, he has, he has guests much more often.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Whenever he has a guest, he asks them to recommend three books. So she, she recommended some cool books and she was talking about, uh, Ezra was talking about a book that she wrote recently. And, um she was talking about a book that Ezra wrote a while ago and like his next one that's coming out, which all sounded really interesting.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um I just can't remember the names of them, but yeah, so I'll have that in the show notes. You guys can check it out. Um, definitely a good listen uh okay so we have i know you want to try to keep us at an hour we're at 53 minutes we have our instagram section if you want to do some of that we have our republicans altering the timeline predictions how might we all die um you know in our traditional closing stuff so
James: so
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: How do you feel about time? What things do you want to what do you want to jump into next?
James: um Well, it's on the tariffs thing. ah that's why of straight If people haven't seen the Rachel Maddow from this week, it was a little known thing that if it wasn't for Rachel Maddow, I never would have caught that.
James: I mean, God, I didn't see any other maid mainstream or any any other media source actually talk about it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: Which was, it's insane, and I can't believe and more people were talking about it. Because the Democrats, like we talked about earlier, trying every little procedural thing to muck things up and everything else.
James: <unk> you know Chuck Schumer doing the right thing. It's like, hey, you know what? The only reason these tariffs are happening is because he's de preparing declaring it ah an emergency. You know what mean? National Emergencies Act, whatever. He's calling it an economic emergency.
James: So there's a procedure. If you know the Senate goes to put up a vote that says, hey, We are putting up a vote to declare this is not an emergency.
James: You can take the emergency away from the president. And so Chuck Schumer is like, hey yeah, we're going to force this vote. We have to vote on whether or not this is a real emergency. And everybody knows there was no emergency that required us going batshit crazy on tariffs left and right every other day.
James: Right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Uh-huh.
James: But the Republicans did not want to vote on that. You know, they don't want to say no to Donald Trump. And they don't want to make a vote saying that, A, they don't want to go against Donald Trump, and B, they don't want to have voted against Donald Trump, but they can't exactly vote for all these tariffs that everybody knows is stupid, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Uh-huh.
James: So, for the purposes of Section blah, blah, blah of the National Emergencies Act, they declared... The rest of this Congress will constitute one calendar day for the remainder of the term.
James: Because the rules say very clearly, if somebody's going to challenge the national emergency, they have 15 days, 15 calendar days to vote.
James: So the Republicans passed a little thing saying, with respect to the national emergency, the rest of this term is one calendar day. So they'll never hit 15 days. They'll never hit two days. The rest of the count, yes.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like the the The nonsense is so brazen.
James: It's so in your face.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: is so brazen
James: It is so...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: yeah
James: the the the the The bullshit is right out in front of you. Everybody can get a really good whiff of it. Hey, everybody, look how full of shit we are. It's like that George Carlin thing.
James: Look how full of shit we are. the rest of the year is only one day. We have 15 days to vote against this. But the rest of the year is only one day. And how do you like that?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I don't understand how they can get away with that. You know, like if the law says you got 15 days, don't understand how they can like alter the, for set like the, the counting of time.
James: and so because it's like
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like that just seems, that seems so wild to me that they can get away with that.
James: Well, maybe, hopefully, they will take that to court. But it's kind of hard. no why here's Here's why it's hard. and
James: Usually, branches of government, like the courts, right? A court can say, the court is very, okay, the legislative branch might pass a bill that affects people, and they can say, hey, wait, no, this is unconstitutional, right?
James: Which I i argue the Democrats should, on constitutional grounds, challenge this. Okay. ah Just challenge it. Hey, they have 15 calendar days. This is about a national emergency.
James: This affects the entire country. They can't say it's one day just so we can't vote. I would challenge it in court.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, absolutely.
James: They might be able to, but usually courts, but courts, courts are generally,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: should. Hopefully they will.
James: They don't like trying to rule another branch. Same reason why the legislative branch doesn't really want to tell the Supreme Court a list of ethics rules that they have to follow. They say, hey, well, they're co-equal branch.
James: They do their thing.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh my god, they should.
James: We do our thing. They should.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, they need to. So hard.
James: but exact Well, do you really want this group of Republicans making the ethics rules for this Supreme Court? I mean, come on. But I get your point.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah Yeah, I mean, like, let let them make the rules be like, can't be black, can't be woman, can't can't not hate gay people.
James: Yeah. nice
James: You can't not hate gay people. You have to. That is a prerequisite. That is a litmus test.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yes.
James: But, you know, but they generally don't like doing that. Usually the courts don't like saying, well, that was them affecting their own law. That's their own rules. we We don't want the legislator telling us how to run our court.
James: We don't want to tell them how to run their house. Usually that's the way it goes. So it'd be hard, but I think they got a good case.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: anyway
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's just such a...
James: of it
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's just...
James: it It's a bullshit move. It's such a bullshit, obvious bullshit move.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's... Man.
James: so so just But also, everybody should remember that and talk about that and remember that. Like, hey, yeah, you're Republicans in Congress there. They totally don't like these tariffs either.
James: They went way outside the box thinking just to make sure they wouldn't have to vote against it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, I mean, A lot of people were saying things like, ah you know, trump's going to surround himself with people who are going to temper his wildest impulses and kind of keep him in line and keep him from doing the crazier stuff. And like, I think that was true the first time.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, he was he was very frustrated by the the walls, you know, the limits of power that he bumped up against.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, it's like, it's him telling Pence to not certify the election. It's, you know, all the times that he said to prosecute Hillary and they said there's nothing to go after her about.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: He said to prosecute Comey and they said there's nothing to go after him about. We're not we're not doing that.
James: Go after Biden! after this and go after, yeah, go after everybody.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah. You know, it's like, it's just like, it's whack-a-mole of all the things that he tried to do the first time that he didn't get to do because somebody was there who was the adult in the room and stopped him from doing it.
James: Go after homie, man. Go and get him.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And even like his tariffs the first time were much more measured. And that's because he had, he had much more serious people in all of these positions. And that's why this time he had to go for like the bloggers and the TV hosts and the, you know, and the, and the, and the, you know, and the Russian plants and the, the Florida, you know, rent a cop, AG, like the lawyers, like,
James: And the Russian journalist, journalist in the quotes. His
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: He has to drag the bottom of the barrel to get somebody who has no who has nothing else to stand on.
James: his own criminal defense parties.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: No career, you know, no, um no history, no like real, real caring about like public service.
James: Certainly no morals.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, like he like the only requirement is is absolute loyalty for everything.
James: is you get to follow him the way wants.
James: Which they did. They were doing that, remember, across the FBI. They were giving the, quote, loyalty pledges to all the FBI people now. know
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, like, that's like, the like the the deputy director of the FBI is like Dan Beninga, who's still running his podcast. Like, that's his thing. He's a podcaster. He's not even a lawyer. He's just a podcaster.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, I guess we could be, I think we said this in the episode we talked about it, but like, we could be the deputy director of the FBI. yeah we have We have just as much credentials. Like, it's...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, it hurts. It hurts to think about, because like, you know, I feel like
James: Thank you.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: My idea of what the country was, was, was, was based in like Americana. It was, it was, Bill Clinton giving a speech.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It was Obama talking about hope and change. You know, it was Bernie Sanders talking about how healthcare is a human right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And, you know, all the other countries that are well-developed and wealthy like America, but less than America. are doing are giving their citizens all of these things. They're given them ah they're giving them insurance. They're making it so no one goes broke from an injury. They're funding public options for education, public options for healthcare. They're they' funding childcare. So like it doesn't make financial sense for you to stay home and watch your kids instead of going and getting a job and working.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: because the cost of childcare is more than what you would make if you worked in a day. Like all these common sense things that that other countries have done that we're not doing.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um Or like this idea that we're like doing things for moral reasons, that we're like sending troops to places, that we're funding things, that we're, um you know, doing USAID because we don't want kids to die of AIDS in some other country, or we don't want people to have Ebola in other countries or we're funding cancer research because we want things to become better. Like we're inventing insulin because we want things to be better.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, like it was like this, the idea that we had ah moral imperative and an ideology. And that's what led us.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That was the guiding principle behind our decisions. And we would disagree about how to accomplish it and which things were more important than others and who should pay, how much and when.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: But like, we all agreed on like the state of the world and, and our moral imperative towards it and what our relationship to like the other people in that endeavor was, you know?
James: and
James: Yeah, i really miss i've really been
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And like, all of that is gone. Like it just feels so gone.
James: I really miss when Obama and Romney were running against each other. And then even though, you know, I was like, you know what? I'd be all right if Romney won.
James: I wouldn't be happy, but, you know, I'd be all right with him. You know what or like, when McCain was running, even though Palin was a nut job, you know, i was like, still John McCain, man.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Excuse me.
James: You know, ah I wouldn't be worried about John McCain, you know?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: George W. Bush previously was like the worst president to me. I was like, oh my God, this is the absolute, it wasn't the worst. I mean, there's the worst, but ah at the time i was like, oh my, in my lifetime, i was like, I can't believe this has some embarrassment.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, I would.
James: And now looking back, it's like, yeah, they did some illegal stuff. You know what I mean? Not on this level. You know what
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like if the Democrats ran Dick Cheney against Donald Trump, I'd vote for him.
James: mean? I know, but, uh,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know.
James: God, i would hate I would hate having to do that vote, but I would definitely do it. Because at least dick cheney and Dick Cheney and George W.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: mean, I'd vote for Punxsutawney Phil over Trump.
James: Bush as... and i This is more towards Dick Cheney than George W. Bush. I think George W. Bush was more incompetent, you know but as evil as I think they are, right they i do believe that they want what's right for this country, even if I disagree with what that is.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: i don't think there's anybody... I mean, there's the people who are really drinking the Trump Kool-Aid, but any serious person with a brain, I don't think, believes Trump gives a shit about the country.
James: He gives a shit about himself, his wealth, his power, his ego. He doesn't give a shit about the country. isn't He could care less, man. If he could sell off all the liberal states to Putin or just ah Kim Jong-un in exchange for some money, he'd do it.
James: Who cares? Hey.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: what like I don't even understand... like ah Maybe this is like a perspective thing, but like i can't even understand the why behind that. you know Because like dude's 80-something years old.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: He likes McDonald's. you know like He doesn't drive cars, as he was just saying, as he was doing his Tesla advertisement at the White House the other day. What
James: it's like It's like a rich person who's a kleptomaniac.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like like what is he going to do with more money? What
James: Here's the thing. Well, that's rich people, man.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like
James: That's that's the insanely rich people. and that's like It's like the rich girl who's a klepto. She doesn't do it because she needs makeup. She does it because it's the thrill of doing it and getting away with it.
James: is that That's what it is for Trump.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: It's the thrill of knowing that you can just do whatever the fuck you want to do and they can't stop you. And check it out. Even if the court tells you you can't do it, what are they going to do about it?
James: They can't do shit. I run the executive branch. I'm in charge of the police officers. They can't do it. I have the attorney general. it's it's a it's it's just a way that it's It's a way to pretend he's swinging a big dick when he has that little mushroom.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: you know That's what it is.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I think it's like, I think for him, like, did you read, um, I can't remember what her name was. I think it was like Laura Trump. It was his niece. She became a, a psychologist.
James: Lara Trump. Oh, wait, talking about Lara Trump? Not the the one who sings the national anthem badly?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: No, i'm talking about his niece who is very anti-Trump, but she wrote a book about like the family history.
James: Mary Trump? Mary. Mary. Mary Trump.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Mary Trump.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. Um, But like she wrote this really good book about like like what his home life was like when he was a kid and throughout like his early years in his life and like stuff with his brother and stuff with his dad.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um And I think a lot of that informs this. you know It was this very competitive, everyone's trying to screw everyone over, like like
James: Your dad's a criminal.
James: Your dad's criminal.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like meanness for the sake of meanness, like no no love, no empathy, no compassion, like
James: Evil. Yeah.
James: And nothing happened, you know? Yeah. there' a way Shaped by shaped by his his family life, for sure. You know?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like I think she says like his his dad was probably like an undiagnosed psychopath. And he has all the hallmarks of a narcissist.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And it's probably because of you know being raised by a psychopath.
James: Nature versus nurture. mean, it could be both. ah so
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Could be both.
James: but But I do think he's a traitor. And I think once everybody comes to the conclusion that he is a traitor and he will do whatever he can do that benefits himself at the expense of the country, nothing seems crazy anymore, at least.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I just, I really, I honestly do not see how, how this collection of things that he's doing can be viewed as like a pro American collection of things to do.
James: good for America. yeah yes
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like, I don't, I could not, I could not like, yeah I was not just lying through my teeth, you know, just like, just throwing hype at just like,
James: Well, i can I could argue that. I could argue that for a minute. I could argue
James: it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Lipstick on a pig. OK, if I was not just putting lipstick on a pig, I could not like make a compelling argument for it without just like lying.
James: I can make a compelling argument for it. I can make a compelling argument for it because we have all adopted over the last 20 years A line that I hated 20 years ago, which is talk about all the immigrants doing the jobs that Americans won't do.
James: 20 years ago, I fucking hated that line. I hated that line. You know, we were our economy wasn't the shit, you know, it wasn't, you know, the shitter.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: why
James: And it's basically like, oh, OK, so we should reward. big agricultural conglomerates by letting them hire illegal workers who are going to work for way less than minimum wage because we don't want to pay Americans a living wage.
James: Now, that's not what Trump's arguing because they're not he's not trying to say we need to pay everybody living wages and give pay increases, and that's why immigration's bad, and that's why these things are bad.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: but that But that is a compelling argument for slapping on tariffs and getting cracking down on illegal immigration. that would be a reason to do it you know mean pay Americans more money pay us a living wage stop having people come in there working for two dollars an hour without tips you know mean and ah you know that would be an argument for it you know and something hey americans Americans would do this job hey know what for fifty thousand dollars I bet you there's a lot of Americans who would go down there and pick avocados of course avocados are little way up but yeah don't know
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, this goes back to my my my talking point about billionaires. You know, a billionaire eats one dinner. A million people eat a million dinners.
James: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, like you can't you can't pay the people who make food more money when so much of the money is pooled at the top.
James: Mm-hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You know, everybody can afford to pay three times as much for food.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And I'll tell you what, I bet a lot of people would love li I mean, and I mean this sincerely, I bet a lot of people would love to be out in the sun, to be in nature, to be handling plants, to be, to be working on the mission of feeding America and have all the health benefits of sunshine and labor that come with it.
James: Another job.
James: Mm-hmm.
James: Yep.
James: There are farms.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And like the feeling of like doing something productive and being in connection with the earth.
James: Not only that, Gabe.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like so many people would love that if they could afford to do it,
James: People pay to do Gabe. People pay to do that. If you go to farms in Indiana, seriously, I'm not even joking here.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Seriously?
James: There's farms all over the place here in Indiana and Michigan.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, like pay to pick?
James: and Yes!
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: People pay to go out there for hours and pick apples and pick raspberries and pick fruits and fill up buckets.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: They pay.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: yeah Yeah. We go to the apple orchard and pick our own apples.
James: If people would pay money to do it, people would do it for a living.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I've done it. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, absolutely.
James: but
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: if it just like If it paid, you know, if you could get good money, you know, working the artist.
James: If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: but
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, totally. Totally.
James: But yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: totally
James: Oh, man. The first time I saw people doing that here, they're like, oh, we're going out to the whatever orchard. Yeah, we're going to pay blah, blah, blah, blah. We're going to like three or four buckets of blueberries. like, what?
James: We're going to go to the farm. You're going to go to farm and just pick blueberries? Out in the sun. You're stand there in the sun for hours on end picking blueberries. Yeah, it's fun. I'm like, wow. Okay.
James: You're paying.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Blueberries are delicious. Sunshine is great.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You're in nature. You're at the dirt on your hands.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like you're, yeah, you're getting a good sweat.
James: That's what they said. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You're tired at the end of the day. You feel like you did something.
James: but So that's why I always hated that line. Like, we're paying americans you're paying people to do jobs that Americans won't do. Well, it's not that. It's that Americans don't want to do it for $2 an hour and it's illegal to pay Americans $2 an hour to do it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Exactly.
James: You know? but but but that's not the But that's not the argument that Trump is even making.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Exactly.
James: He's not even making that argument.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: No, not at all. Like, cause he's, you know, what he hasn't talked about at all in all of this.
James: Yeah. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like in all of this, right.
James: and
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: If the problem is where we're 35 let's, let's just switch it. Okay. I'm not going to use the numbers from like the American economy, but we're going to talk about the deficit in the economy and like what going to describe the problem.
James: I'm waiting.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. So the problem is this, like I personally, or we per we collectively are in debt. Okay.
James: im waiting
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And in order to solve our debt, we have we have a couple of options. One of the options is we can stop buying candy bars, you know, like we buy a candy bar like every day and like it adds up. It's like candy bars are like three dollars a candy bar now. So like three dollars a day. It's like 90 bucks a month in candy bars. Okay.
James: Is your analogy to candy bars like F-35s?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: No, the candy bars are like, you know, firing all the park rangers and the IRS workers, et cetera, et cetera.
James: Oh,
James: oh that's a little bit muddy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That's right.
James: Okay.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like we're going to so like, you know, we're going to save money by like cutting costs.
James: Save a little
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Right. I'm going to stop buying candy bars. OK, that's option number one. OK, and that's an option like I'll definitely ill I won't spend $90 on candy bars.
James: save a little bit of money.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That is an option. OK, but option number two is um i raise my income by I just multiply it by three.
James: You get a second job. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Right. Like, let's just say like, let's let's say for the sake of argument that I make five grand a month.
James: Hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like but option number one. OK, stop buying candy bars, save ninety dollars a month. Option number two, triple my income. OK, make fifteen thousand dollars a month, have have ten thousand more dollars a month.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: 10,000 versus 90. This is the, this is the thing that we're talking about. And what no one is talking about, no one is talking about like, Oh, we have $34 trillion dollars in debt. What should we do? We should probably go to the people who have benefited the most from the current system who have all so much money that they can spend $270 million dollars on an election, or they can spend $40 billion dollars buying Twitter.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So they can run it into the ground or, yeah or, you know, like, All of the nonsense, right? So we can have like Jeff Bezos buy a $500 million dollars yacht that he has to like have them has to have them demolish a bridge because they built the mast too tall to get under the bridge, and that's the only way it can get to the ocean. So he's like trying to sue them to make them take down the bridge so he get his boat out of the fucking dock where it was built.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like The nonsense, you know, or like, or like we're going to consolidate all of the news media behind five companies and we're going to like cover every, every website that you can ever look at on your phone.
James: Hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So that 70% of the screen is just ads, ads that you can't close on every website ever for all time. It's just constant ads, like 10% content, 90% ads.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Or we're going to like put all the food into like five companies are going to make all the food and own the entire food industry or just Amazon is going to be your only option for this. Or, or, or the or, you know, no matter, no matter how much money you make, you know, your only option will be to go and buy money for like, for an infinite amount of money instead of for a fixed amount of money.
James: Yeah, we get it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Right? Like, Like if so much money that you can just like shit all over the system, buy up all the houses so no one can buy a house and they can. The only option is to rent one from you at like way more than what it would have cost if you hadn't bought all the houses.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like there's so much money that they can just do this like ruinous shit to like make it so you'll own nothing and be happy. LOL. It came miserable because you're just constantly in debt from the day to the day you die.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Right. No one is suggesting that we just go to the people who have way the fuck more than they need and take some of it to like pay down the debt.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: They're like, let's stop eating candy bars. And it is the most, it is the most frustratingly self-defeating thing because like, yes, they're like, let's stop eating candy bars.
James: Well, they're doing worse than that. They're doing worse than that. It's worse than that.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And, and instead of taking money from the rich people, let's give them more of our money.
James: Yes. That's why I'd say it's way worse than that. Because not only is it that they're not talking about taking money, right and actually it's not even quote they, it's just Republicans. Democrats did want to increase the taxes on them.
James: People didn't vote for that though. People voted for the I'm going to make everything better And it'll it'll be easy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: See, this is the part where disagree. they People didn't vote for person who talks in policy. They voted for a person who speaks about outcomes and that and and talks about problems.
James: That's exactly what That's exactly what said. Exactly. That's what said. The Democrats had a policy. Yes, they did want to increase the taxes on those rich people. They did want to make the corporations pay. but but but The people voted for the the majority, slight majority, very slight majority, voted for the person who said, I'll make it better.
James: That's it. With no plan. They don't want policy.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Exactly.
James: But they did attack her for not having a specific enough policy, even though he had none. Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That's just like, ah you know, you're a black woman, everything, you're held to a different standard. That's just like the typical two-faced, we're clinging on to as much racism as we can hold in our hot little hands, you know, classic American bullshit.
James: Yeah.
James: yeah So, don't know. So, what I don't know. What do you think the future holds for these voters who will vote for somebody who, you know?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: What do I think the future holds? I think, you know, like I'm, I'm struggling to be optimistic.
James: but
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um
James: You don't have to say what's optimistic. That's not that's the next question, remember.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah Yeah, I know. I was just going to say, like, I'll save like my, like my, like any optimism for like what could go right.
James: this and
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: But like, what do I think is going to happen? Here's what I think is going to happen. I think the price of housing is going to go up. I think the cost of food is going to go up. I think that,
James: and unemployment probably will go up.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: people are going to start art go to start defaulting on their debt in mass. Because the thing we didn't get to was like because of the way they've changed a bunch of the like student loan stuff, like it's making it so education is more um more expensive, like less accessible to more people.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And people who already have debt are are having to pay much larger amounts of it um because like a whole of different programs and things that Biden had put in place were no longer there.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like tons of people, like the government has like $1.4 trillion dollars of student debt that they've like guaranteed. um And like tons of those people, like like an absurd amount, like 60, 70% of those people are starting to default on their loans.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Like they can't pay it because like the cost went from 250 a month to $900 a month or more. And people can't handle like an extra thousand dollars hit to their budget because they just don't make enough.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So my prediction is all of the things that are that that you have to have to survive are going to cost more.
James: Bye.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And all of the ways that most people, the people who make money by doing a job for a certain amount of time and getting some money back in exchange for that, are goingnna have a they're going to have less money.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: The people who make money by having money are going to make more money. So I think we're going to go into a recession, if not full on depression.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: think the stock market is going to just continue to plummet until it becomes catastrophic, existential. And my part of like, I've been like listening to different people talk about like, what do they think is like the motivation behind this?
James: Thank oh
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And one of the things in there was, was this thought that this was like one of those Instagram things that was one of the videos I wanted to talk about, but it was about how like war is a policy choice.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And it was ultimately like making the argument that if everyone is fat and happy, if everyone has enough to eat and enough money to go on vacation and buy a car and, you know, buy a house and send their kids to school on a single family income, nobody wants to go to war.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Nobody has the appetite for war. Nobody has the appetite for like riots in the street. Right. But if you take everything away and you make everything hard and you make everything expensive,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: everybody gets upset and now everybody is willing to do anything to, to feel less upset. And I think that, I think that that's part of it. I think it's like, well, Americans don't want to go to war.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Let's make everything hurt. So maybe they'll want to go to war with Mexico or maybe they'll want to conquer Canada. You know, I think it's ultimately like a plan to destabilize the West.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Cause I mean, my, my position is that Trump is a, is a Russian asset, whether he's a an agent and working with them directly, or he's just compromised and poisoned by their ideas and lifted up by them bailing him out in the 70s financially.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah But like he's so compromised. like He selfish and doesn't care if he ruins the West. So I think everything, my prediction is everything will get worse. like
James: Oh, yeah, I think.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Deep, deep recession may be a depression. bad times all around.
James: Yeah, I was actually reading a little US economic outlook for 2025 to 2026. And this is from ah University of Michigan and over, you know, it's a research seminar in quantitative economics, right? it's a whole thing by a bunch of all of their people here, right?
James: And their directors, America, America, whatever.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Emeritus.
James: and yeah Well, plural, emeriti.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, okay.
James: Directors emeriti.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I hadn't heard that one.
James: So anyway, um but yeah, and they're they're yeah're they're looking at all the consider all the things here and all the stats and the trends and everything else.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I see. I see.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Thank you.
James: And yeah, they're predicting that you know um we will end up going up to the largest ah percent of our GDP population. the federal deficit will climb to approximately 6.1% of GDP, right?
James: oh From 6.1% to 6.8% of our GDP by 2026, which that level of spending on the deficit is ah be unprecedented outside wars, the pandemic, or the most severe recessions our country ever had.
James: um
James: You know, inflation, outspending them.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Remember like the way we won the Cold War was by like using the space race and like the arms race to like bankrupt Russia?
James: It's weapons. Dude. Yeah, exactly.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: feel like China's doing that to us right now. like
James: but doing yourself or knocking it We're Actually, we're not.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like We're getting so close to like defaulting on the debt. you know like We just keep adding...
James: We're not even nearly. We're not even next and close to it. There's actually real reason to think like why they're talking about how the debt doesn't matter. ah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Really? Really?
James: yeah i mean they because the The percentage of your deficit and your debt doesn't matter if your GDP is growing at the same or bigger rate.
James: You know what mean? and now...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I thought that it was good, but okay, maybe I'm just like, i haven't looked at the numbers and close enough and that's probably, that's true. I haven't looked at it super closely, but my, the thing that I thought ah was that we're getting close to like, the interest is getting close to the annual growth of GDP.
James: Like 60%.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And so that like, we're getting close to the point where like, we're not going to be able to borrow at the same rate and then
James: vol Well, that's the problem with when you have a recession. As long as your economy is booming, it's cool. you know When your economy contracts you know and you're not growing and you haven't done anything about your debt, that's when you're in trouble.
James: You know what mean?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: a and
James: i mean if if you just Deficit spending in itself, it doesn't really matter. And the fact is we are paying a ton of money. to the interest on the debt, not even the debt, just the interest. I think, what is it? $500 billion dollars a year.
James: I think 500 billion goes to the interest. Is that, is that right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: 170 billion lifts every American above the poverty line, by the way.
James: That's it.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: A third.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Less than a third.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: of what we pay in interest.
James: Yeah. But I mean, I'm just saying it's like, We can afford it you know, and in good times, it's like the Clinton years, man. Hey, they get a balanced budget and the economy is booming and cool. We have a surplus and let's pay down the debt.
James: Good, good deal, you know? And then we went into war a year later, not even a year later. You what I mean? And they had to give huge tax breaks to the rich people again the first time around on their bush. And they gave away all that surplus money that we were using to pay down the debt.
James: So, i mean, if they just let the tax cuts expire instead of putting them on there again, mean really, we're all acting like, oh, they want to give more tax. They were going to expire. were sitting on your, you know, in your analogy about your huge $10,000 a month income.
James: We were sitting on a little thing where right around the corner, we were about to get another $2 trillion dollars because all those other tax cuts going away. know what I mean? On the rich. But instead, they're like, nope, no, no, no.
James: We got to keep giving those $2 trillion. and actually, know what? We should give them something better. Let's give them another trillion or two.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And they're like they're talking about trying to make that permanent.
James: What
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like There are people in the Senate who are like, yeah, well, we don't like that they're only making these tax cuts like go on for another decade.
James: yeah
James: Forever.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We want them to go on forever. We're not trying to make rich people pay ever.
James: Yeah. It's bullshit. and mean And honestly, here, you know what?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's bullshit.
James: A 10-year thing or a 5-year thing or whatever, if you know what? i As much as I hated it hey, you know what? What if it did? ah What if it would have been an awesome thing?
James: Okay. Okay. What if it would have been like, okay wow, that really did spur this stuff. It it wouldn't and it hasn't and we've proven it over and over again, but at least, you know what? Out on 10 year things like, hey cool. We'll try for 10 years.
James: You know, markets are cyclical, whatever. We'll say we'll see. We'll see how this rolls, you know, at the of the 10 years.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Maybe America can fail up.
James: you're like Yeah, you know what mean? but But shit, it didn't work and whatever.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: For the umpteenth time.
James: Yep.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: think that We've only been trying the same it doesn't it doesn't ever work strategy since Reagan.
James: ah Yeah. Although again, what is permanent? Permanent doesn't mean permanent.
James: Permanent means permanent until you get the next time you have a house and Senate that you can just do a reconciliation deal and change the text code. so I mean, again, permanent doesn't mean shit.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: I mean, look at Roe v. Wade, look at, you know, look at, look at the,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Well, Roe v Wade was never the right way to do that. It should have been ah it should have been an amendment to the Constitution.
James: Okay. All right. Well, think about the plain text of the Constitution, even, you know, that says, you know, um ah you can't hold office if you participated or gave aid comfort to an insurrection.
James: I mean, there's that, you know.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: wasn't an insurrection. It was a speech.
James: Well, no, because they actually had a trial on the merits in Colorado. And yes, they actually had a trial and they went through evidence and they ruled, yes, it was an insurrection.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, right, yeah, that's why they were they were the keeping him off the ballot.
James: That's why they were like, you can't take him off the ballot just because you had a trial on the merits and proved it wasn't insurrection and he took part in it. yeah But the Constitution says right here, well, Colorado doesn't get to say that. We get to say that.
James: We say he's on the ballot. So, yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Exactly.
James: Whatever.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Can change anything if you steal it.
James: oh
James: Yeah. So, all right. how How might we all die, Gabe?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay, there I have a list of several things.
James: You have a list? Oh man, don't have time for a list.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah I texted it to you.
James: Like one or two. Okay.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I'll just do a few.
James: okay
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay, let me scroll up. Okay. um Okay, so basically the idea of this was like a no stakes bet on what will kill us first. It's like ah a squares thing where you can kind of pick your square.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: so I'll read four and we'll we'll both pick a square and we maybe we can do like four more next time. Or even three. i'll do I'll just do three. The first three. Okay. Okay. Here's the first one. Quantum computers break all the passwords and hackers ruin everything.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: We slowly fall into ruin as society collapses. That's option number one. AI takes over and kills us all some way we never see coming or something obvious. That's way number two.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Robot army merges with AI and kills everyone. That's number three. Okay. Robot army. ah Hackers break everything or Terminator.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Which one, which one do you think?
James: Terminator.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Pick your Terminator.
James: Terminator.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I think, well, I've been watching the show on Netflix with ah Robert De Niro, he plays the former president.
James: I
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: um It's called Zero Day. It's about like this.
James: i wanted to do that to ASL preview.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.
James: It's
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It's pretty good political thrill. It's a nice distraction from like the real political problems with like you know, a decent amount of seriousness to silliness and nonsense ratio.
James: great.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like it's pretty good. um But yeah.
James: Hmm.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: ah So I'm going to go with hackers ruin everything, you know, and we just slowly fall into like a decline that kills everyone.
James: Hmm. How might we all die? Well, through Jesus. Alright. My scenario is the Trump administration may try some smoke and mirrors. We'll call it a mask-rofka. Okay?
James: ah shit
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Mascarovka.
James: Yes.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I don't know what that is, but go on.
James: It's like a mask.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay.
James: deception. russian you know what I mean? Russian... you know I think ah ah think you might try to
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh.
James: help the cities with their lead pipes and everything else and infrastructure and actually poison all the blue areas.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh.
James: And the government will just try to quash dissent that way and actually introduce poison to the water supply of the blue of the big cities and areas that you know disagree with him.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: oh
James: That's what I think.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I like it because because i feel i feel like like I feel a sense of safety and insulation from that possibility because like of the amount of competence required to poison people specifically at that scale.
James: Yeah.
James: yes sir
James: yeah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: But I like it. I like it. Yeah, i could I could totally see them going for for like a oopsie, we killed all the Democrats plot. It seems like something they would do.
James: they're a they're epa people Their EPA people are making sure that they're safe. you know Maybe they're introducing the poison of supply. don't know. I can see that.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I could see that.
James: and know. What the future holds?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I could see that.
James: I'm hoping the future holds. Here's what the thing, though. Because we're still talking about, ah oh, wait I didn't get my week with the future holds. And it coincides with what can go right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah, you didn't get your, what's your future holds? Yeah. what do you think will happen? What's your prediction?
James: Okay?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay.
James: Donald Trump, if you all saw, you know was you know for a tv so for a stunt for Tesla because you know everything he's doing now is helping Russia Elon Musk. right He did this show of buying a Tesla at the White House right and having it there, paying $80,000 for a Tesla.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: hey
James: right What can go right and what could the future hold? Maybe it catches on fire and he gets trapped inside of It's a double whammy right there. What the future holds and what we'll go what could go right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. Your prediction is Trump dies in a car fire, a Tesla car fire.
James: ah A Tesla fire. Yes.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay.
James: And the stock.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay.
James: And that might actually... But the bad part is that would probably rally the Tesla stock and make it actually go up.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: No, that would make it go down.
James: And if you killed Trump, come on.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: you kidding me? Yeah, if it killed Trump, it would go down.
James: I'd want to buy a Tesla. I'd want to buy a Tesla. I'd invest in Tesla if they killed Trump.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Dude, if a car is so unsafe that it it manages to like kill the President of the United States, that that would be huge.
James: but can't be They can't be injured. Geico... i code stopped Geico stopped covering Tesla Cybertrucks.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Good.
James: Yeah. So so guy go Geico.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Good. Go Geico.
James: All right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: we you know We are looking for sponsorships, Geico.
James: Your turn.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So...
James: yeah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: reach out to us.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: like I don't even have a business email. I should put the, that reminds me note to self to do, make a business email and get some, get a link tree going. i said do need to get a link tree going for this.
James: my My son was watching a ah video where a guy named Burger, right? And his girlfriend's last name was King. They were getting married and they reached out to Burger King. Think it'd be funny, you know, right? Like, hey, Burger King, can we use your little logo for a wedding? And Burger King took it a step farther and like sponsored stuff and gave them all kinds of free stuff and did a big thing for their wedding, right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Wow.
James: You know, maybe we could reach out to Geico.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay, we could.
James: go
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, Brother News sponsored by your name here.
James: Geico.
James: Fighting the good fight against so is against Tesla.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay. um What could go right?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: What do you think could go right?
James: that's That's about the only thing I think could go right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: All right, I got one I'm going to shift. I'll shift us all. put us back into a positive headspace. What could go right? So we didn't get we didn't get to it, but the Ukrainians have indicated that they're open to a ceasefire.
James: and they pulled out a curse.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And while generally speaking, I think a ceasefire would would mostly just be an opportunity for
James: Maybe
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Russia to have back some political and economic advantage and that they would probably encircle everyone in Kursk and then in a few months or a few years they would just start another war.
James: they just pulled out a curse already, threw there.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: you know They'd drum up some reason for fake provocation and they would start a war. um But my what could go right okay is that is that in in calling their bluff, as you were saying,
James: your band.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: that they will reveal themselves to not be interested in peace and it will result in a renewed effort for like renewed support for Ukraine and renewed, um but I guess like a continued bolstering of like European ah defense spending and, um you know, armament and like building up their militaries that,
James: Which they did also.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So like it'll just it'll give Russia a bigger, more well-armed foe, and it will reveal them to be disinterested in peace because from the beginning, this wasn't about saving the Russians in a certain part of Ukraine or like you know the Jewish president of the country being a Nazi or any other other nonsense bullshit that they've they've said that it was.
James: question.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It was always about destroying Ukraine. And because that's what it was always about,
James: yep
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: they will they're not going to go for a ceasefire and they'll reveal themselves and hopefully that that will be helpful to ukraine that's my what could go right
James: Yeah. Well, I certainly hope so.
James: I certainly hope so. I mean, that definitely could go right. but But by the way, they're they're they're out of Kursk already, man.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: what's like a domestic what could go right
James: They're basically already out of Kursk, though. Russians cut through on a supply road and in into Kursk, so Ukrainians bugged out of there. They're out of Kursk already.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, they left. Okay, i didn't hear that. Okay, well, that's good.
James: Yeah, is like it's like, eh, not really. Because now
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I mean, it's good because like I really was thinking that like they would do a ceasefire for like a month or two months or something, or like a like some really short amount of time that would just be long enough for them to build some extra bombs and like move some troops to surround Kursk, and then they'd go in and kill all those guys.
James: Well...
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: So if those guys made it out and got back you know to the main forces without getting wiped out, that's a win in my book.
James: yeah but Yeah, but now they have hundreds of thousands of troops right on the other side there now too, near Sumy and Kharkiv. Which, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they go in there, maybe they don't. Maybe they move all those forces down to Post-Crosk and down the south, where, you know, Ukrainians have been pushing them back, you know?
James: Maybe they won't be able to keep pushing them back if they get all those other forces down there now. So, I mean... I don't know. We'll see what happens, but I am somewhat surprised and glad that they turned back on the deliveries of the rest of the arms that Biden promised to them.
James: There's still nothing new, but they're going to continue. They have already, they yesterday, immediately after that, you know, they, Ukrainians made that speech about the peace thing. They turned back on the flow of the remaining weapons that we've already promised them.
James: So that was good. But, uh,
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: And the intelligence.
James: And the intelligence, yeah, which I bet, I wonder if it really truly ever got turned off because, i don't know, I know the president might say something, but I don't wonder if, there's still, man, the Ukrainians are talking to people, they've been talking to people for years, intelligence, and you know what mean, the communications, I'd be really shocked if it just went silent all of a sudden, you know what mean?
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I mean, the day that they.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I mean, the day that they said that they shut it off, there was a massive attack by Russia, so
James: been massive attacks by Russia every single day.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I don't know. No, it was like an especially it was an especially big one.
James: ah
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: It was it was an unusually big one.
James: Either way, I really do hope that goes right, man. and
James: Yeah, definitely.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: You just go of youre going to piggyback on my what could go right?
James: Well, Tesla, he could die in his Tesla.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: are
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Oh, right. That's right. That's right. Yes, that would be great. That would be.
James: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: That be so right. because now That would be like a double whammy because like I think Tesla stock would would go down even more.
James: I making a joke about it going up. was just talking about how you know they've been shedding all their stuff because nobody wants to buy a Nazi mobile.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yeah.
James: If it killed Trump, i mean at least you'd be able to say, hey, look it up.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: I mean, i I'd join a GoFundMe to buy one for Vance if one takes out Trump.
James: Yeah, and exactly.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: so I guess guess there's some logic there.
James: All right.
James: Yeah, so. All right.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Okay, well... I think this was our um best episode.
James: Hey, i will I will see you Today. Next week.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Today, next week? Why? What's happening today, next week?
James: it'll still be It'll still be one calendar day. Next week will still be one calendar day from today. you know so
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yes.
James: cool
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Yes.
James: Every episode will be the same day.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Don't worry, fan. We'll be back with more news before you know it, before the day is out.
James: Alright. Good night. Everybody. and
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: Good luck.
James: Good luck to us all.
GABRIEL ZIEGLER: All right.
