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Unknown A
Elon, as impressive a businessman as he is, and you have to give him his flowers. I think in terms of all the businesses he's built as an ex poster, he's nuts. Now, one good thing about Donald Trump is he's not part of the conspiracy. Right. I think secretly, every time he hears a right wing conspiracy guy, he's like, that's a little bit nutty. But I can see that there's a lot of momentum there. And I don't want to, you know, there's, there's no enemies on the right, but that's not a part of his, I think, core settings. And I think the conspiracy. Right. Is a growing danger.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. I think even in the, I think Jack Smith released part of this when the J6 stuff got killed. And I think there was the thing of Trump, like muting the phone with Sidney Powell on and he's like, this lady sounds like she from Star Trek or whatever. I think was the quote that some people said. He said, how do you feel, I guess insofar as where we're at right now with DOGE and Trump and the federal institutions and the judge rulings and all that, what are your general thoughts on this?
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Unknown A
So from 10,000ft, I'm a big fan of the mission of Doge for the following reason. I think. I'm not an economist, and I won't pretend to be. My knowledge of macroeconomics is equal to the average educated person. But it seems to me one of two things is true. Either America can run infinite national debt because we're the reserve currency of the world, or we can't, and eventually we will have a debt crisis similar to Greece or Argentina or Puerto Rico. And it will just take much longer because our reserve currency status gives us more leeway. I don't know which one of those is true, but if there's even a 10 or 20% chance that the second thing is true and we are at our current trajectory headed towards a debt crisis that will seriously screw the economy in our lifetimes, then we need Doge or something like Doge, at some point we absolutely need to cut spending and waste.
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Unknown A
Fraud and abuse is obviously the natural target. And so we need a Doge. And I worry that almost like climate change or certain other frog boiling in the pot issues, it's such an easy issue for one administration to pass to the next like a hot potato. And it's not a sexy issue to run on either, because mostly people don't like. People usually like politicians saying, I'm going to give you more money, I'm going to give you more stuff. Which is why it's so easy to think of countries that have ruined. Ruined themselves through that route, like, you know, Latin America. It's harder for me to think of countries that have ruined themselves by doing something like Doge, but were otherwise functional. So to me, I think Doge is a good thing. I expect there to be process fouls and procedural fouls, and I think all of those should be called out, and the judiciary should do its job and the Constitution should hold and the separations of power should hold.
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Unknown A
But ultimately, I feel I have to be on the side of rooting for Doge and hoping it actually accomplishes what it set out, what it sets out to.
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Unknown B
Okay, what do you think? Totally. Every fiber of my being disagrees with almost every single part of that. I'm trying to think of where I want to go with this.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
The. I think you drum, right? Is that what you do or what do you.
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Unknown A
A little. I'm pretty good at drums, but I play trombone, mainly.
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Unknown B
Oh, trombone. Okay. Okay.
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Unknown A
I can get around on drums, though.
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Unknown B
Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. Damn. I'm trying to think.
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Unknown A
I don't know why a drumming analogy would work, though.
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Unknown B
Yeah, sure. I went to school for a saxophone.
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Unknown A
Oh, okay.
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Unknown B
Although sax. Yeah.
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Unknown A
You went to school for sex?
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Unknown B
Yeah, for two or three years, but I had to drive because I was working too much, but.
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Unknown A
Oh, cool.
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Unknown B
Yeah. What school? Don't ask me that. It's not Berkeley. Okay. It's like a, you know, University of Rascal. They had a good studio, but I mean, I was working so much. It's. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Jazz.
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Unknown B
You have to. If you're a saxophone player.
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Unknown A
Right?
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Unknown B
Yeah. I'm not playing classical alto only. Yeah, I assume. Yeah.
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Unknown A
I didn't know that.
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Unknown B
I think. Okay. When it comes to government, my feeling is that process and procedure is incredibly important. Actually, when it comes to private business as well, private enterprise as well, process and procedure is important because it usually exists generally for some type of reason. A really basic example I would give would be a manager walks by a store, employee's goofing off. Manager goes and talks to the supervisor. Sometimes. This happened to me once, actually, as an employee, and I got really miffed. And I didn't understand until I became a supervisor where I was like, why didn't the manager say something to me? Why the would you go to my supervisor? Just like, you're right here. And then I realized things like chain of command are important because if the manager talks to me and the supervisor isn't aware of it. Like, this type of miscommunication through, like, avoiding, like, chain of command or chain of communication, makes things very confusing and cluster.
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Unknown B
So usually there's like a process or procedure for a reason. I think my biggest issue with Doge is on the legal side. Doge is just an office in the executive office of the presidency. So that means there's like a. The office of the presidency, you've got like the chief of staff who makes meetings, everything. And then Doge is just. This was repurposed of the. It's called the usds, I think the United States digital service that Obama had made. And their goal was just to kind of make it so that offices were more like digitally friendly and efficient. That was like the mission. But the Doge office, even though I think on paper it says that they're just trying to make things more efficient, it feels like what it's become part of is more we're going to go in and we're going to cut stuff that we don't like, which I think is significantly different.
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Unknown B
I think it's a lot scarier, and I think it's mega illegal. Because what's happening is, is when an office is created by Congress for the executive branch, that office can only be removed by Congress from the executive branch. So, like, the big issue you're running into now is DOGE stepping in and basically saying, oh, look at all this funding of projects that we don't like. Like USAID was a good example, where if you don't like usaid, then you have to pass a law either destroying the office because Congress is the one that authorized and created it, or significantly changing the way the office is funded, which is again, from Congress, because Congress does appropriations and funding. And having a faux organization created in the office of the presidency, basically to just go in and pull the plug on it, I think is mega oversteps. A lot of checks and balances.
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Unknown B
Like, the President can't unilaterally defund offices, which is essentially what DOGE is doing. That's one big issue that I have on the legal side. And the second big issue is that if you want to get. If you want to make things more efficient, or if you want to just get rid of waste, rot and abuse, that's fine. But a lot of this seems to be heavily ideologically motivated to where similar to that Occupy Wall street stuff, where people are like, why are these people going into jail? You know, like, Elon will come in and go, this $20 million was spent on maybe a trans dance recital. I don't know, Whatever. This is what they're saying now. And it's like, okay, sure, let's say, let's even assume that was true. What about it? Like, if you don't like it, you have to defund it from Congress.
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Unknown B
You can't just say, this is the thing, I don't like it, therefore I'm pulling the plug on it. Because that's not your job. I think that's my big issue right now with the Doge stuff.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And then, and then on the side of that, this is actually my biggest issue, I think in politics today. It's the fire hose of constant lies and misinformation that Elon does on X, where like every single tweet is like another lie, another piece of misinformation. I'm like, holy fuck. I don't even know what we're supposed to do about stuff like this. Yeah, and these are my big issues right now.
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Unknown A
I fully agree with you on the second thing. Elon, as impressive a businessman as he is, and you have to give him his flowers, I think in terms of all the businesses he's built and frankly, the good that those businesses have done for the world, in my view. But as an ex poster, he's nuts. I mean, he's been nuts for a while and it only seems to be getting worse. As for Doge. So I guess I have one. I guess I have a few points. One is, frankly, I expect and price in that almost every president pushes the boundaries of their role in the system of checks and balances. And I believe that the system is going to check it. So it's not that I don't. It's not that I disagree. It's a concern. I just, I think that it's going to be checked. And part of the genius of our system is that it predicts and expects presidents to try to maximize their own power.
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Unknown A
It's built for the president who is trying to maximize his own power out of bounds of procedure. And I think, I think it will hold for that reason. And secondly, I wonder, I mean, the status quo with our functioning proceduralist system has been for spending to balloon every single administration of my lifetime. Republican and Democrat people talk a big game, but nothing happens. And the debt to GDP ratio gets worse every single four years by a lot. So the question is that is the status quo. That's like the system working, and that's a result of the incentives of the system, because there's always an incentive to promise more, to a particular interest group on the right or the left. And it's never fun to cut spending. No one, no politician has a personal incentive to say, hey, I'm going to cut this program, because it always means more to a small interest group than the diffuse result of saving, what, $1.50 for the other 300 million Americans.
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Unknown A
So to me, that's like a fundamental problem. And solving that. I'm not sure I can imagine, in theory, the doge, the version of DOGE that solves that while perfectly respecting the proceduralist institution, the proceduralist norms of the system. But just because I can imagine that, it doesn't imply that that's actually possible. It could be true that in order to actually solve a problem that's so deeply based on the incentive structures of the system, it is going to be a little bit crazy. And if that's the case, then I think it's important to see the bigger picture and to see the, to keep in mind, like the cliff we're driving towards and to keep that in mind as we critique the process fouls of doge, which are definitely happening and going to keep happening.
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Unknown B
Sure. Okay. So I, okay, so I'm agreeing in principle. I think my big issues are. So I'm agreeing with what you're saying in terms of it's hard to cut spending, but I guess here's my issue. People are deluding themselves into thinking that we are going to make significant spending changes by finding waste, fraud and abuse. And that is just never going to be the case. There's always going to be some level of waste, fraud and abuse in everything, whether it's government, whether it's private industry. And there might be a world where DOGE even does find maybe, or could find a little bit more waste, fraud and abuse. I would say, again, that's not the job of that entity. You have Office of Inspector Generals that are supposed to do that, or the Government Accountability Office. But whatever the. Maybe even if they did find some waste, fraud and abuse, maybe they could cut a little bit.
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Unknown B
But I think we're talking on, on the scale of maybe tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, and may, maybe, maybe even billions. But like, our discretionary spending is $1.7 trillion. That's just discretionary. Our overall budget is like 6 or 7 trillion. It's a, it's going to be a drop in the bucket. And the thing that irritates me the most is that Donald Trump does things that are going to wash away any type of waste, fraud and abuse. You could find the two Biggest ones are one. As his recent thing as he' that NATO countries now need to commit 5% of their GDP to military instead of the 2% is what he asked before the current US the current US contribution is like 3 point something, I think.
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Unknown A
Like I assume he's saying that to get them to 2%.
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Unknown B
Well, I think most of them have gotten to 2%. So.
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Unknown A
Have they?
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Unknown B
I believe so, yeah. I think. And so if he's saying 5%, we're talking about like a 50, 60, 70% increase in our own military spending, which is on the scale of probably 500 ish billion dollars. So that's the defense is already our biggest line item in our discretionary spending. So whatever money might be saved by discovering waste around abuse is totally like 10 orders of magnitude gone. Or not 10, but like two or three orders of magnitude gone because of the increase in whatever military spending would happen. He's talking about other things to imply increase as well, like building an iron dome over America, whatever the fuck that means. Building more ships for our Navy, whatever that means. You know, spend, spend, spend there and then on the other side.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
You have your spending and you've got your income. He wants to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs act and I think he even wants to expand it a bit because he's talking about other types of tax savings as well. This is going to decrease the revenue coming in. And then on top of that we've got. Did he actually announce the 25% steel tariffs yesterday?
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Unknown A
Yeah, that's what I saw.
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Unknown B
He said he was going to. So assuming he did, he might have on the plane, actually. So this is something that's going to probably decrease GDP because it's going to make things more expensive and everything. All of these things are like huge deficit increasers. Like if you had to guess, what are the chances that you think one, that the deficit is going to be gone, are spending our spending deficit we gone, or two, that will even get smaller, I guess under Trump.
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Unknown A
It feels like as of now, I would say the, the odds our deficit gets smaller under Trump are less than 50%.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
Which is a very optimistic even to say that, to say any number other than zero is optimistic. And the only reason I'm even that optimistic is of how much popular sentiment and support Doge seems to have, which is to say only time in my lifetime I've seen a significant number of people like salivating over the idea of cutting government for more than like two seconds. So that's what gives me some optimism. Everything else that you said to me, which I agree with, gives me no optimism. I don't think that Trump. I don't think that Trump cares about cutting the government at all. I think Elon does care about it. I do not think Trump cares about it. I think Trump has accurately surmised that Elon has a following. And Elon is powerful, and he's a good ally right now. And Trump, like every president in our lifetime, I think is happy to pass the baton of the national debt to the next president, which is the fundamental problem, is that no one.
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Unknown A
No one's going to be held accountable for this. And the president that inherits the debt crisis, if and when it eventually comes, can and will be accurate in blaming every past president, and we won't hold him or her accountable for it. That's the. That's the entire problem. Tariffs. Dumb idea. Unless. Unless it's a negotiating tactic where in the next three months, he gets some kind of trade deal with these countries, which I think is very unlikely. All it does is it hurts more Americans than it helps. Obviously, the steel industry is going to.
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Unknown B
Be very happy today, but everybody downstream from them is going to be everyone.
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Unknown A
Downstream from them, which is more people than are in the steel industry. More Americans are going to be hurt by it. And so, yeah, I don't expect that. I would say. I do feel probably his 5% thing on military spending is something he doesn't mean as an end goal. I think he's saying that to whatever countries still haven't got to 2%. I think he's saying that as a negotiating tactic to try to scare them and get them to 2%. And I don't think he. He intends to increase our. Our spending to 5%.
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Unknown B
Have you ever seen it on YouTube? There's, like, a skit comedy group called Always Friday TV.
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Unknown A
Mm.
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Unknown B
Okay. They make YouTube shorts. There's some guy. It's called, like, the Dupont Method. And he's just like. He's like a business guy who just does, like, crazy or whatever. And there's a skit where he's like, this is how you negotiate, you know, for selling a car. And he's like, I want to sell you this car, and I want you to try to negotiate the price down. Like, I was like, well, I can't. And then I think he, like, he takes out a gun, and he's like, if you don't buy this car for me, I'm gonna kill myself or whatever. I'll blow my head off. And we'll threaten him by putting a gun up to his head. Right? That'll do it. That won't do it. If you really want to get what you want, you'll threaten him with your own life. One of the big problems I have with Trump is I feel like his.
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Unknown B
We'll talk about the no accountability thing, but the second thing is that it's very difficult to deal with anything he says with any of his followers, because people immediately run to that, well, he doesn't mean it. Or it's just a negotiating tactic. And it's like, okay, well, let's throw at number one, because that's stupid. He doesn't mean it. Let's say it's a negotiating tactic. Is that actually, like, a fair, like, excuse to be unhinged? Like, there's a lot of people I can negotiate with if I were to just, you know, bring a pistol with me or threaten to kill their whole family or threaten to do whatever. Unhinged stuff. But I feel like when you're in a world where Trump is like, I'm not taking the military off the table for Greenland and, you know, Mexico and Canada, maybe I'm going to 25% tariff, everything.
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Unknown B
Despite the fact that, by the way, that trade agreement that we have with them was his, like, crowning achievement from his first administration was with a renegotiated nafta.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
Like, it can't just be that the United States president can just say literally anything. And it's like, well, that's a negotiating tactic. You know, he's not actually. Especially because that kind of defeats the point of a negotiating tactic if nobody thinks he'll actually do it. Well, he doesn't really mean that. He's just saying that, you know?
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Unknown A
Well, I think so. I think it can work sometimes. And part of the reason it can work is because even we take him seriously. Right.
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Unknown B
I think, like, I can't tell. I don't know who does anymore.
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Unknown A
Well, you took his 5% thing seriously, right?
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Unknown B
I don't know. I actually don't. Like, I could literally see at this point, like, Trump is pure chaos. Like, anything could stem from that because it seems like he gets bored with things and he moves on in, like, a month anyway.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
But then at, like, this Gaza thing. Is that for real?
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Unknown A
My guess is that's also a negotiating tactic. Okay, what is he negotiating? I think he's. My guess is that. My guess is that it could be something like, okay, he's gonna. He's gonna be at the table with the Saudis soon, and he wants them to believe he's willing to do incredibly crazy things if they don't get a deal, they don't join the Abraham Accords. And so he wants them to fear that the US Will be, will have troops in Gaza or he wants them to think there's even a 10% chance of that, and as a result, the Arab street will go crazy. And if he, he, he feels that if they, if they think that if they worry about that, they'll be more friendly.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
And they'll, they'll have a fire under their ass to not drag out the negotiations or something. That could be the calculus.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
And I do think this is like, you know, the thing about Trump where I try to, I try to give him charity is because he, his personality traits are generally so awful that if he was a guy I knew I could not be friends with him. I would have to unfriend him. Like, if, you know, I don't, I don't have any friends with his personality traits, and I couldn't. But I do believe that he has a method that he thinks works and one of his. And he, you know, he writes it in the Art of the deal. It's like he believes it pays to be. I think, how do you put it? A little bit wild in the context of negotiation and start with something a little bit wild. Right. I think that can work. It can also backfire terribly, but it can work.
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Unknown B
I think the backfire terribly is the thing that I'm kind of worried about. Yeah, I guess you've done some of the Israel, Palestine stuff. Are you a little familiar with the Six Day War? Yeah, there's this concept called brinksmanship where without getting too deep in the history of it, I kind of agree with the idea that I actually don't think that Egypt wanted that war. I think that. I think that there was a weird game that was being played with a lot of the Arab leaders to where they knew they probably wouldn't be able to defeat Israel, but they knew that their citizenry were not happy with Israel. So you engage in this, we're going to destroy them. I think there's speeches that Nasser made a famous one. I think it's like to the Arab trade unionists where he's like, war with Israel will be the last war, or every single one will be destroyed or whatever.
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Unknown B
And he's saying this and he's expelling people from the Sinai, the UN peacekeeping troops, and he's mobilizing his people. But he just suffered like, catastrophic losses in Yemen. Like, there were like tens of Thousands of Egyptian troops that just. And they wouldn't have been in a position. But as long as he keeps saying it, his citizens will be happy, and that's all he needs to do. But I think rightfully on the other side, I think Israel's looking at this and like, okay, well, what the. And at some point, I feel like the. The start of the Six Day War was a little bit kind of like Israel calling the bluff of, of Nasser, where it's like, okay, well, if you keep saying you're going to wipe us off the face of the Earth, we're going to get you first. And I worry with the Trump stuff, that, that type of brinksmanship, what I'm.
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Unknown B
What I'm really scared of is that one day somebody's going to say, oh, okay, like, you want to buy all of Gaza, then go for it. It's good luck. And then at that point, the United States either has to execute on an insane fucking thing that Trump has said, or we have to pull back. And I think that the scariest thing for Trump, and I think we might see this maybe today or tomorrow with these judicial orders, is if somebody calls Trump's bluff. Well, what is Trump's act? Because both things, I think, are equally terrifying to where we either have to execute on an insane thing that he said that was never supposed to, shouldn't have even been said, or the whole world sees. Wait a second. Trump is full of shit on, like, every single thing he says. And now Trump's word has no credibility, and people start to pull back a lot more.
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Unknown A
You know what's interesting about that, though, is you and I both know that Trump is full of shit in a lot of ways, and yet every time he says something crazy, there's still a part of us that reacts. Isn't that interesting?
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Unknown B
No, because he's the President United States, I would expect to react. It's crazy.
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Unknown A
It's more than that, I think, fundamentally, he is a TV guy. I mean, you listen when he says, when he talks about the presidency, whenever. When I forget when he said this, but he goes. He's talking to someone and he goes, or maybe this is. Maybe it was in Jared Kushner's book. The first time he's running, he goes, this presidency thing, it's. It's like it's bigger than the super bowl, right? So it's like that's kind of how he thinks about it. He thinks about the US Presidency a little bit like it is a show whose ratings are even higher than the Super Bowl. It's the show with the highest ratings to him. Right. And he's a showman and he was good on tv. His show was good on TV back in the day. That's, he's, he's pretty good at that. And I think the thing about him is if he promises something crazy and someone calls his bluff, probably he's not going to do it and he's just going to lie and say he never even meant to do it because he's literally tweeted things in the morning and lied about having tweeted them the
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Unknown A
same day. He's so comfortable lying that he, I, I don't, I don't know how much he feels he has to follow through with, with his bluffs. I think he feels he has to make them really confidently and really convincingly. And he does it often enough that even those of us that have been following his track record of lying the past eight years assume he's telling the truth or worry that he's telling the truth when he says crazy shit. So, you know, and I think people around the world, they see, well, his own people are taking him seriously. Maybe he, Maybe there's a 10% chance he'll really do that crazy, stupid shit and maybe he's crazy enough to do it and maybe we should come to the table. Right? That can work on the, if you're on the other side of that negotiating tactic and the person has power, that can work.
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Unknown B
Yeah, for a little bit. Yeah. I'm just worried if somebody calls him out and then he doesn't follow through. I'm worried if there's like some crazy domino effect where people are just like, that's just the US President. He says whatever, shit, who cares? And then I don't know because at some point he would be forced to act or do something, right? Like imagine he threatens those 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and it's after he's failed to make good on some other threat or promise and then they're just like, okay, well whatever, and he's like, well, then I am going to do all this, this terror thing. And now it's like, now we're in a doomsday catastrophe scenario.
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Unknown A
I think the terrorists, he's always going to go through because he, he, he actually believes in tariffs and their core to his identity in a way as a businessman. Balance balancing the budget. You know, President invading Gaza I don't think is core to his identity and I don't think it's important to his base. So I, I do think it's a bluff.