The DOGE Cases

The Supreme Court allowed the 20-somethings at DOGE to access your Social Security information. What's the worst that could happen? If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin, and our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Transcriptions of each episode are available at fivefourpod.com http://fivefourpod.com Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this episode of Five to Four, Peter is joined by friends of the show, Jay Willis from Balls and Strikes and journalist Josie Duffy Rice, to talk about two recent Supreme Court cases involving the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE. The first case, Social Security Administration v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, is about DOGE asking for access to social security information and other highly sensitive information about the American public. The second case, U.S. DOGE Service v. Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is about the federal watchdog group CREW requesting information about DOGE under the Freedom of Information Act.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  The Supreme Court ruled that DOGE can have access to private social security information, but CREW cannot access internal information about DOGE. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

• 1:04Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have forced our civil liberties to sleep on the ground, like the National Guard in L.A. I'm Peter. I'm here with Jay Willis. Hey, everyone. And Josie Duffy Rice.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 1:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Michael had to take the week off, and then Rhiannon is marching to Gaza. He's joined a humanitarian march to Gaza. And so I thought, this is a perfect time to ask the question, could I do it? Could I just do it with two other people? Could I just... Could I do it myself? You know what I mean? Do I even need those two? Maybe not, right? Maybe it's all Peter at the end of the day. So, I wanted to keep it going. Smart. You know, keep the ball rolling. And so I thought I'd have you two on, once again, unpaid.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I was gonna bring that up, actually.

• 1:55Peter Shamshiri?

  You can bring it up all you want.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Last time I filled in for a host, I think it was Peter. So I guess continuing in the same spirit, I'll assign myself Michael this time because yeah, gender roles are so important.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  And in his honor, I would like to start by telling you guys about a law review article I was reading the other day for fun.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Uh huh. You know, I have to say, I really love that Michael reads law review articles because it makes me feel like I've read the article, even though I haven't, but someone I know has.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Someone has to do it.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  That counts, you know?

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:32Peter Shamshiri?

  No, that's just like when you listen to five, four, you've read the case as far as I'm concerned.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Yeah.

• 2:40Peter Shamshiri?

  Before we go on, our, our thoughts with Rhiannon, I think the march might be over by the time that this is released.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47Peter Shamshiri?

  But just know that between this moment where we're recording right now and the release of this episode, I am filled with an anxiety that is unparalleled in my chest in recent history. Let's put it that way. I feel very anxious. Rhiannon, I understand that you're a powerful voice for justice across the globe, but please just, please just take it easy on me with the stuff, you know?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Rhiannon, it's really about Peter at the end of the day and when we think about Gaza. And so just keep that in mind.

• 3:19Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, yeah. All right. Today we are doing something very special, sort of a five, four first, aside from the fact that I have two guest hosts. We're talking about two cases today. These cases are both about the Department of Government Efficiency, AKA DOGE. One is Social Security Administration v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. And the second is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. DOGE. So as you probably know, DOGE, this is Elon Musk's band of puppy torturers turned government efficiency aficionados. And as I imagine you know.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Minor puppy torture.

• 4:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. They turned 18 and they were like, I want to join the government. I've been throwing rocks at strays and now, now to change how social security works forever.

• 4:23Peter Shamshiri?

  So to give a little bit of background, and I'll take Rhiannon's usual background job here. And if I do this well enough, again, we can ask ourselves, does Peter need anyone else on the show? In January, Donald Trump hands down an executive order creating DOGE, creating this agency. It was something that he had teased, that Elon Musk was said to lead. Immediately, they're hit with lawsuits. These come from various different angles, and we're going to talk about these two. So the first is about DOGE's demand for access to social security data. They were in the process of DOGE-fying the Social Security Administration, and they said, we need access to certain data.

• 5:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Social Security Administration said, no, that's private. Lawsuit ensues, right? Second, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, filed a FOIA request for DOGE's data. FOIA, of course, a law that allows people to basically sue for access to government documents and records, right? So they wanted things that included like financial disclosures, communications between DOGE members. They wanted to depose the administrator. One Friday afternoon, a couple of weeks back, the Supreme Court held that, one, DOGE gets access to social security data, and, two, CREW does not get access to DOGE data, at least not yet. So these are both shadow docket cases.

• 5:53Peter Shamshiri?

  We have increasingly covered shadow docket cases. Again, there's sort of two dockets for the Supreme Court. One is, they all sit around, and they say, like, what cases do we want to hear this term? And those go on to what you might call the merits docket. And then you have cases that come up to them essentially as like emergencies. Things develop in lower courts. It rises up to the Supreme Court. They handle it in real time, right? The shadow docket, they call it. Usually, we wouldn't cover these cases because they tend not to have like fully fleshed out opinions. The cases might come back to the Supreme Court on the merits docket down the road. But a huge amount of the important cases this year are popping up on the shadow docket.

• 6:37Peter Shamshiri?

  It's where they're just doing a lot of the dirty work. And so I think- It would be a mistake not to cover it. And it's also great for us because we don't really have to read opinions because they don't provide any. They don't provide reasoning in these cases, which is, it's fantastic for me as a legal podcaster.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  You guys should just move to the Shadow Duckett full time. Cut your work in half.

• 7:00Peter Shamshiri?

  I don't want to step on Steve Laddick's space. You know what I mean?

• 7:05Speaker 03

  That'd be hard. He's really tall.

• 7:07Peter Shamshiri?

  This is us. We do generic shit talk. As soon as you start to specialize, people expect you to understand a lot about what you're talking about.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 7:14Peter Shamshiri?

  I've been able to avoid that, avoid those tough conversations where someone's like, how does this procedure work? And I'm like, I have to go. So let's talk about the Social Security Administration case first. I think that this is like the big one.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:29Peter Shamshiri?

  Trump puts out this executive order saying that DOGE should be granted access to agency records, quote, "consistent with applicable law." The DOGE perverts request access to social security records. The Social Security Administration in turn says that's not consistent with applicable law because there's this law called the Privacy Act that says that agencies can only disclose data to one another if there is a need for the record in the performance of their duties. Not to mention, and this is sort of hanging behind all of these cases, you have this lingering question of whether DOGE is in fact a federal agency, right? They're not created by Congress. They're created by executive order. It's sort of obvious in many respects that they're not really a federal agency. But here we are in June.

• 8:14Peter Shamshiri?

  They have functioned like a federal agency until now. In fact, sort of like a super agency that linkers above all the others. You know, what is law, right? So to give a little, a little bit of color here, data in the executive branch is actually relatively segmented and a big part of that is the Privacy Act. It basically says like, unless there is a specific need, you cannot share agency data, right? This prevents the centralization of information and power in the executive branch, right? It gets dispersed throughout these different agencies.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Well, I have a question.

• 8:49Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Don't you think it should be called Dodge? Don't you think DOGE is just the weirdest frame of that name?

• 8:55Peter Shamshiri?

  So this, this stems from the origins of DOGE, which are DOGE Coin, which itself is a derivation of the DOGE meme. So the pronunciation stems From a meme from like 2014. It's the dog meme.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  This is where this all started with? I had no idea.

• 9:16Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, no, that's it.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  I'm not that online, I guess.

• 9:19Peter Shamshiri?

  I guess not. No, that's why there's like an extra layer of national humiliation.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely.

• 9:25Peter Shamshiri?

  This is predicated on a meme coin that itself is predicated on a meme.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:32Peter Shamshiri?

  It's so many layers of uncool that it's almost hard to process. Like, you have to just put it out of your mind and move forward.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  You have to keep saying the word as if it's like a, a serious word, a serious concept.

• 9:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Like, very well-paid expert, subject matter experts, keep having to discuss Doge with like a straight face.

• 9:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And again, the origin of it is just that it's a stupid way to say dog. Like Doge, Doge, like you're petting a dog and you're, and you're acting like it's cute. Like, that's, that's what it is. I believe that its origins are in that sort of like cute speak.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's the reason toddlers don't have access to food assistance now.

• 10:12Peter Shamshiri?

  If they just hadn't put that meme out.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a butterfly. A butterfly flopped its wings in Brazil. Right.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 10:21Peter Shamshiri?

  So, a lower court weighed in on this, and they said, okay, Doge can have access to redacted and anonymized records if they have certain required training and background checks, which is what you usually need to get access to this data.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:36Peter Shamshiri?

  If they want the non-anonymized data, they can get it. They just need to submit a request providing a reason. But the Trump administration was not satisfied with that. They wanted unfettered access. They said, "These 20-year-old sexual perverts cannot pass a background check. All right? We need to give them this data immediately."

• 10:55Speaker 02

  As opposed to what kind of pervert? What are the other kind of perverts?

• 10:59Peter Shamshiri?

  You've got business perverts. You've got law perverts. Right? There's all kinds.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  21-year-old perverts, 22-year-old perverts.

• 11:07Peter Shamshiri?

  I like to sometimes say sexual pervert. That way, when I say pervert in general, you can argue down the road that it's not defamatory.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Good point.

• 11:18Peter Shamshiri?

  I'm building a defense when I say sexual pervert.

• 11:22Peter Shamshiri?

  So again, because this is from the shadow docket, it's not uncommon for the court to hand down their ruling without providing a written explanation. And that's what happens here. We don't know what the court's analysis is. The Supreme Court says, "We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work." No analysis. We don't really have insight into what the court is thinking. We do know what the analysis should be, and the primary component is about irreparable harm, the idea of irreparable harm. Would granting DOGE access to the records irreparably harm the

• 12:04Peter Shamshiri?

  Social Security Administration? Would not granting them access irreparably harm DOGE? DOGE might claim that they want these records to do their anti-fraud work or whatever. But what's harder to explain is why, one, they need the unredacted data, and, two, why they can't just either make a request for the data or wait until this litigation has concluded in a few months and then we'll find out whether they get it. At best, they can say, "Hey, we can't do our job quite as efficiently, as effectively as we would like to," but that's it, right? That's not like irreparable harm in the legal sense. Irreparable harm

• 12:45Peter Shamshiri?

  in the legal sense is like, they're going to demolish my house unless you put this injunction into place.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  This is a fantastic example of reparable harm. We can't do our job as well as we want to, but like, if down the road, the court gives us everything we want, suddenly the problem will be resolved.

• 13:04Peter Shamshiri?

  Right, right.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Right. It feels like you really have to drive home that there is no clear, urgent reason they need this data. They just want to do things faster.

• 13:15Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Which is like, that's why you don't get into government.

• 13:18Peter Shamshiri?

  What's interesting about this is like, they don't even make the case in their briefs that like, they don't try to build some bullshit reason that they need this immediately. They're just sort of like, "We would like this." And like, just Jackson writes a dissent here, and she talks about that. She's like, "They're not even like, they're not even trying to say that they need this immediately." And the other side of this, the potential harm if you do give them the data just seems enormous, right? Like this stuff obviously includes names, birthdays, social security numbers, but also bank account information, addresses. If you receive disability insurance through social security, it includes your medical history. The whole point of this irreparable

• 14:00Peter Shamshiri?

  harm analysis is like, there are some cats you can't put back in the bag. Once you give Doge this data, all of that private data is in the hands of these little freaks Right. who work for a fake administrative agency, presumably haven't passed background checks. So if a court later decides, hey, actually, Doge should lose this case, it doesn't really matter because the harm's already been done. Your private information is already out there, right? That's supposed to be the whole point of this irreparable harm analysis is like, let's not let this move forward if that means that something's going to happen that we can't undo.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  You guys did an episode recently on Trump v. Wilcox, that case about firing independent agency heads.

• 14:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  And the parallels between these two cases are like pretty uncanny. As in Wilcox here, like the Wilcox opinion, which didn't mention Humphrey's executor case they were functionally overturning, the majority in this case doesn't mention the Privacy Act, which again is the federal law.

• 14:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  That they're pretending doesn't exist. As in Wilcox, when they said, we're just staying in order, you know, that in the real world has the effect of firing a person. Here too, they say, you know, we're just staying a lower court order, which, as Peter says, has the result of getting Doge everything it wants. And then again, as in Wilcox, they're picking the outcome here that changes the status quo during litigation instead of preserving it, like basically tipping their hand on how they intend to rule on the merits. And, you know, Peter, you mentioned at the top that, you know, there's no analysis in this case. Like, can't be stressed enough. What Peter read is not like the introduction to the court's analysis. That sentence is all of it. And, I mean, this sounds like a joke,

• 15:44Speaker 03

  but I honestly wonder if after the like well-deserved Backlash to the Wilcox opinion and their like weird little carve out for the Fed. I almost wonder if when they were putting together this opinion, they were like, hey, do you guys want to just like not show our work this time and maybe fewer people will make fun of us?

• 16:03Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, it's almost like better to ask for forgiveness than permission, you know, like better to just do it than explain ourselves and inevitably humiliate the court.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Look stupid. Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  There are all these analogies to Wilcox, but the way in which it's different, obviously, is like, nobody actually cares or most, many people do not care if an agency head gets fired. In fact, they welcome it. But it is remarkable. I don't think there's like a huge market of people who want all of their data out, like who want random people accessing their social security data. It just isn't.

• 16:36Peter Shamshiri?

  Give big balls my data. That's what. I'm a, I'm a single issue voter.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Pro data breach coalition.

• 16:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Give big balls my address history.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Right. And like the New York Times did a list of like data that they have access to, that have centralized, just like everything they can tell about you. And it is remarkable. I mean, it's, it's basically everything. They like, maybe don't know what you had for breakfast, but that's essentially it. I'm like, who's the constituency for please take my data? It just is such a remarkable thing.

• 17:10Peter Shamshiri?

  You mean the constituency for good government, for good and efficient government? Josie, they're rooting out fraud. Okay?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Apparently.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  You're gonna let big balls cook or what?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, we gave a million dollars a year to like the South America and now my social security number is going to be on a billboard somewhere.

• 17:30Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, I think that there's a degree to which like, this is so patently unserious and yet like here we are at the Supreme Court talking about it like, it's normal, like this is the, the normal machinations of the government, but like. Elon Musk was on Twitter being like, oh my God, there are people in the social security database that are getting payments that are 170 years old. And then a bunch of database experts were like, nope.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  That's not happening.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 17:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Nope. You don't know what you're looking at or talking about.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  It's the same fucking logic as voter fraud.

• 18:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  There are people on the rolls who haven't lived here in 20 years. Yes, but they're not voting.

• 18:04Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  They're not voting.

• 18:05Peter Shamshiri?

  It's just people who don't know what they're looking at, looking at it and getting scared. That's what it is. Like, and it's the product of a political movement that has like, just decided that expertise is fake in like every respect. And so here we are, right? 19 year olds know where you have lived your entire life because the right wing political movement does not believe in expertise.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  So there is a written dissent in this case. It's written by Katanji Brown Jackson and joined by Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan also noted that she dissented from this decision, but she did not like formally join Jackson's opinion.

• 18:50Peter Shamshiri?

  Boo, boo.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, I don't want to do too much palace intrigue speculation here about, you know, why you take the step of dissenting, but not joining the opinion. But I don't know. It's a good dissent. Like, join it. Or if you don't want to join it for some reason, at least write separately. Like, let us know what's up here.

• 19:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, I think we were speculating that one interesting thing about the dissent is that she comes very close to saying this court favors Donald Trump, right?

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:19Peter Shamshiri?

  I think she frames it as like, the court has favored the government.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:24Peter Shamshiri?

  But it's very clear what she means, right? She doesn't mean the Biden administration.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:28Peter Shamshiri?

  And I think maybe Kagan thought that was a step too far. Let us not cast the dark, long shadow of politics over the court.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Well, we're going to cast. We're going to cast that shadow.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  We're casting. Yeah.

• 19:38Peter Shamshiri?

  No, I agree with her. I'm going to be moving away from such things.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Peter hedging his bets. So there are Supreme Court dissents that, you know, dispute substantive legal points, make legal arguments. And then there are dissents that sort of fall into this category of just saying like, man, what are you talking about? And that's kind of where this dissent comes down because, again, there's no analysis here. The court states the legal standard and then just says, upon review, we think the government wins. Let's get out of here, guys. Like, if you wrote this on a law school final exam, you would probably fail. But like, at the actual Supreme Court, this is what passes for analysis sufficient to write the Privacy Act, basically, out of existence.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  So in this dissent, it's basically on Jackson to say things like, okay, here is the standard. Let's walk through the factors. Here is how it's supposed to work. And, you know, surprise, where she comes down is, the court keeps just glossing over its work, you know, not showing its work in cases involving the Trump White House. She points out that the district court that, you know, issued the lower court issued the injunction, it showed its work in a 145-page opinion, walking through each element of the test. The lower court particularly took issue with the fact that the government never said why Doge needed the unredacted data. And when the court asked the government, like, hey, can you provide some clarification

• 21:12Speaker 03

  on why you need this? Doge just said, no, we feel comfortable standing on the record. Which is so cool, just like the hubris to be like, hey, fuck you, we're gonna get this kicked on appeal. Like, we're gonna win this eventually. Yeah. Yeah. And Jackson says, you know, this should be the end of the case. The government has failed to demonstrate any harm. This should be the end of it. The only thing the Trump administration wants is not to wait to get everything it wants, which, under the relevant legal test... Doesn't matter. You don't just get to say no thanks

• 21:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  to legal orders you don't like. Jackson has a pretty funny line in there where she characterizes the government's argument that the courts are, quote, "micromanaging Doge's work." And she says, "Yeah, that's just what it means to have to follow the law." Like, this is, what is it that you think we're doing here?

• 22:03Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. You're looking at, like, every time we steal the data from every single citizen in the nation, you're saying we can't.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  You're on my ass about it. But this is what happens when you put 18-year-olds in charge, you know? They're like, "Mom, like, leave me alone. I don't, I don't want to follow the rules." And it's like, these are just, this is having a job.

• 22:23Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  This is like every youngest person not in office upset that they have to show up on time. But in this case, it's stealing our identities with all of the data that exists about us in the federal government.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Jackson also talks about how light of a compliance burden the injunction actually poses. If you read the majority opinion, again, short as it is, you might think that this is a fight over Doge getting access to any data or not getting access to data at all.

• 22:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  And as Peter said, that's not, like, remotely correct. Like, despite the fact that the government barely tried to justify its request, the lower court said, "Okay, Doge staffers, if you go through the background checks that everyone else has to go through, and you go through the training that everyone else has to go through, you can get the anonymized data that everyone else at Social Security gets to work with." And this is not just, like, general day-to-day work. The lower court says, "Look, even Social Security employees who are investigating fraud, waste, and abuse, they only get access to as much data as they need to investigate the abuse. They don't just, like, get the keys to the kingdom."

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And the lower court says Doge can get some non-anonymized data if they, you know, provide a written explanation for why you need it.

• 23:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. If you can, if you can literally just explain why you need it.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Give me one reason.

• 23:47Peter Shamshiri?

  Then you can get this data. And like, the entire case at bottom is like predicated on them just being like, we shouldn't have to tell you fucking nerds anything.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Sounds like a lot of work.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:00Peter Shamshiri?

  We want the full universe of this nation's social security data, and we don't want to have to tell you why or what it's for. We don't want to have to explain it. We just want to look at it. We just want to look at it. I just want to feel the power.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 24:13Peter Shamshiri?

  coursing through my body when I look at, you know, the fucking address history of some lady from Minneapolis. That's all they want.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Well, it essentially sounds like what they're saying is also in a way, we don't know why we want it. We'll know when we see it. Like, we need the data to find the problem, which is, in some ways, embodies the entire idea of this fake ass agency.

• 24:37Peter Shamshiri?

  But even then, they could probably come up with a request that, that says, like, you know, here's what we're looking for, or whatever. But I don't think they actually know what they're looking for. I think that they just truly believe, if I'm trying to like, conjure up a good faith version of these guys, I think that they truly believe that the government is so poisonously inefficient and ineffective, that if they just glance at this data holistically, there will be like massive fraud and inefficiency glaring back at them.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I feel like it's a, it is some of that, but it's also the, almost, it's the inverse in some ways, which is like, not just that the government is so inefficient, but that they are so brilliant and smart and like, pure naturally talented, that even if there are no obvious problems, they can make this, they can do this better.

• 25:27Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  I don't know if you guys saw Mountain Head, but it is very much that vibe of like, wow, okay, well, you should be more efficient.

• 25:35Peter Shamshiri?

  Excuse me, I'm waiting for my wife to not be sleepy at night.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Wow. It's gonna be a while. As a sleepy wife.

• 25:42Peter Shamshiri?

  For sure. For sure. You don't know what it's like.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  So from there, Jackson gets to the portion of the dissent that Peter referenced earlier, where she kind of takes a step back and talks about the bigger picture of how the court has been disposing of these shadow docket cases involving pretty extraordinary requests from the Trump administration. She says, "The effect of the court just tossing out the test whenever it's Donald Trump asking for help is that you're creating two different standards." Like, what, she says, "What would be an extraordinary request for everyone else is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this administration." Now, she does stop short of criticizing the majority as harshly as she maybe could

• 26:28Speaker 03

  have, because she, at one point, says the court's decision might, quote, "unintentionally send the message that it favors the White House and undercuts the work of her lower court colleagues." But, like, she's kind of being polite in writing here.

• 26:42Peter Shamshiri?

  The only reason they're not putting the thumbs up emoji in there is because it doesn't fit like the style guide.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Right. She is being very polite. It's pretty clear what's going on here. And she references some examples, and then there are others that we can take from headlines. You know, here, by granting a stay of the lower court order, the Supreme Court is giving Doge everything it wants. And Noam v. Doe, by granting a stay, the court allowed the government to terminate the parole status of half a million people while the court is still deciding the case. And Trump v. Wilcox, which we've already talked about, by granting a stay, the court allowed Trump to fire people who, under federal law, he's not supposed to be able to fire. And in US v. Schilling, the ban on trans people in

• 27:30Speaker 03

  the military, by granting a stay, the court allows Pete Hegseth to start discharging trans people from the military, again, while the litigation is still ongoing. And Jackson says, "Look, anyone else who comes to us in a case..." Has to show irreparable harm in order to get a stay, but not the government. And the pretty clear subtext is not this government, right?

• 27:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Not the Trump administration. If the Biden administration had tried to pull something like this, like there would be, there would be six separate opinions explaining why this is terrible.

• 28:02Peter Shamshiri?

  It's the most frustrating shit that we don't get to witness the alternate reality where a democratic administration requests all of the social security data to hand it to a fake administrative agency run by a tech billionaire.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, the conservatives would be losing their mind, dude. Like, Alito would write his opinion on the fucking Betsy Ross flag if this shit happened.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, Clarence Thomas is gonna like start bringing a gun to work if Biden tries this.

• 28:32Peter Shamshiri?

  A hundred percent, dude. Absolutely. Like, the consequences of this ruling are sort of hard to overstate. I mean, it's very obvious, again, this is supposed to be a preliminary injunction analysis. It's very obvious that the court is basically just saying, hey, we're eventually gonna side with those, so let's just do it now.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:53Peter Shamshiri?

  It would be so refreshing for them to just be like, we're gonna reach the merits right now, write a short opinion, side with those, we don't have to do this bullshit. Like, this is so exhausting, it's so embarrassing, it's such like procedural nonsense. And it brings us to the same exact place, right? Right now, because of this decision, your private info is functionally within the control of the White House, right? Which is something that wasn't true before. Access to enough information that you can imagine, not just is there potential for like mass surveillance here outside of the scope of like the NSA and the FBI, but like

• 29:36Peter Shamshiri?

  political retribution, right? They have like a roadmap for whatever authoritarian shit they want to do. It's just like, it greases the wheels for authoritarianism in so many different conceivable ways that it's hard to list them off. But, I mean, the basic bottom line here is the Supreme Court just handed Donald Trump, a list of every single person in the country, how much money they've ever made, where they've lived, some of their medical histories.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Their connections, their family members, their former roommates, their educational history.

• 30:16Peter Shamshiri?

  Their social networks to some degree. Who have you lived with? Who have they lived with? Right? It's wild to think about what could be done by the administration if they really wanted to put this data to, quote unquote, good use.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  I feel like the scariest part is almost the bank account information. It's like you don't, like, this is just basically pretext to cut you off from any kind of source of money you have. It's just, it just essentially like gives them power to ruin your life like that, very easily, very efficiently.

• 30:48Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And for our listeners, it's just embarrassing. You know what I mean?

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Donald Trump knows that you're broke as fuck.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, not just your listeners, sometimes your guests.

• 30:56Peter Shamshiri?

  Sometimes your co-hosts, because they refuse to sell out, like I constantly advise them.

• 31:04Peter Shamshiri?

  So that's one case here. And I'd say that's the big one. The court hands our private data to the most totalitarian administration in modern American history. But then there's the other question. What are we allowed to know about Doge? CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which based on the name is history's least successful nonprofit. They made a FOIA request.

• 31:32Peter Shamshiri?

  They're good guys. I just, I had to take that.

• 31:35Peter Shamshiri?

  It's a, that's a rough name. They asked for a list of Doge employees, a list of employees and positions for which Doge has recommended termination, a list of government contracts and grants that Doge had recommended to be canceled, and the deposition of Amy Gleason, the purported administrator of Doge. I say purported because- Courts have consistently asked Doge, "Hey, isn't Elon Musk in charge?" And they've consistently dodged the question. And they said, "Well, Amy Gleason is our administrator." And yet Elon Musk is online being like, "I am in charge of Doge." He's clearly directing things.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Here is what I did today at Doge. Yeah.

• 32:20Peter Shamshiri?

  A federal district court granted crew most of these requests, including the deposition. But the Supreme Court steps in here to send it back down to be reconsidered. First, there was a portion of the FOIA request, again, that asked about the Doge recommendations, right? The terminations of employees and contracts and grants. The court said, "No, that's too much. You can't have that. The sanctity of the recommendations of a fake government agency is too great for you to infringe upon it." And they also said, "Hey, reconsider the rest of these in light of these principles that we've identified." And so they basically say, "Here are two factors that you should consider more

• 33:04Peter Shamshiri?

  when you reconsider these requests." They say, like, one of them is sort of a technical item about the question of whether Doge qualifies as an agency under FOIA. And then the other is that the court should be extra cautious about this type of FOIA request, given separation of powers concerns, right, between the judicial and executive branches. So they don't provide specifics. They don't actually resolve this issue. They just punt it back to the lower courts. And they're sort of like, "Try it again, and this time, show some respect for our president, okay? Let's be nicer to Donald Trump." In general, incredibly unserious to punt this back to a lower court

• 33:45Peter Shamshiri?

  with, like, general guidelines, rather than just say, "Here are the documents you can have. Here's the information you can have." Like, this is a discovery order, meaning this court has said, "All right, you can have these documents. You can have this deposition." Bang, right? If the Supreme Court disagrees with that analysis... They can say, no, not these documents, but these are okay. Instead, they strike some of the documents and then they say, the rest of them, maybe. Maybe, maybe after you think about separation of powers a little bit.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Think about what you did.

• 34:22Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Maybe after you say the pledge of allegiance, then, then you can think about what documents they get. We said this in the Wilcox case, too. You're not functioning like a court. This is just not what courts do. You don't, just make the fucking decision. Tell them what documents they get. I don't understand what they're doing here. I mean, I do, but it's just pissing me off.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Actually, I think you get it.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  I mean, in a lot of appeals courts, you know, they love to say, we don't concern ourselves with trial court decisions. That's not really our business to stand in the shoes of a trial court. But Peter, like you say, you could at least provide the lower court, even if the Supreme Court didn't do the very easy thing here, which is say, you can have these documents, but not these. You could at least provide the lower court with like some standards for how to reevaluate the decisions that the justices don't like.

• 35:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. The standard they're providing is meaningless. Think about the separation of powers a little bit more.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Just complete abstractions. Yeah.

• 35:18Peter Shamshiri?

  They're doing like, like sophomore level psychology thing. It's like.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  I was about to say.

• 35:23Peter Shamshiri?

  Stare at this bald eagle and then write your discovery order. It's so embarrassing. And also like, I just don't agree that that's doing the work of a trial court. If they can strike some of the discovery, they can just say that the rest is fine.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Like they have brought to you this discovery order. If you want to carve it up, fine. Appellate courts carve it up all the time, but to just send it back with like.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Vibes.

• 35:47Peter Shamshiri?

  You know, the waving American flag vibes. It's, it's so fucking stupid. And there's no written dissent here. The libs note their dissent.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:56Peter Shamshiri?

  And I think we all decided that maybe this, maybe they're just exhausted. Maybe they're just like, I don't have time for this one.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, they ran out of time.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  In the other case, Katanji Brown Jackson walks right up to the line of saying, you people are in the tank for Trump and everybody can see it. Like, I don't know, seems sufficient for a day's work.

• 36:13Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, maybe they're just like, we've, we've already talked a little bit of shit about Doge. We have to like, write our various other dissents for the end of June. So let's, let's just move on mentally and physically.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have so many dissents to write.

• 36:28Peter Shamshiri?

  And then, big picture, when you're looking at this Doge stuff, I guess there's like, the question of where's Elon and all of this. We already touched on this a little bit, but like, the sort of constant presence in reality and absence in the courts of Elon Musk is so glaring and bizarre. And the idea that you can not only have a fake agency, but install like, a shadow head of it, that like, is untouched by the courts.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Who's also the richest man in the world, like, not even the shadow, like, can the richest guy in the world have your social security information is essentially the question here. And there's like, separation of powers. It's just crazy.

• 37:12Peter Shamshiri?

  And like, I mean, think about it, like, if you were Crew, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington folks, you probably wanted to oppose Elon Musk, huh?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:21Peter Shamshiri?

  But Doge is saying, no, he's not really part of it. Meanwhile, he's on Twitter, being like, I'm looking at the social security data right now.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Musk isn't mentioned in either opinion. The closest either opinion gets to even tangentially referencing Musk is Crew's request for an org chart for Doge, right? Saying, look, you won't give us a straight answer on what his job is within Doge, if any. So just like, give us the papers. Like, show us where he is, who does he report to, if anyone. But yeah, like, the howlingly obvious reality of this Silicon Valley vampire being the recipient of the information, just like, not mentioned by this court.

• 38:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. I was talking about this case with Michael, and he had said, you know, this is like, such a good example of the inadequacy of the courts to deal with this moment. Like, they can't keep up with the pace of what they're doing here. Like, we have decisions handing Doge all of our private data before a court has reached a conclusion about whether they are a federal agency. Like, I'm sorry, but one of those needs to precede the other. And

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:35Peter Shamshiri?

  They're just not built for this deluge of bullshit.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Right, although they could stem the tide a little by just saying no a couple of times, in which case, like, then you set a standard of like, what kind of behavior are they gonna try? It just seems like that, too, is kind of a structural decision that they've made.

• 38:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Right? And that they've sort of said like, well, we don't know. Well, we're gonna tell you in a little bit, which then encourages Doge should go out and like, whatever, try to get more, bringing more cases, and then they're overwhelmed. It's like the really fast way to stop being overwhelmed is just to tell them to shut the fuck up.

• 39:13Peter Shamshiri?

  In a functioning system, this gets intercepted immediately.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Immediately.

• 39:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Executive order comes out, and there's immediately a challenge being like, fake agency, boom, that's it.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:23Peter Shamshiri?

  And they're like, yeah, these people can't do anything.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Right. In a functioning system, Doge isn't even like a household name, because it was an idea that Trump said in some fucking speech, and they said, no, and we moved on. Right?

• 39:34Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  It's not even a thing.

• 39:36Peter Shamshiri?

  I think it originates from Elon Musk tweeting it, being like, wouldn't it be funny if there was a Department of Government Efficiency, lol Doge?

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:44Peter Shamshiri?

  And now we don't do foreign aid anymore.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. Now, everybody I know is out of a job. Yeah, exactly.

• 39:53Peter Shamshiri?

  If the courts can't step in and stop that, if they can't stop these fucking little freaks from ransacking, like, the civil service and cutting foreign aid and getting all of our private data, whether it's structural or ideological, they're functionally complicit here. And there's just like, no real hope, when I look at these cases, of like, the Supreme Court providing even like, a minimal backstop, right? Like, maybe you could have said, hey, maybe the Trump administration kind of freaks out Cav and Roberts and Conny Barrett, and they start to take some Ls, right? It's pretty clear that's not what's happening. And I think, I think we know enough to know that, no matter what happens at the end of the term, they've done an incredible amount of damage already, to the point where I'm

• 40:38Peter Shamshiri?

  not even sure that like, the merits docket cases coming up throughout the rest of this month are very symbolically important. Like, I think that we already know the direction the court is headed, even if we score some unexpected wins at the end of June.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Well, can I posit a theory? Which is, I just keep thinking about that quote JD Vance had a few years ago, where he was like... I told Trump, if he got back in office, he needed to fire, you know, X amount of civil servants. I forget, thousands of civil servants. And, you know, if the court says no, you say like, who's going to stop me? Essentially, like, he basically was like, just do it.

• 41:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  And even if the court says no, just do it. And that has been kind of the entire approach, even more in the second administration and pretty explicitly. And I wonder if like, part of the logic on the courts part, not good logic, but logic nonetheless, is like, trying to basically prevent their own irrelevancy. Like, they are basically trying to give them a leash because they're like, if we say no, they're going to do it anyway. And then everybody's going to know that the law is fake and that we don't actually have any real power unless someone listens to us.

• 41:50Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  It almost feels strategic in that way.

• 41:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, I could see that. The problem with that theory, I think, is that if it's happening, it has to be subconscious because because they do believe that what they're doing is real. But I definitely feel like there's like, we want to avoid confrontation because we will get our ass kicked. You know, it's like when you see two dogs barking at each other behind a gate or whatever, and they open the gate and they're like, oh.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:19Peter Shamshiri?

  Never mind. You don't want to be the dog that gets exposed as a coward, right? That feels like it has to be part of it, but I honestly don't know how much. And I, you can also see elements in like, some of Calv's recent writings of like radicalization that wasn't there before. Like, their brains are fucking cooked, right? They're watching this LA stuff being like, my God.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Send in the double Marines. They're not watching all of this through links on Blue Sky. You know what I mean?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 42:51Peter Shamshiri?

  They're getting radicalized significantly, and I think you're seeing it. I think that the fact that they're like, of course, we should just hand these Doge folks our social security data, something that would be incredibly easy to not do.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:01Peter Shamshiri?

  I think that that indicates to me that they're largely on board and any pushback is going to be ticky tack.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, the fact that both major parties in the US have embraced the sense of like, the government needing to be maximally efficient is such a. Disgusting turn of events that in such another example of like liberals just kowtowing to the right wing because it's not that efficiency on its face is a negative thing, but it's certainly not the priority and not the priority of a government. It's like the way that the government is supposed to work and should work is that it is actually hard and there are many levels of approval needed or, you know, steps needed to actually make a major change. That's how you want the government to work.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  You don't want them to be able to do to be able to, you know, use their enormous power, more power than everybody else combined, to do whatever they want with like as little resistance as possible. That's just like, and by the way, that's true for like lots of industries. It's like you don't want the most efficient car industry, right? Because you want your cars to be like checked two or three times before you get in them. You, you, I get that like when you're building an app at the fucking Y Combinator with Marc Andreessen or whatever, you're like, you maybe want the maximum efficiency and the entire point of tech has been like, this is kind of a side industry where like we're inventing new things and we're trying them out and like efficiency matters. But this weird obsession with efficiency from the government is going to be the downfall of everything.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  It's like you actually don't want all your data centralized. I was talking last week with one of Jay and I's friends who used to work at Health and Human Services and she was like, yeah, it was incredibly difficult. Like you need this information about, you know, a, a kid who's like a natural born citizen, but their parents are undocumented and you have to like request it from all these different agencies and it takes forever and that's actually fucking good because like this is their data and it actually, I shouldn't be able to get it all at once, right? And that principle has just flown out the window as like everybody on X is sharing details about how we were like paying $700,000 for a transgender opera in Venezuela and that is like why they're willing to give, you know, to like allow for the government to prioritize efficiency above everything else.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Efficiency, like all kind of autocracies have to be kind of efficient. It's really hard to like run an authoritarian state inefficiently. It's really hard to have, you know, a lot of people in charge and run an authoritarian state. You consolidate power for a reason. It makes it easy to do all the shitty things that you want to do.

• 45:37Peter Shamshiri?

  And I, I think it's like worth noting that a lot of the ways in which I think governments are inefficient. It's sort of like citizen facing.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:47Peter Shamshiri?

  If you want to interact with the government, you probably have to fill out a bunch of fucking paperwork. Right. And you're probably at some point looking at it and being like, this is too much. Right. I would like less paperwork. I would like more points of access to the government. But when they talk about inefficiency, they're talking about it from the executive's perspective.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Inefficiency that they see is we are looking out upon the civil service and we want to wipe it out. But there are all these rules in place saying we can't do it. That's what they're talking about when they're talking about government efficiency. It's a very, very different thing. They're not going to fix the paperwork problem.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  No, and in fact, they're going to make it worse.

• 46:26Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  They're going to make it harder for you. In fact, the government's about to get a lot more, a lot less efficient for the average citizen because they fired half the people that are supposed to be helping you out. Right. But it makes it easier for them.

• 46:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And I'll also say they don't know. Like, I don't want to go to bat for the idea that the government is particularly efficient. But it's a lot more efficient than they think it is. You know, there is that like one guy who left Doji and has now publicly said like, I didn't really see that much fraud or waste or inefficiency. Look at how the tech industry functions. Right. In 2020 and 2021, things were booming. They said, oh, things are booming. We are sitting on massive piles of investor cash. We're going to hire a ton of people, hired a ton of people. Two years later, less than two years in some industries, they were like, oops, the investor money has dried up

• 47:22Peter Shamshiri?

  as the market has leveled off.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 47:25Peter Shamshiri?

  We now need to lay a huge percentage of those people off. That's not efficiency.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  No, right.

• 47:31Peter Shamshiri?

  That's rash decision making.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:33Peter Shamshiri?

  That's putting like massive amounts of energy and cash into very quickly made hasty decisions. Not efficiency. It might look like efficiency to someone who doesn't really understand how anything works.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:49Peter Shamshiri?

  But it's not. It's not efficiency. And these little freaks just don't know what they're talking about. They don't. They couldn't run a business either.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  It also looks like efficiency to people who are short term, their entire perspective is short term. And that's the same thing with like the foreign aid thing, right? It's like you think of this as an enormous amount of money, but what you're actually doing is like trying to think long term about what can you prevent and like what relationships you need to maintain? And what does soft power look like? And like, how does this actually make being part of the international community easier on the US long term by like having an aid structure? When you reduce that, like suddenly a lot of other things become much more of a grind. A lot of other relationships become much more of a grind. Like down the road, you're paying for things that if you had paid for them on the upfront, you know, upfront, then you wouldn't be as big of a deal. But this is also reflective of like a lot of these people being kids.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  I mean, we joke about that, but like it's really hard to understand how valuable your data is when you are like, you know, getting your first girlfriend in your dorm room. Like it's just all this stuff that people like 19 year olds think is not a big deal. There's a reason that 50 year olds think it is a big deal. And it's not that they are like suddenly out of touch. It's that like you live a little bit longer and you realize how much shit is out there about you that you don't actually want everybody having access to. This is why we don't put kids in charge.

• 49:10Peter Shamshiri?

  And that's why I want Elon Musk to have sole authority.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Sole authority.

• 49:14Peter Shamshiri?

  The adult in the room.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  I would love to steal his data.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  I remember when Doge first started like digging into government stuff. One of sort of the big scandals churned up on like by right wing media and on X was this idea that, oh, look at how many redundancies are built into the social security systems that send out the checks. And everyone who knows anything about social security was immediately like, that's so that if one of the systems goes down. People still can get checks like

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  We can't just have one system for something this important. Like what is for anybody with like a passive familiarity with what it means to, you know, depend on government assistance for your daily needs, understands just looks like waste inefficiency to someone who like has never had to think about that.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, if you like, your whole career has been at like air table or something where like if the server goes down, like it's not a huge fucking deal.

• 50:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Right, like who gives a shit?

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Air table taking strays.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I love air table, as you know, but like, you know, there's just a stakes, people, there's this whole sense in tech that like they're used to dealing with really high stakes and that's just couldn't be further from the truth. There's very little in tech that like is life or death. There's very little that like, if it goes down for a day or 10 days, like people can't make it, but it's the entirety of like the basis of government, right? It's like we're keeping the fucking water moving, right? We're like keeping the lights on essentially.

• 50:49Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  And I want the water to work. I don't care if it's working at its maximum efficiency. I want there to be a backup system so that like, if the first system breaks down, we're paying extra money for the second one. There are some things that don't have to be maximum efficient.

• 51:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Josie, you say people in tech never have to deal with life or death decisions. Why don't you tell that to a charred remains of a Waymo?

• 51:13Speaker 02

  I was just about to say, what about the robot car? You know, like the fuck?

• 51:20Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, I think that's what efficiency is to them, right? Is like, you get right up on the edge of potential failure. Because that's the most cost effective thing to do. And sometimes that means you veer into failure. Your systems will fail, but it's worth it, right? Cause who cares? What's your worst case scenario? You send out an email to your customers being like, sorry, the TikTok was down for 25 minutes. I know that you had it rough. You had to pay attention in school or whatever, but

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 51:48Peter Shamshiri?

  That's it, that's, that's the worst case scenario right now.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Folks, we were gonna talk about the protests in LA, the horrific riots spreading across the city. Absolutely devastating LA.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Heart goes out.

• 52:04Peter Shamshiri?

  But we don't have time. We went way too long talking about Doge. So, well, we'll just see how that develops. We'll leave the deployment of the military to downtown Los Angeles to perhaps its own episode. We're gonna take off next week because, again, Riannon is marching to Gaza. I don't know what about that you folks don't understand.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  I take this to mean you don't want us to fill in ever again?

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Didn't go well.

• 52:28Peter Shamshiri?

  I think this went good, not great.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  We record, start over.

• 52:35Peter Shamshiri?

  And then we'll be back for the end of the month with the usual end of June

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Bullshit.

• 52:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Stuff. I am not excited. We don't know what cases we'll be doing, but we'll be doing them, folks. Brace yourselves. Follow us on social media at FiveFourPod. Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out for access to premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack, all sorts of shit. We'll see you in two weeks.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  You can also pay me and Jay, since Peter won't. Feel free to Venmo us.

• 53:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Cut that.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Stay safe, Ree. Come back soon, Michael.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yes, both of you. We love you, Ree.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Nefok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode. To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community, and more, join at patreon.com/54pod.