Project 2025 Expert on How We Are Headed to a Constitutional Crisis & Why We Needed to Take Project 2025 Seriously from the Beginning

Why is Everyone Talking About Project 2025 & Should You Be Worried? How Dangerous Is It? What Does it Mean for America? Is Project 2025 Trump’s agenda? No matter which side of the political aisle you're on, America is being reshaped, and it’s important to be aware of these big changes that will impact so many of us. As Trump's first 100 days in office for a second term comes to a close, we’re breaking down Project 2025 - what it is, who’s really behind it, how it’s already restructuring society, what else is to come, the global implications, and why we need to start finally taking it seriously. David A. Graham (political & national affair staff writer at The Atlantic, author of The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America) gives his political analysis of the hidden dangers of Project 2025 — from mass federal layoffs and the erasure of environmental protections to the terrifying push for Christian-only values and a government that could soon look unrecognizable. With whispers of invading Canada, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and rewriting democracy itself, Graham dives deep into how this political earthquake could dismantle the U. S. system as we know it — and why now, more than ever, we need to wake up, speak out, and fight for what’s left of due process, education, and basic rights. You can't afford to miss this episode of MBB! David A. Graham's book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/800230/the-project-by-david-a-graham/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  I don't want to read it.

• 0:10Mayim Bialik?

  It feels like we're living in a science fiction novel. The plans for what we're seeing now started in the first term.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Project 2025. Most of us, and I hold myself accountable for this, just didn't read it. We didn't take it seriously. This is an attempt to transform so many things about the government and about society. You have contributors to the project all over the administration. They are accruing all this power and they're taking over these bodies that the president hasn't traditionally had control over. They want to use all of these things to support his political ambition. Trump wants to have all these powers for his own reasons. And they want to have all these powers for these sort of ideological reasons of both constitutional law and also the Christian worldview. And so they found a way to work together because they have a shared interest. It feels like it's only a matter of time before we see the executive branch try to defy a judicial order. And if we get there, that's a really dangerous moment. Suddenly you have an authoritarian government.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  I worry about people getting violent in the streets because they no longer see another way to express themselves or another way to check power.

• 1:18Speaker 03

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• 2:19Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 2:20Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:22Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we're going to be breaking down a little more about the state that we find ourselves in, in this country.

• 2:32Jonathan Cohen?

  No matter which side of the political aisle you're on, America is being reshaped. There are things happening right now that are being implemented that many say have never been implemented before. Whether you call it a constitutional crisis, whether you call it reducing the government, whether you are pro the things that are happening or against them, it's really important to know what's happening.

• 2:54Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to be doing a deep dive into Project 2025. Many of us heard about it during the last campaigns, before the last election. Many of us brushed it off. David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he wrote this sweet little book called The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Guess what, people? It's really happening. It's a thing, and it is being implemented. The president does know about it, and there's some really interesting things for us to learn about what it means, how we got here, and why it should be important, no matter who you voted for, what it means for the future of America and for the future of your family. So we're very excited to welcome David A. Graham to the Breakdown.

• 3:39Mayim Bialik?

  He won the Tonner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting for his coverage of the 2020 presidential election. He's written for a bunch of places. As I said, his new book is The Project. Please welcome David A. Graham.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Break it down.

• 3:53Mayim Bialik?

  Okay. David Graham, welcome to the Breakdown.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:57Mayim Bialik?

  We respect so much the writing that you do, the thinking that you do, and the contributions that you make to really everything coming out of The Atlantic, surrounding politics, what's happening in 2025, all these things. Before we do a deep dive into your book, The Project, give us some good news. And I don't just mean, like, tell me, you know, what smoothie went right when you tried to blend it this morning. Give us some good news to start. So that we can start this conversation from a place of building on some aspect of understanding hope in this context.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that the last few months have been really bleak and the current moment can feel really bleak. But I think people are tuning in after some time of tuning out. I think people are paying attention. I think there's real engagement. And, you know, I think there is a conversation about the country that is helpful. For a long time, I think a lot of Americans have sort of assumed that things are the way they are and they will stay that way. And there's maybe more of an understanding now that we have to work for that and we have to sort of push for the vision that we want.

• 5:09Mayim Bialik?

  I'm not yet convinced.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Okay. I'll do my, I'll think about it.

• 5:13Mayim Bialik?

  No, I mean, like, and I think, no, and I'm not saying your good news is bad news, but I think that, look, I think that that speaks to the place that a lot of us are at. And I think what I'd love for you to also kind of frame for us, many people didn't want to know as much about what's going on in the government as we now have to. And for many of us, we were raised with a consciousness of the civil rights movement being not long ago, the equal rights amendment being not that long ago. You know, for those of us who are my age, like, we lived through, my parents sweating and crying through Carter and Reagan and, you know, like, many of us knew things, but most of us got it.

• 5:58Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, my dad read the newspaper every day. He read the New York Times every day. But for many of us, what the first, you know, Trump administration looked like was we all of a sudden knew what the president was thinking and doing at all times. So where is that balance between being aware, right? Like, I knew all about apartheid. I knew all about, you know, all of those things, all the protests. Like, I knew about movements that were happening globally. It just feels like, name a country and I could tell you something that the current administration has said, done, or thought. And I'm sure that it was like that with every president. They were always doing things. Why do I know about it so much? And is there

• 6:41Mayim Bialik?

  a line between we know too many things and it's good that we know all these things?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we know the wrong things a lot of the time. Or, you know, the government is acting so erratically that we learn about something that they haven't thought through and then they change their mind about it. You know, tariffs is the most obvious example. So you're trying to keep track of things that are changing so quickly. There's no deliberate process, seemingly. And, you know, I think one of the things that is important for me about the book is there is this chaotic level coming from the president himself. And then I also think there is something going on below the surface that is more systematic. But I mean, I feel like I am too informed about politics and I am a political reporter. I don't know how other people possibly deal with it.

• 7:28Jonathan Cohen?

  It seems like every opposition party says that there's a drastic remaking of the government and that this side is way offside and they're changing things for the worst and it's a catastrophe. How do we balance the regular partisan objection to what's going on with the actions that are being taken right now and the changes that are happening that we should be aware of?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I think one way is to separate out a policy and sort of procedure. So there's a lot of things, and I think when we talked about Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign, it was often on the level of sort of some of the policies. And, you know, Democrats would talk about certain policies that they thought were unpopular. But I think what sets this apart is the way that they have a plan and methods and are executing on reshaping the government, like the way the executive branch works and the way people interact with it. And I think that makes it important to understand and that makes it a little bit different from just the sort of back and forth, like they want to do this and it's bad, kind of talk we get.

• 8:31Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that's fascinating to me about people's fascination with President Trump. Is that, that, well, obviously, a lot of people really like him. So I also want to like be clear about that. And, um, and I understand, to the best of my ability, mostly with the help of The Atlantic, I understand why Kamala Harris did not win. Okay, so like, I'm okay there. I'm not trying to like rewrite, you know, history, as it were. But one of the things that's very surprising to me is, you mentioned the word chaos. And, you know, it, it's not unlike, you know, when you go to have a tooth removed,

• 9:14Mayim Bialik?

  you want, you want to be numb, right? And you don't want to know the intricate details of the needles, the saws, the, you know, like, you don't want to know. And there's a certain confidence you have when you go to the dentist's office, that you know that if something intense needs to happen, you're going to be shielded from, for lack of a better word, chaos, right? So there's something about the transparency and, you know, I would say, almost like this perverse embrace of chaos, that is not only a feature, in my opinion, of this president. Every president's got their thing, and I could complain about all of them, if you give me, you know, enough time. But there's something about, you know, the getting behind this kind of chaos,

• 9:59Mayim Bialik?

  that I find very dysregulating. Meaning, I wanted to believe that even if you like Trump, or, you know, support his fiscal decisions, or whatever, you think the government should be run like a business, a bad business, whatever, I, I was willing to sort of like put that aside. The place that's really confusing for me is why are some people digging the chaos that's coming out of Washington?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I think there's so many people who have reached a point of, um... Just jaundice with government? And they think that it's working so poorly that this is no real, you know, it's either this isn't any different, or that it's just so bad that they're happy for it to work poorly. It's a little bit of a like, almost like a Leninist like height and the contradiction sort of thing. And you know, there are these people who just want to burn it all down. And they think that the, you know, the government needs major changes. And so if you say to them, look, this is breaking the government. They say, yeah, and like, that's what I want. This is a good thing. And, you know, I think that's a really blunt way to approach it. Because a lot of these change, you know, some changes are good and some changes are bad.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  And I think to simply say, change, I like change is not, not a very thoughtful approach. But I do think it is the way a lot of people feel. They're just like, screw it.

• 11:18Jonathan Cohen?

  And the question is, if we are changing things, what is the alternative plan? Because especially when you have Silicon Valley model approach, which is move fast, break things. If there is nothing to replace it, like if there's no childcare and we're removing a quick start, fast start, a head start, sorry. What are we replacing it with? And are we just leaving this next generation to not be educated? And you can argue whether or not that's a great program, whether it has corruption in it, if it's the most effective way to spend tax dollars. But we do know that without some form of early childhood education, people don't return to the workforce, there's a drop in productivity,

• 12:00Jonathan Cohen?

  two income, you don't have a two income family, it becomes harder to make ends meet. Like, there doesn't seem to be a plan in place for the next vision. But perhaps Project 2025 is that vision. Talk to us a little bit about both the breaking things without a plan to replace them. And maybe we'll move on next to what are the things that we should be most concerned that are being implemented?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  I think like Project 2025 is interesting because often the diagnoses are convincing or like bipartisan and then the prescriptions are, I think, much less convincing. Yeah, you know, they argue that Congress is really broken and that's something, you know, I think you would be hard pressed to find a political scientist of any stripe who didn't agree that Congress has been in really bad shape for a long time now. But is making the president more powerful and giving him all the power going to solve that problem? I'm skeptical. You know, another example would be civil servants. Like, not, you don't find a lot of people who just like love the federal bureaucracy and just like praise it. But if you replace that with a lot of people who are chosen on the basis of loyalty to

• 13:10Speaker 02

  one person, is that going to make services better? Is that going to solve the problems that people have? I'm skeptical of that.

• 13:16Mayim Bialik?

  That's a great point, and I think that leads to sort of my, my next question. You kind of named it already. What I seem to hear most from people is, well, it was this messed up before and you just didn't know about it. They all lie. They're all assholes. They're all, you know, philanderers. They're all, like, fill in the blank. What's wrong as, just from an intellectual perspective, what's wrong with that argument?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a certain, a certain truth to it, and I think it's important to acknowledge that. There are a lot of problems.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  But I, you know, I think there's a lot of things that are going right. There are things that people depend on all the time. You know, social security is a really valuable tool for a lot of people. A lot of people depend on Medicaid. They depend on Medicare. They love going to national parks. They, you know, their school, their child goes to a school and their child needs special services and that's paid for by money from the Department of Education. So I think it just cuts with a really, or paints with a really broad brush to say, well, it's all broken and they're all bad people. The federal government is a lot of things and I would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 14:29Mayim Bialik?

  For those of us who chose to study this stuff, in whatever level we've chosen to study it or live it. For me, I have a minor in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, which means a lot of World War II. And a lot of the politics on the climate, really from the 1800s on, leading into World War II.

• 14:49Mayim Bialik?

  There's a lot of things that feel really uncomfortable about many of the changes that are happening right now. Can you explain, for people who may not remember, also kind of Middle School Social Studies, is what we used to call it. What is beautiful about the United States system? In particular, the three branches that we have. Why are they beautiful and important, especially by virtue of the fact that they were founded in opposition to a monarchy?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Right. They were founded in opposition to a monarchy and designed in opposition, to some extent, to each other. It was laid out that Congress would pass the laws, and the executive branch would enforce the laws, and the judiciary would interpret the laws. And that is, the balance of power has shifted a little bit over time. The president has become steadily more powerful

• 15:44Speaker 02

  since the founding, but especially in the last 150 years or so. But this has meant that it's very hard for anyone to take total control. It's very hard for them to abuse power too far before something comes back and checks them. And it's also hard for them to corrupt services that are there and things that people depend on. Any president has only so long. They have four years, or they have eight years. And their power is limited, and that has worked not flawlessly, but I think generally fairly well. There's a reason the US has been so resilient for so long.

• 16:20Mayim Bialik?

  And the idea is, we have the opportunity to change leadership if we don't like the way things are going. Often, the economy is what determines a change in leadership or a change in party. We have the ability to advocate on state levels, and have representatives then, who, in theory, are representing each of the states.

• 16:46Mayim Bialik?

  You brought it up first.

• 16:49Mayim Bialik?

  Is there really a possibility for a third term?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Boy, I don't know. I think, well, I have been surprised so many times in the Trump era that I hate to say, "No, of course not." I mean, the Constitution is very clear, but a lot of things seem clear. I think this is one that, more than a lot of places, it's very hard to imagine.

• 17:09Mayim Bialik?

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• 19:12Mayim Bialik?

  Graham, like, think of all the things. I never imagined I would know when the president was on the toilet.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  That's true. Well, that's not in the Constitution.

• 19:23Mayim Bialik?

  No, but just in terms of things that I could not imagine, like, I mean, unprecedented things occur.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And he has this genius for finding places where, you know, it seems like the rules are clear, and he just does it, and nobody stops him.

• 19:39Mayim Bialik?

  What is going on? Like, how much can I protest and hold up a sign and believe that I'm doing something? Is that the way to do something? What are people supposed to do if they feel that, constitutionally, something is going wrong? What are we supposed to do?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Um, protesting is actually surprisingly effective. I mean, the political science shows that mass protest really does change people's opinions, and it changes politics. But it's scary when you have people who are aware of the power of protest and who are aware of the short time they have before there is potential backlash, and are determined to make as much of that as they can, and, you know, with the understanding there will be backlash. They want to move the ball forward as far as they can before that happens. And so, there's like certain imperviousness to public opinion, and I think that's really daunting.

• 20:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's just touch back on the third term for a moment.

• 20:40Jonathan Cohen?

  In order to do that, they have to change the Constitution, which they can present an amendment. What is the process of changing that and how many people need to agree?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  I don't think, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be wrong about this, but I'm not sure that an amendment has been approved this fast, ever, and certainly not recently. You've got to have, you know, we have two-thirds of the states, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna reveal myself as being an unqualified political reporter. But you need, I think, two-thirds of the states and three-quarters of Congress to approve an amendment. The numbers aren't there. I mean, I don't think there's any chance of amending the Constitution. And what they claim is they have figured out legal workarounds for how, well, because he didn't serve the terms continuously, actually, it's okay for him to serve a third one. And what they hope is that if they go to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will ratify that.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  And, I don't know, you know, you would think they wouldn't, but, as you said, like, you could imagine, there's lots of things that you couldn't have imagined.

• 21:38Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I mean, look, in the, in the first, you know, in the first term of Trump's presidency, you know, there was already conversation, which I thought was preposterous at first, about really just the distribution of justices and the distribution of justice, as it were. And, you know, indeed, and I think this, this leads into a little bit of the project and your book and the conversation around Project 2025. This isn't like a haphazard, whoops, let's figure it out as we go.

• 22:17Mayim Bialik?

  The, the plans for what we're seeing now indeed started in the first term and were, you know, really explicitly kind of rumored to be laid out in something called Project 2025. The thing that really, you know, gets my goat is how much, you know, when people would bring this up, Trump and sort of all the people around him, you know, were adamant that like, this is not a thing, we're not affiliated with it, ignore it, blah, blah, blah.

• 22:51Jonathan Cohen?

  I've never heard of it before. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 22:53Mayim Bialik?

  Right. Like, we have no idea what you're talking about. And...

• 22:59Mayim Bialik?

  So happens, as we say in my family, so happens that this is a thing. And I do really get annoyed when, you know, even when Signal Gate happened. Like, don't tell me that I didn't see what I saw. Like, just don't do that because we're gonna find out. And like, you know, when the explicit transcript was published, it's like, I don't know, that bothers me that JD Vance and everybody was like, this didn't happen, there was no information. It's a lie. It's like, no, but it did. Like, why? I have to live like this? So can you talk a little bit about what happened with Project 2025? What happened with sort of when it started circulating?

• 23:43Mayim Bialik?

  The distance that was created from it? And what we are now seeing? And like, and I'm just gonna say this, like, it's okay. Meaning, this is what they wanted to do and they're doing it? So like, we're just like, kind of living it. The ridiculousness of that distancing. I wonder if you can sort of speak to how this sort of came into your orbit? And, you know, really made you wanna to write about it and really help people understand it?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  You know, so I had read bits and pieces of the Mandate for Leadership, which is the main document during the campaign, but not the whole thing. And I thought I had an idea. And then I sat down after the election to read through the full 922 pages. And I was just struck by what a complete vision it was and how different it was from the little bits and pieces I had heard. There's a list of contributors to the project, 70 some people. Of those, about a quarter served in the first Trump administration. Some of them were members of the cabinet. Russell Vogt, who's kind of the prime architect, was the head of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of Trump's term. He's back in that role now. Even as Trump was saying that he didn't know anything about the project, Vogt was serving as the Chair of the Platform Committee for the Republican National Convention.

• 24:54Mayim Bialik?

  He probably knew.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  I think he knew. I bet he didn't read it. I believe that. When he said he didn't read it, I think that could be true.

• 24:59Mayim Bialik?

  But I think he doesn't read a lot of things, though.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  But, you know, there was, it wasn't credible. And you had, I mean, I think one of the strange things about this is even as you had Trump saying, I don't know anything about it. You know, here we have this big plan and they put it on the internet in 2023, 18 months before the election for anyone to read. And I, you know, most of us, and I hold myself accountable for this as one of the people, just didn't read it. We didn't take it seriously. And so I'm trying to make up for that now, I guess.

• 25:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's go through some of the most surprising things as you started to read it. What stood out to you the most?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  I think the scale of their scheme for taking over the government was the thing that stuck out first. I mean, they have a lot of things they want to do. Every administration has things they want to do, but they had thought really hard about how to do it. So, you know, laying off tens of thousands of civil servants or converting them to political appointees, these are things that are hard to do, but they had thought about how they were going to do it, and they had a process. They thought about how to use the Justice Department as a tool of these things, how to take sort of the little-known offices like OMB or like the Office of Presidential Personnel and turn them into the engines of really executive power growth. And then from there, the way that they see this as a way to remake all of society. I think their ambitions are really broad, and they have thought about the mechanisms and the way they can use the government to kind of coerce people along those lines.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  So I think it's more radical, perhaps even than some of the impressions we got of it were in 2024. It just, you know, they thought about how every department could contribute to this broader whole and how to change the way we interact with the government and how, you know, that means like the way we live our lives, what we're learning and what our children are learning, how we're getting our health care, all these really direct things that are not just like what happens in Washington, but they're what happens in our lives.

• 26:48Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm always struck by the delta between seemingly very smart people, often in the tech world but in the business world, who are very supportive of this administration and, you know, the phrase, "Let them cook. Let's see how this goes." There are some things that are actually... And then the other side, which is adamantly opposed to it. And I really struggle to understand like how credible people don't see eye to eye, and not only do they not see eye to eye, but they're so vastly apart from one another. So when you... Like, I'll steel man for a second. Reshaping the government. Well, government is too big. It hasn't had a massive restructuring in a long time.

• 27:33Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, there's some issue of doing it too quickly and not knowing what you're cutting. But like, tell me why I'm wrong about the government needing to be downsized and restructured.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  I don't think you're necessarily wrong about government needing to be downsized and restructured. But I think to think of it from that point of view is to put the cart before the horse a little bit. I think the question is, what do you want the government to achieve? And what are the best means to do that? You know, and you'll get civil servants and you'll get Democrats admitting, well, maybe there is some blow. Maybe there are some places where we could reshape these. So I think there's something to that. And I think a lot of the diagnoses, like I say, you know, they point to things that are real problems. And they want to deal with them. And they have some, in some cases, ideas that I think have wide appeal. In other cases, ones where I think they will not help. You know, they're right to say that there are places where the government is politicized.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  I don't think that politicizing it in the opposite direction is really a good solution to that. It's just a little bit of a spoiled system. Well, they did it, so we're gonna do it too, you know?

• 28:36Jonathan Cohen?

  What's an example of a place where you think, right idea, wrong execution?

• 28:42Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I was gonna talk about social security. I could talk about that for forever and a day. No, because that's one of the programs that I have had direct interface with because my father passed away 10 years ago. And so my mother gets, you know, social security and like because of that can't get health insurance. Like, I mean, it's nuts. Like, I live in a bureaucratic mess as the child of, you know, someone who's receiving social security benefits. And like, even, I'm just gonna be super honest, and I have tremendous respect for anyone who has to work for any government office. Like, or has had to deal with things like social security and dealing with the American public and the questions that we ask when we call them.

• 29:22Mayim Bialik?

  But the level of bureaucratic nonsense involved in me just trying to figure out what are the benefits? What does she, like, there's just not, and I'm thinking like, this is just me. I'm one person just trying to interface with a system. Everything's going to AI now. I can't even get it. A human being like, forget about to make a return to like Pottery Barn, you know, just to like, try and speak to someone about my mother's health insurance. Right. So to me, like, this is a level of bureaucratic nonsense, which I was just raised, you know, as the child of liberals as like, that's just the government. It sucks. Socialism is the answer, but it doesn't work either, you know?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a way to rethink those rules and to restructure them. I mean, social security is an interesting example because it's like the big elephant in the room that I think Project 2025 doesn't really grapple with. And I think that's because people, they understand that it's something that is so important to so many people that they're afraid to touch it. But it's very hard to think about how you're going to solve the federal budget if you're not thinking about social security. There are these places where the rules need reform or where, you know, again, you can talk to people in the system and they'll say, yeah, we're handcuffed by whatever paper requirement. We're handcuffed by the rules and the way they've sort of accreted over time.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Getting rid of them, though, if you fire those people, there's no one to work through at all. And that's kind of the situation that I'm worried we may be in if a lot of these federal employees are simply just laid off without a replacement.

• 30:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Veterans Affairs is mimicking that experience, too.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 31:00Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I like to do is watch documentaries. And there's a documentary called The Family, and I watched it several years ago. And it really freaked me out because it was about,

• 31:14Mayim Bialik?

  you know, it was about a, at that time, what I assumed was a very paranoid, you know, dramatized explanation of an infiltration of a very, very specific kind of right-wing Christianity that was influencing the government. And the documentary makes a very, very strong case for it. You see it with the breakfasts and, you know, over the years, the various evangelical movements that have moved into the White House in ways that, you know, I think make a lot of Christians uncomfortable as well. But there's an aspect to Project 2025, which I think disturbs me the most.

• 31:54Mayim Bialik?

  And that is this sort of notion that there is an authority and there is an authoritative perspective on what constitutes

• 32:07Mayim Bialik?

  Family and family values. And this is a place where, you know, publications like The Atlantic understand that you don't have to agree with something to support its right to exist and to be appreciated. Right? Meaning, we're not looking to all be the same. True liberal values mean that you tolerate beliefs that are different than yours. And that's the definition of liberal, right? Of a true, like, kind of ideological liberal. What you read when you look at Project 2025 is a very explicit

• 32:44Mayim Bialik?

  approach that seeks to define family, family values in a very specific way that, you know, as someone who's 2% of the United States population, definitely doesn't speak to me in a lot of ways. And I find it really distasteful, you know, any notion of religion coming into my government. And I know that it's there. I understand it was, you know, an extremely important component of the founding of this country. Like, I understand that. And I understand that that's the value of many people in this country. I understand I'm a minority here, literally. But can you talk a little bit about some of these kind of like family values issues? And where these are seeking to challenge

• 33:27Mayim Bialik?

  what we hold true about being free in America?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Kevin Roberts, who's the head of the Heritage Foundation, which convened this, says that, you know, liberty is not doing what we want, but what we ought. Which seems a little Orwellian to me. And when his idea of what we ought is very much based in Christianity. Russell Vogt says, like, this was founded as a Christian nation. We need to bring it back to that. And he says, you know, liberals describe me as a Christian nationalist. And unlike many pejoratives, I think that's right. I am a Christian. I'm a nationalist. This is very much the view I have of the world. They want a biblically, they say, a biblically based vision of the family. And that means generally a father who's the breadwinner.

• 34:08Mayim Bialik?

  That's not in the Bible. And like, I'm sorry.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. They see this, I mean, they describe that as a biblically based family. They want-

• 34:17Mayim Bialik?

  Father's the breadwinner, so no feminists allowed.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Right. The women are, it doesn't say women shouldn't work necessarily, but the focus should be on motherhood. Families should have lots of children. The children should be gender conforming. LGBT people are pushed to the side, pushed into the shadows. I mean, in this case, they literally want to write trans people out of the language of the government so they can't officially exist. They would like social services to be provided through churches. They advocate, I mean, an interesting idea, they talk about wanting workers to have a Sabbath available to them. You know, they say people should have time to spend with their family, and that means they should either have a day off or get paid time and a half. But it's interesting, they phrase that as a Sabbath, and they say, of course, the default for this would be Sunday. So, funny how that works.

• 35:04Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and all the Seventh Day Adventists are like, wait a second.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Wait a second. They think schools should ideally be, well, they should be, parents should have a lot of say in schools, but they would like the system to be more focused on private schools and particularly religious schools. They think the federal government can fund these things, but there should be vouchers, the states should be able to design the system as they want. If they want to instill biblical values, biblical values, Christian values in the school systems, that's just fine. So it's all focused around, I think, this very Christian approach.

• 35:34Mayim Bialik?

  It feels like we're living in a science fiction novel when you describe it this way. It sounds so cuckoo pants, crazy, like, to use technical terms, just because these are things that, you know, that I, again, as a minority in this country, like, these are things that I hold so sacred, and I always have understood that most of the country is Christian. That's just true. And I'm like, I'm OK with that. Like, I get it, like, holidays at Christmas and Easter, everything's closed, like, we work around, you know? But the notion that there is some sort of moral righteousness, or that there is really a role for the government in telling me what my family should look like, that's outrageous

• 36:19Mayim Bialik?

  to me.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Right, and I think, you know, we've seen conservatives who have pushed some of these same ideas. You know, Reagan did this.

• 36:25Mayim Bialik?

  Of course.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Bush did this. But I think there's a willingness to, I mean, combined with a sort of grab of executive power, there's a willingness to use the coercive authority of the federal government to make people live this way and to push things in that direction that is a step beyond what we've seen from any other sort of past social conservatives who've had any power.

• 36:43Jonathan Cohen?

  I have a couple of questions that come up, just in terms of, like, let's think through this logically. So you want it to be a single family household in terms of the breadwinner. The male should be the primary breadwinner. But currently, two family households are struggling to survive. They're not making enough money. So how does that transition work? Bringing back manufacturing and manufacturing jobs is not going to solve that problem. Even if it was possible, which we don't know that it is. Most people say it's not. So you go ahead and you remove childcare, likely as an attempt to keep women in the home to raise the children. It's like, is that what we're seeing?

• 37:26Mayim Bialik?

  Unhappy women who don't want to be raising their children is not the people you want raising those children. Like, if they want to be out, let them be free.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  There are places where they move towards something like childcare. So they say, you know, there's, there's different visions. I mean, there's interesting places where you get debate within the text. So some people say, well, we should be paying, providing sort of stipends to family members to care for children. Now, we can guess what that means. That's going to be mothers or grandmothers, probably. But they say, you know, it should be in the home or failing that, you could have childcare at work. Now, they say, you know, that should be in the workplace, not at a third site. So that people can be closer to their children. That's an idea that I think might have widespread appeal. But if you're saying, you know, we will not have childcare, we're going to cut things like head start, that's where you start to see a conflict. I mean, you know, they talk about the idea that we should restore jobs where one breadwinner can feed the family and have sort of dignity of work. But I think they're kind of hand wavy about how to achieve that.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  And it's a, it's a, you know, there's a hollowness at some of the economic ideas where they want to, they offer some ways to give workers more dignity or maybe even more power in the workplace. Not quite on the level of labor unions, but moving in that direction. But if you don't solve exactly the question you're talking about, about, you know, how do you feed people onto incomes, which they don't, I'm not sure how it works.

• 38:39Jonathan Cohen?

  What are those steps? Because what struck me during the interview between Musk and Trump was Trump's praise of Musk as such a fantastic job cutter.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they talk about sort of workers councils, which is a sort of European idea where you have workers who have a voice in the workplace. They say, you know, major labor unions are corrupt, but we should give workers the opportunity to organize, to have a voice in the workplace. So there are. Like these steps, you know, we've heard about the idea that GOP is becoming a workers' party. And I think that is often not convincing, as seen in the case of Musk. But I do think there's like a sincere grappling with like, okay, how can we rebalance things to give workers more of a say? But if you're also, for example, cutting taxes drastically, especially on the wealthiest earners, it's hard to figure out how you're going to really rebalance the economy in a holistic way.

• 39:32Mayim Bialik?

  I think there's also an element here, you know, as a female person, you know, there's an element here of you don't get to put the genie back in the bottle. Once you have given me my rights and once you've given me the option to control when I have a baby, I'm not going back. And you may not like what the feminist movement has evolved into, meaning you're welcome, you, not you, David. But you're, anyone is welcome to say, here are the things that I think work well in traditional families. Quote, "traditional families," right? Here are the things that women need support in if they're going to leave the home to work.

• 40:13Mayim Bialik?

  Here are the ways that we can make staying home not difficult for women who would like to, but who think they don't have the skills, right? All of these things are possible, but you cannot, and this is sort of my challenge in general with Project 25, you can't go back.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:28Mayim Bialik?

  We're not going to. And the people united will never be defeated. Like, that's just true. You will not, like, you cannot stop that. So what we have now is this kind of breaking point. And that's what it feels like, where you can't even talk to people in your own family who are on the other side of this, right? Like, it's gotten to a point of a civil crisis. And that's, you know, I think also the kind of chaos that many in this administration kind of think is going to like push us to some like breaking point. But you know what? That only happened in the Old Testament. Like, that happened 5,000 years ago. Things would get so bad that there'd be a war and like a hole would open up and God would swallow up all the bad people. That's not happening anymore.

• 41:12Mayim Bialik?

  You don't have to push it to that point.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's a sense of nostalgia among a lot of people for like the way things used to be at some indeterminate moment. But it's really hard to translate nostalgia into policy. And I think that's exactly what you were pointing to.

• 41:25Mayim Bialik?

  The nostalgia is that of...

• 41:28Mayim Bialik?

  Of men who would like to control women's behavior in many cases. And, and the next level, and you know, I learned this in women's studies, you know, 10. This, this, it always for me will fall to race, class and gender. Right? So, the, the other sort of like, the, the elephant in the room that like, nobody wants to talk about is, is the issue of class. And, and I'm not arguing, you know, I'm not arguing for socialism, although I'm happy to argue for socialism if given the opportunity. But, but the notion of what to do about people who do not have means is this other sort of like, thing that we don't talk about.

• 42:10Mayim Bialik?

  And you know, I was sort of, when I was raised, like, this was one of these points that was made very clear to me. That like, it was like, one of my dad's favorite examples. It's not that Republicans don't like poor people. It's not that they hate poor people, you know, constitutionally. But, the Republican Party in general has a different way to approach dealing with people who are poor. And the Democratic Party has its own way of dealing with people. So I was raised that like, Democrats are like, give money to poor people and help them. Give them food stamps, give them support, give them, you know, educational opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have. And by those means, they will be able to help themselves. And I was taught that the Republican Party believes like, oh, create more jobs, more possibility.

• 42:54Mayim Bialik?

  And they'll just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And if they don't, it just means they weren't made to succeed. And I was not raised to believe that. Meaning, I was raised by public school teachers who said that there are miracles in every single school. Not just the wealthy schools, right? There are children who, if given the right resources, love, support, education, and, and someone believing in them, can achieve and become whatever they want to be, right? That to me was the American dream. So, can you also give us an example of where the poor and this issue of, you know, kind of economic stratification fits into this nostalgic Project 2025 vision?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  There's so many ways in which it feels like they think that American society took a, a bad turn around the New Deal. And, you know, that is involved in like the growth of the government in general, but it's involved in all kinds of social safety net programs.

• 43:50Mayim Bialik?

  Can you frame the New Deal for people who, again, don't remember high school history?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so starting in the great, with Franklin Roosevelt, in the wake of the Great Depression, you have an, you know, the idea that government should help people out on certain things. And this grows again in the 1960s with Great Society programs, Medicare, Medicaid. So you start with Social Security, you add Medicare, you add Medicaid, you create things like Head Start, you have housing assistance for people, you know, public housing through the federal government. All of these things have gradually grown. And there is this sense that these things are making people dependent on the system. You know, there's, you're creating a culture of dependency. And so I think the authors of Project 2025 agree that there are miracles, but they're not interested in creating a safety net for the people who are not the miracles.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  So if you are those, those high, you know, just those amazing students, you're going to do fine. But if you're not, your Medicaid is going to be slashed, you might not get your housing assistance. All of these things that people depend on are going to be reduced. And so you're kind of on your own.

• 44:52Mayim Bialik?

  I was just listening today, NPR was doing a piece about, you know, what happens when you green, you know, low-income neighborhoods, right? And there's a big study that just came out. And, you know, what happens is, first of all, it reduces the carbon imprint because literally, like, the trees are sucking up badness, right? It also lowers the actual temperature. So you have people, I mean, for lack of a better word, people can be more comfortable, right? I mean, even if you don't have air conditioning, you can be more comfortable. You have more access to outdoor spaces, which Jonathan and I talk a lot about, you know, even simple ways to be in touch with nature, being able to look up at the sky, being able

• 45:37Mayim Bialik?

  to be in connection with something greater than yourself is positive for your immune system, for your mental health, right? And all these things, and just these kind of simple things. And I was thinking like, gosh. That's the country I want to live in. The country that says, here are the simple solutions to help people live better, make better choices, feel better, achieve better for themselves. Like, those are the things that I would love to see a government tackling. What are some things that you feel like people on both sides of the aisle can and should be supporting in light of, you know, all of the sort of discord that we're seeing?

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a really powerful one. I love that. I mean, I think that there are, you know, childcare is a place where if you are pronatalist, as many of these people on the right are, you should be making it easier for people to get childcare. I think it's a no-brainer. I think it's really popular. I think people agree that there should be clean air and clean water. I think people agree that, you know, we should restrict pollution.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Even as I say that, like, I'm, you know, Project 2025 wants to cut a lot of these regulations. So it's hard for me. I mean, maybe the consensus is not as strong as I think. But I think there is a core of desire for certain things, even within this sort of extreme right, that does correspond with things that a lot of people want. But some of them don't. I mean, it's just hard to reconcile an idea that we should be living a sort of Christian-based life with the kind of pluralism that exists in this country.

• 47:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's talk about clean air and water for a second because is the idea that we just need to remove regulation to increase economic viability and drilling and we don't, there's too much red tape to get oil out of the ground and natural gas out of the ground? It seems like that's a slippery slope to, we don't care what's in the water in the cities, we're not worried about air pollution and that, you know, that affects everyone no matter what party you're associated with.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  I find it very hard to, like, to even understand the environmental approach in Project 2025. And it takes, tells the story that, you know, in the 70s, the air was bad, there was a lot of smog, the rivers were burning, and we cleaned those things up, and now things are good. And we should not be restricting industry now. We need to let people have progress. We need to grow the economy. The economy, growing the economy is the best way to improve people's wellbeing. And we should focus on things that are measurable and things like greenhouse gases. They're a little bit vague. Climate change, we don't know how much is caused by people. So we shouldn't focus on that. And what we need to do is just extract as much oil and

• 48:20Speaker 02

  gas as possible, and that means cutting all the regulations. It's what they say.

• 48:26Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I ask again, because I think a lot of people hear some of this stuff and say, these people, they use expletives. They attack their character. They attack their intelligence. But it doesn't seem like it's totally not thought through, given that they wrote it all down. They've made this plan. So I really do try and get underneath the psychological justification and the rational justification. If it is about increasing access to industry and the unfettered capitalism that will make everyone really successful, okay, I can understand that. But there should be guardrails to protect water systems. Like, yes, the rivers were burning.

• 49:07Jonathan Cohen?

  That was a bad thing. I think we can all agree to that. So why take away the guardrails? If the goal is to get more capitalism, oh, let's do that. But why throw it all away?

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's a weird triumphalism, as though like, well, once you've solved the problem, you don't need to keep those solutions in place. But I think if you, if you take those guardrails away, what you're going to get is the same kind of pollution you had before.

• 49:31Jonathan Cohen?

  And we know companies are not going to police themselves.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 49:34Jonathan Cohen?

  We've seen that. So they can't believe that. But then the same would be true of the FDA. We know that food companies are not going to just decide not to put toxic chemicals in food unless they're forced to do so. So. They're also removing the FDA supervisors.

• 49:53Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, FDA is a great one. Maybe we can hone in on that a little bit. You know, RFK Jr. is this incredibly polarizing personality. And, you know, there are many things that he says that it's the wrong messenger, but the message is actually right on. Like, it should not be considered normal to consume chemicals that Europe for decades has been like, what are you crazy? You know, like, we should not be eating products that contain fragments of DNA that seems to possibly be changing the way our immune systems and physiology functions, right? Like, these are just things. And in addition, we should be very, very curious

• 50:37Mayim Bialik?

  about an increase in autism, ADHD. We should be extremely curious about what's going on and what we can, you know, possibly understand better about physiology that does not change in one generation, right?

• 50:51Jonathan Cohen?

  It might take longer than three months to find the solution, but the questions are on the right track.

• 50:57Mayim Bialik?

  He's a Kennedy. He's super ambitious. And nobody knows what's gonna happen. He's gotta get it done quick. But this is an interesting place, you know, maybe to sort of poke around a little bit because, you know, I was actually surprised when I first heard about Project 2025 and before I kind of read your book and dug in more deeply. I thought it was just like a bunch of like rambling things of like, we're gonna blah, blah, blah. But like, it's outlined. There's this section on the environment. Like, it is categorically sound in that it's really trying to be like, we're gonna figure all this out. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what are the biblical values of the FDA?

• 51:39Speaker 02

  The FDA is actually, I sort of thought of this earlier when we're talking about places where the consent is. You know, you get a real concern for revolving door between regulators and industry. And they're concerned about those places where you have undue influence from industry. I think it's inconsistent. They're concerned about, and because each of these chapters, there's a kind of overarching. Ethos, but there are places where individual chapters have slightly different approaches. So there's a real concern for the revolving door in the drug industry and in a lot of medical stuff. I think a lot of people agree about that. It's missing to, you know, to our discussion a moment ago, in the discussion of the environment. So some contributors seem to be more aware of that than others. But they do, you know, they, they see, they see drug companies having far

• 52:24Speaker 02

  too much influence. I think a lot of people agree with about with that.

• 52:27Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know why I have to have drug commercials. I was trying to explain to my kids, like, this is kind of weird that, and I, I happen to watch shows that have a lot of drug commercials because I watch Family Feud, and I watch game shows. So, you know, it's a little bit about the demo. But it's very bizarre that they are selling me, I mean, it's like, it's like an episode of The Twilight Zone. They're selling me the persona that I should have with this drug that I know, like, somebody's getting paid for, you know, me to believe that. And I was actually talking with my, my 16 year old about this. And he's like, well, if the SSRI is not working, maybe you do need a booster, right? Like, you know, he's like, and I was like, yeah, but like, this

• 53:07Mayim Bialik?

  is, it's their, it's a brainwashing, you know, in terms of how we've even come to understand drugs, which I think we saw, and, you know, The Atlantic reported this very, very consistently. Like, we saw this with COVID. People lost their effing minds about where to get information, what to do with it, who to believe, and why. And a little bit, you know, we kind of have set ourselves up for a complete lack of trust and faith. Where do you see Project 2025 in terms of, you know, a, a general trust issue that we're having? Is it believe people when they tell you who they are? Is it, it's never too late to try and tackle this, but don't trust

• 53:52Mayim Bialik?

  the government? Trust your own side unless they start seeming strange? Like, how do we trust?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  I think one of the things that's amazing about this is that they have, as you said, it's sound, they've laid these things out. And so I think a good place to start is to like, take people seriously. Read what they wrote and, and Try to understand what they want to do. I think during the campaign, Democrats did not always do that. They took it as a great campaign talking point. But they didn't really try to understand what was going on and to their detriment. I think they could have had more effective political messaging by really understanding what was in there. But they just wanted to sort of hit that, you know, hit something on the stump and move on.

• 54:30Mayim Bialik?

  What would that have looked like?

• 54:31Speaker 02

  I think talking about the way that this is an attempt to transform so many things about the government and about society. Like when we talk about the biblically based family and structures they want, like people should understand that. And maybe that's something people would vote for anyway, but I'm not sure. And in the campaign, there were fascinating polls where, you know, people knew what Project 2025 was. They didn't like it and they just didn't believe that Trump was going to do it. They thought, he's not going to do that, so I don't need to worry about that. And I think that's because people didn't understand that it is a full program and not just a bunch of cobbled together, you know, a list of, a wish list of ideas.

• 55:05Jonathan Cohen?

  But that's a symptom beyond just Project 2025. When he talked about the tariffs, their side was like, you don't take him literally.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And when he talked about mass deportations, well, you don't take him literally. He's just giving an example of something that we should look into and we'll figure out how to realistically solve the problem once we get into office. So his own party is downplaying him where it seems evident now that you actually have to believe everything he says as fact. And that's something that he's going to follow through.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's really tough because there are things that he says and people don't believe it and they are very much what he wants to do. And then, as Mayim, you were saying earlier, you know, there's cases where like with Signal Gate, they tell you that something, you can see it in front of your eyes. And so it's hard to, I have struggled with like, what is the rubric for when you know something? When you should take it seriously and when you should treat it as hogwash? And I don't know how you explain that. It's a little bit of a like, you have to know it when you see it. But clearly a lot of us don't know it when we see it. We have been wrong about things over and over and again, including me.

• 56:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's do a very, very fun and fast rapid fire, which we don't normally do in the middle of the episode. Things that we should take seriously on invading Canada.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 56:19Mayim Bialik?

  I don't like that you don't know. I don't like that you don't know.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  It was just like, I mean, you know, like what is he talking about? But he keeps bringing it up. Um, I, I, uh, I don't, big maybe. Sorry, I'm bad at lightning round.

• 56:35Mayim Bialik?

  Greenland.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  I think that's more likely. Than Canada, at least.

• 56:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Taking back the Panama Canal.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Uh, he seems to have dropped that one. I think that's on the back burner.

• 56:45Mayim Bialik?

  This is ridiculous already.

• 56:47Jonathan Cohen?

  The level of deportation, what was the initial goal? They wanted how many million people out?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Um, they wanted, I think, a million in the first month or something. Um, not possible.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Like, even if they wanted to, they just, the numbers aren't there.

• 57:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Continuation of tariffs at this level.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Um, I think they're serious about that.

• 57:07Jonathan Cohen?

  And the risk to the global economy? Are they willing to face the recession/depression that may happen if China calls back the debt?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  I think Trump maybe is. I mean, Trump feels so strongly about tariffs and has for so long. The question is whether he can be sort of strong-armed by people around him, I guess.

• 57:25Jonathan Cohen?

  The risk of a third term?

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Um, I think people can't ignore it. It's something to keep paying attention to.

• 57:32Jonathan Cohen?

  Possibility of deporting, uh, national citizens?

• 57:36Speaker 02

  A very, very big risk.

• 57:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Moving on.

• 57:39Mayim Bialik?

  Uh, well, I actually, I wanted to, I wanted to ask, you know, I couldn't help but see, you know, some of the, you know, the president's sort of like, um, well, I believe it was what was supposed to be a joyful Easter greeting. Um, that was, you know, I think, really disgusting and disrespectful to people who actually do, um, celebrate Easter.

• 58:04Mayim Bialik?

  There's this sort of notion, which I do, I don't know if this is me being a bad person.

• 58:12Mayim Bialik?

  There's a, there's a perspective about bad people that seems to be consistent with what you describe as this sort of like biblical-based, quote, "traditional," this notion that like, I'm just gonna say it, that bad people don't deserve rights.

• 58:31Mayim Bialik?

  And I'm speaking in particular about, you know, like conversations about people's possibly previous gang affiliation, you know, using domestic violence against women, which is a heinous act, but using domestic violence as a reason that someone should be denied rights. This is, again, a place where, if you'd like to know the definition of a liberal, you know, people deserve rights and, you know, in a state that we are living in, I don't trust anybody at this point, meaning I don't trust what you tell me about anyone that you have deported and put in a prison. I don't trust you.

• 59:14Mayim Bialik?

  And I understand, nobody can trust anyone, but I'm not taking the president's word in a tweet to justify denying someone due process, right? For me, there's, there's a lot more to be said about, you know, some of the deportations going on at college levels. There's, it's a different conversation and due process is always the overarching rule. It is, it is not illegal to protest. It is not illegal to hate this country. It is not illegal to burn the flag. So I wonder if you can speak, though, to this general notion that, what does it mean if the executive branch is deciding who is good and who is bad?

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right about due process. And the point of due process is not that everybody is innocent, it's that everybody needs to have a fair, a fair way to be tested on that. And, you know, by the way, Trump was very happy to use the system of due process when he was charged in court. He thought that it was important that those protections be in place. This goes back to the conversation we were having earlier about the checks and balances. Like, we don't vest all that authority in one person or in one branch, in the executive branch, to accuse, try and convict somebody. We have, we have juries, we have judges, we have an adversarial system. And they're trying to take those things out of the process. You know, they're saying that people can't challenge their detention because they're challenging in the wrong place or because, you know, their lawyers don't know where they are.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  And so they can't challenge it in the right venue. They're saying they can't challenge their detention because they've already been sent somewhere else and we no longer have authority over them. That's putting all the, all the power in a single branch and often in a single person.

• 1:00:56Jonathan Cohen?

  This question goes back to the relationship between the branches. And it ties into the third term that we were talking about earlier, which is, let's say the courts don't uphold the right for someone to serve more than two terms. If the power has been organized in the executive branch and they control the enforcement of rule and law in the country, what is to stop him from putting himself on the ballot anyway and just moving forward?

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, see, I think that's a greater risk than the Supreme Court or than, you know, than any sort of third term amendment is simply saying, I'm gonna do it and see what happens. And I think not that long ago, that would have seemed to me to sound really conspiratorial. And I think for me, January 6th was a moment when I had to like consider more broadly what was possible and what someone could get away with. And they are accruing all this power and they're taking over these bodies that they haven't traditionally, the president hasn't traditionally had control over. And, you know, they want to use all of these things to support his political ambitions. They think that's, you know, I think for Trump, it's a personal thing. Trump wants to have all these powers for his own reasons. And they want to have all these powers for these sort of ideological reasons of both

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  constitutional law and also the Christian worldview. And so they found a way to work together because they have a shared interest.

• 1:02:17Jonathan Cohen?

  You could imagine him starting a media campaign saying, the people want this.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:23Jonathan Cohen?

  The people want this, they're taking it away from you. You have to protest in the streets and say that this is what we want and forget about anyone telling you that it shouldn't happen because they don't want America to succeed.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Right, and they'd frame it as democratic too. You know, look, this is a populist movement. This is what people actually want. Don't let the system stand in the way of what the people want.

• 1:02:43Jonathan Cohen?

  The system is corrupt, it's filled with the deep state. These are the actors trying to ruin the country. And before I got here, we were absolutely in ruins. And now all these ways that America is becoming healthy again and great again and lighting the rivers on fire. If we don't have our populace, if I, if you don't allow me to run again, like, how is this gonna continue?

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. If you let them back in, they'll ruin it like by

• 1:03:06Jonathan Cohen?

  And it will be World War III and all of the terror will continue. Speaking of which, the White House just announced that they're encouraging people to marry and have children, offering baby bonuses of up to $5,000 when you give birth. The program also offers to teach women about their menstrual cycles, so they know when they're most fertile, and Trump has recently coined himself as the fertilization president. There's some interesting components of this. One is that France issued a similar medal in 1920, and then it also picked up steam when Hitler introduced it for mothers of eight people or more in 1939. Stalin offered it to women who had nine or more children in 1944.

• 1:03:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Any thoughts on if we should be offering baby bonuses and if the world is really at risk, especially the United States, is at risk of population decline?

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  I don't understand where the idea of population decline comes in. I mean, you do have societies that have birth rates that are very low, and it is a challenge. You know, Elon Musk discovering that Social Security depends on people paying in when they're younger was interesting. It's maybe troubling that that person is reworking our government. You know, having birth is important, but is this the way to do it? Are these prescience we really want to follow? And does it need to be on this level? I think you, I think the, you know, the parallels speak for themselves a little bit.

• 1:04:30Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I would use that money to have childcare, go back to work.

• 1:04:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, there's another interesting, interesting, I say in air quotes here, where they're restricting the voting rights for peoples whose ID doesn't match their birth certificate, which mainly impacts women who have taken their husband's name.

• 1:04:50Mayim Bialik?

  This one is a little, a little fuzzier, and maybe, David, maybe you can help us sort of parse this out. This is a place where, like... I would, I mean, by the time this airs, maybe I'll be proven wrong. I would find it very hard to believe that there's an active campaign to stop married women from voting.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  It's hard to believe that that is the intent.

• 1:05:16Mayim Bialik?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't think that's actually what's going on. Like, there's other things going on that are...

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  They're thinking about trans people. And they don't want people to be changing their identity on their birth certificate, changing their name on their birth certificate. But often, they haven't thought very carefully about what the secondary effect is. And one effect is women who change their names.

• 1:05:33Jonathan Cohen?

  But when they realize that, and it's potentially impacting 69 million women, does it not get walked back? Does someone not say, "Hey, there might be an unintended consequence here"?

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  It's interesting to see when they have to walk things back and when they don't. You know, I'm thinking about Kilmar Braga Garcia, where he was detained and deported, apparently in error. And now they decide, you know, "We're just gonna push on this. We're gonna make this our thing. We're gonna die on this hill, or ideally, not die on this hill." 69 million women voters seems like a hill that they would probably blanch at. But who knows?

• 1:06:12Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, who has time to vote when you're having so many babies?

• 1:06:16Mayim Bialik?

  Does it feel like Handmaid's Tale to you?

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  It's a little bit less... It's a little bit less dramatic. I mean, it's so looking backwards. It's not this new society. It's to put things the way they were. And, you know, I think you're right that it's hard to put things back. But I don't want to think of it too much as a futuristic, you know, futuristic change. I'm sort of trying to think about what we can materially grab on to from the past and understand it that way.

• 1:06:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you have concerns about being the voice of an opposition in a time period where press is being targeted?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I think it's really important to tell people what's going on. And I, you know, that's what I've chosen to do. And I feel like that's what we need. And if people don't like that, that is... You know, I think it's their right to dissent from it. I think the first amendment is really important. The press has to use that or we're going to lose it. And so I intend to exercise those rights.

• 1:07:21Jonathan Cohen?

  Is there one or two top lines of Project 2025 that you're watching most closely?

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  I am really curious to see what happens on abortion, which is something that I think is very important to a lot of the people involved in Project 2025. And not something that Trump cares as much about. But they're, you know, they're working to get staff into these low-level positions that we don't necessarily see, or are going to be pushing on these things. So I think that's really important and could be transformative. We've already seen the shift from Roe v. Wade being overturned. You can imagine a national abortion ban or even steps short of that would be really transformative. The other thing that I'm thinking about is and watching for is how they slash or eliminate climate tracking. So that's, you know, privatizing NOAA is one of the goals, closing a lot of the climate research in the government.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  And I think that's something that is really hard to put back and can be destroyed relatively quickly with really important impact.

• 1:08:21Jonathan Cohen?

  There's, it made me think of one thing in terms of the research. And this goes back to the divide between equally intelligent people seeing things very differently. When you hear about the attacks on research institutions, no matter who they are, Columbia, Harvard, where they're removing research dollars. I heard someone recently say, well, one of these institutions had 69% earmarked for administrative costs, which could justify, oh, the money's not even going to research anyway. But can you talk about the risk of not being at the forefront of research globally and what the impact could be to slow the advancement of disease cures or other breakthroughs?

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we have had this sort of social compact where universities do these things for the good of the country and they, you know, we pay them for it on the basis that they're, you know, it's kind of, it's a little bit of a conservative idea. Like, the government is not the best place to do all of these things. There are people who are really good at this and we want to fund it because everyone benefits from it. If you let other countries take charge of that, I think it puts America behind. I mean, I see this even in the example of things like electric cars. They want to cut down on electric cars and cut down subsidies for that. Well, do we want the Chinese industry to be leading the world on electric cars? Or do we want Americans to be building those cars and making a profit from it? Do we want other countries to have, you know, leadership on medicines? Or do we want to be able to make those things internally? You know, if you're talking about sort of American greatness,

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  it seems like you would want America at the forefront of research. And if you want that, you have to pay for it.

• 1:09:53Jonathan Cohen?

  And if there are renegotiations to happen, then have those, but don't cancel it outright.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. You can't make these vast decisions so quickly. It has to be done in a more deliberate fashion.

• 1:10:04Mayim Bialik?

  I want to touch a little bit on education because I remember during the Black Lives Matter, you know, protests, there was this conversation about defunding the police. And at first I was like, what? What's happening? I thought we need them. And then I learned a little bit more about what it means to redistribute resources, to make sure that there's appropriate care and attention to keep communities safe. And I was like, oh, OK. Weird, weird phrasing. Didn't make sense to me at first, but like now I know more. OK, cool.

• 1:10:37Mayim Bialik?

  I tried to apply that same logic to let's eliminate the Department of Education. And I was like, maybe I just don't understand because I didn't understand what defund the police meant. And like, maybe there's just like a different definition of this word. Then I learned more about like literally not having a Department of Education. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what that means and how that fits into Project 2025.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  The Department of Education does a few things. You know, what it doesn't control is curriculum, although you get politicians occasionally sort of trying to talk that way. But important things it does, one, it pays, it funds a ton of schooling. So it is, we get federal tax dollars that are passed to states to fund a lot of programs. You know, some low-income districts, special education programs, a lot of really important programs there. It deals with student loans, which have been traditionally, they've gone back and forth between sort of a private and a public model. But since 2010, that's something that the federal government has made loans and guaranteed loans. And then they also enforce Title IX, the equality in education rules that cover athletics

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  and they cover classroom instruction, a lot of other things. So they want to get rid of the Department of Education and the way they want to handle that is they want to send the student loans back to the private sector. Okay, maybe that would work, maybe it didn't. But the reason that the federal government took it over is that the private education loans were becoming predatory. They were sending a lot of money to, federally guaranteed loans were end up going to people in for-profit schools that were profiteering.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  They want to change a lot of the Title IX enforcement, send it to the Department of Justice, for example. So just move it somewhere else. And then they want to take all the funding and just block grant it to the states on the basis that the states can decide what they want to do with it. So they say they want to eliminate the Department of Education, but it's really more of an administrative change, except that suddenly you have people who are not necessarily experts in these things dealing with them. Like, why the Justice Department is better dealing with education than the Education Department, I think, is an open question. Once you black grant things to the states, the states have a lot, you know, say it should be anything that's legal under state law. And what I think that means is you're pushing towards a system of vouchers, of religious schools, of other kinds of private schools, in diminishing the role of public education. I suspect what you'd end up with is blue states

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  with public education largely, as we see it now, and red states with a much more religious and voucher-based setup. And you would have things like, you know, the Bible being taught in schools. You know, really strict rules about LGBT students.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  You would have libraries that were really restricted in what they could loan to students. And you have parents with a lot more involvement in the curriculum than we've had, which is something that's been a big conservative cause, obviously, for the last few years.

• 1:13:29Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, to me, that just sounds like, and this is just sort of like Mayim's Project 2025. I think at some point, people are gonna start grouping by states in more significant ways. The same way that we have seen people leaving for Europe, or leaving for Canada. I know those are not huge numbers, but I feel like there's going to be, that's one of the solutions, is that you'll see this further segregation, essentially. That's just my, it's one of my predictions.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  I think you're right. I mean, if you look at the outcomes already, even before some of these things were in place, the differences in so many indicators by state, based on who controls the state, you just get wildly different outcomes and, you know, income, health, you know, life expectancy, health statistics. So that's already happening, and I think this would make it more, it would exaggerate it.

• 1:14:20Mayim Bialik?

  I wanted to touch on one more thing regarding education, because it's been in the news lately. And, you know, for me, it's one of these, you know, sort of areas that gets a little muddy and gets a little gray, and I wonder if you can sort of help us, you know, parse it out. There's, there's conversation in Montana, is where, you know, the Supreme Court heard about parents in Montana, who, in many cases, may respect people being trans. It doesn't necessarily say anything about how they feel about trans people, but the notion that public schools are introducing to, in many cases, first graders, second

• 1:15:01Mayim Bialik?

  graders, to storybooks about trans children, meaning it's being kind of part of the curriculum. And many parents are saying, this is something we would rather decide when our children learn about this, right? Rather than the school using it as curriculum. I don't want to live in a society where those people go to private school, and the only people left in public school are people who are like, yes, teach about trans kids in first grade. And honestly, I don't, I'm not weighing in on this, but I do understand that for some parents, that may be something they prefer to talk about in what they determine to be, let's say, an age-appropriate level, right? So where does this fall? Because these parents might be accused of falling in line with this sort of like biblically

• 1:15:46Mayim Bialik?

  based, you know, conservative. How do we stop from, you know, having such black and white distinctions between who's on which side, and who do we support?

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I can see two levels where it's important. One is, you know, so much for All of American history, basically, we have treated education as largely a local issue. And so that sense, you know, the federal government does fund a lot of things, but doesn't determine what the curriculum is. And we've, you know, we decided that people at the local level can set the standards for what they, how they want their schools to operate. And I think that's a, that remains a really good rule. There's just, the federal government isn't going to know as much about what's going on in the community as anybody in that community is.

• 1:16:23Mayim Bialik?

  I don't want them to.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Right. I also think that there's ways to, to structure the system so that people can opt out of things. If people are uncomfortable with something, that's one thing, but that doesn't mean that we need to, for example, you know, expose librarians to prosecution for, for putting these books on the shelves. You just need to give people an opportunity to have their children in, in the sort of, you know, to introduce their children to those things in the way they want. So many places, and I, I think this is true across the board, there's a sense that government needs to, to have a really heavy-handed approach. And sometimes the answer is, in fact, we don't need to have a whole lot of heavy-handed approach. We can let people make these decisions without the government being involved.

• 1:16:58Mayim Bialik?

  Are we becoming libertarians? Is that what just happened?

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that, you know, there's, there are places where libertarianism is really strong. I think we're, it's really effective, and I think education is a place that, that a more localist, I'd say, approach has been very effective.

• 1:17:15Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think, yeah, I think what's going on is really driving a lot of people out of traditional, you know, kind of buckets. Meaning, you know, a lot of people are saying, like, I don't identify with a lot of the super, super-left, you know, components of the Democratic, you know, party, and where do I fit? Am I now an independent? You know, I am hearing a lot more people leaning libertarian than I did before, you know, kind of from, from both ends of this spectrum. So it really feels like something is being, you know, shaken up.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think we're in a constitutional crisis?

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  I really resist the constitutional crisis label because I think people don't know what it means. Or I think it's like, it's, it's really an overwhelming thing to take, to, to understand. I, I also, someone made an interesting point to me, which is that the crisis frame favors executive action, and I think the problem here is too much power for the executive. When people are in a crisis, they want a strong leader to solve that problem. And here we have an issue of an executive leader who's taking too much power. But I think when you have conflicts between the White House and the, the courts, like we're seeing, it is really, it's really touchy. And I'm not sure if we're in a, we're at the, the point of breaking, but we seem to be edging closer to that.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  It feels like it's only a matter of time before we see the executive branch try to defy a judicial order. And if we get there, that's a really dangerous moment. But I don't know when and if we'll get there.

• 1:18:38Jonathan Cohen?

  When you say breaking, what do you mean?

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  You know, if the government, or the White House, rather, discovers that it can simply defy a judicial order, that it doesn't have to do something on one thing, I don't know what's to stop it from doing it on any number of things. And suddenly, you have, basically, an authoritarian government without any effective check on it. If you do that, then I worry about things like civil unrest. I worry about people getting violent in the streets because they no longer see another way to express themselves or another way to check power. And, you know, that's why the balance of powers has been so effective in keeping the US stable for so long, which is not to say, obviously, that, like, the US is flawless or that we have not had serious flaws in our government.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  But that overall balance has been very effective, and it would be a shame to throw that out.

• 1:19:25Jonathan Cohen?

  The irony is that in the foreword for Project 2025, it quotes Ronald Reagan's 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, "Freedom is a fragile thing, and it's never more than one generation away from extinction."

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  It's really poignant that they chose that quote. And their idea of freedom, I think, is very different from the one that a lot of Americans have. And I think people will be troubled by the vision of freedom that they try to lay out here.

• 1:19:53Mayim Bialik?

  It's less than a generation. It's potentially one term away.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:57Mayim Bialik?

  Not to be an alarmist. The book is The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. Highly recommend you have this as a resource. Unfortunately, you will need it probably a lot over the next several years. It's really, really helpful. So, David Graham, thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for breaking it down with us. We really appreciate it.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. I really enjoyed thinking through it with you.

• 1:20:20Jonathan Cohen?

  All right. Rapid fire. Mind be Alex, Project 2025.

• 1:20:31Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know.

• 1:20:33Jonathan Cohen?

  You haven't written the 900-page draft yet.

• 1:20:36Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I wanted to ask him about many things that I know he can't fix for me. But I think what really bothers me, one of the things that really bothers me is that during the campaigns for the elections, there were people who were like, "He's gonna do this thing." I even mentioned it to my ex-husband, who's studied political science and has an advanced degree in it. And I was like, "This is a thing." And, ex-husband aside, many people did not want to hear this. They didn't believe it. They said it was hysterical. They said it was paranoid. They said, "Oh, it's just like Kamala to bring this up. It's so hysterical." You know, it's women wringing their hands about something that's not gonna happen.

• 1:21:17Mayim Bialik?

  Like, we were told, how many people, this is the, like, if I could go back in time, if I could understand an alternate reality, I want to know how many people, if we had told you, "For reals, yo, this is what's happening," would they have said, "Oh, it's worth it to not vote for him?" Unfortunately, I think people couldn't even imagine that this would be a thing, that we'd be talking about biblically-based values. You know, like, the Bible has so, like, it's got so many values that you don't want, like, throwing rocks at people to kill them if they literally, you know, like, speak gossip. I mean, I'm just like, that's just synagogue this past week.

• 1:21:59Mayim Bialik?

  So, like, you can't just paint with this broad brush of, like, biblically-based values. It has no place in our government. It's not a thing. If you want to say, like, traditional, I'm sorry, like, the statistics for women in particular, not so great in many aspects historically. Many women were addicted to painkillers in the 1950s because it was incredibly depressing to be stationed in your home with a generation that had just experienced trauma, right? Like, the answer is not, "Keep women at home." Like, I promise. Every menopause expert we've ever had on here, when I have said to them, "Is it possible that for all of human history, women have just been miserable and no one cared?" The answer is, "Yes."

• 1:22:43Mayim Bialik?

  That was the reality, and it wasn't just because of their hormones. I promise. I blame trad wives. I blame social media with your sourdough starters and your custom goat cheese that you're squeezing through a cheesecloth while looking sexy in an apron. That's what I think is the problem.

• 1:23:02Jonathan Cohen?

  What I also think is the problem is that they are addressing things that have a basis as a real concern, but fixing the problem in a way that maybe has unintended consequences. And not even maybe. It does have unintended consequences. And...

• 1:23:18Mayim Bialik?

  Tariffs is a great example. Elon Musk is a great example. Things that someone thought was a great idea. And it's not working that way.

• 1:23:26Jonathan Cohen?

  When I was first introduced to the idea of America, I was told that there was a separation between church and state. What happened to that?

• 1:23:33Mayim Bialik?

  That was a fallacy. That's something that we're told that, in many cases, I think was protected. But this country was founded on Christian principles. You know, the notion of one nation under God, like, that is a thing.

• 1:23:52Jonathan Cohen?

  But it's always been whatever God you want, not ish?

• 1:23:56Mayim Bialik?

  Ish.

• 1:23:58Jonathan Cohen?

  And now we're just done with that? It's just only my God?

• 1:24:02Mayim Bialik?

  I think that whatever illusions we were under that you could have a different concept of God than the Christian God, yeah, I think that there's a lot less protection about that. It's like a little bit the gloves are off. And, yeah, it feels a little bit like, you know, we have a story that we told. But ultimately, the goal of this administration and the policies of this administration is to affirm that if you are Hindu, if you are Muslim, if you are Jewish, which I know gets a different kind of, you know, classification with a lot of the conversations. But like, yeah, the message that you get is that you're not like us.

• 1:24:52Mayim Bialik?

  In the name of a great American orator.

• 1:24:55Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm gonna mash up two different people from somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum. Ben Shapiro, Scott Galloway. Both of them agree that family values, having two parents in the home, children have higher levels of success, having male role models, especially for men, is extremely important, that boys, young boys are often physically stronger, but more emotionally weak than their female counterparts, and that not having a role model in the house tends to have poorer grades, higher addiction, more delinquency, more propensity towards crime. So, like, is that the only way that family should exist?

• 1:25:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Absolutely not. It's impossible to mandate that or legislate that, but can there be structures in place that encourage those people who that's their propensity on how they want to procreate to increase family values? Like, that doesn't sound crazy.

• 1:25:54Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I mean, the government can stop denigrating people of color and bringing drugs in and blaming them for selling them.

• 1:25:59Jonathan Cohen?

  That's a starting point. And I think addressing the quality of life and the hardship and being able to make a living, I think, of course, is a key component to that. How to do that is a point of great debate and a lot of discussion.

• 1:26:17Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah. And there's a lot of things in place, you know, already that are trying to shift that narrative. I mean, but yeah, I think that in many cases, people have been living in a state of ignorant bliss and believing, I'm not saying you, but many people have kind of believed that, you know, the country's operating a certain way, and I think this is really clear that, A, it hasn't been operating that way, and I think there is, there's a much more concerted effort to move it. You know, I think of my grandparents who fled Eastern Europe to come to this country, like, the only reason was because of the values that America...

• 1:27:00Mayim Bialik?

  You know, stood by, which was, you know, bring us your poor and huddled masses. Like, if you, um, if you are different, you are welcome here.

• 1:27:11Mayim Bialik?

  You know, I, I grew up in Los Angeles, right? I've talked about going to public school where everybody was different shapes, sizes, colors, and, you know, in many cases, economic backgrounds. Like, uh, that, to me, like, that was America. Whatever this, like, biblically-based thing is, I, it's just, I don't recognize it.

• 1:27:29Jonathan Cohen?

  I was watching a news program where they were doing sort of a man-on-the-street-interview style, and they were asking people, "How much do you think undocumented immigrants pay into social security?" And they were like, "Nothing, everyone says nothing." And it turned out to be over $900 billion, because they're paying into a system, but they're not able to collect from. And I don't really think we understand what will happen to our economy when you remove the number of people who are doing the jobs that help the economy stay afloat.

• 1:28:01Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, and, and one of the elements that I kind of see throughout the conversation around Project 2025, um, is there's, there's a level of punitiveness regarding these differences. Meaning, um, it's not just, "We don't like poor people," it's that you will be punished for being poor. It's not that we don't like trans people, it's beyond that. It's, "We will punish you," right, "for the things that you do to assert your identity." Even if, it wouldn't be the identity I would choose, right? Or that, you know, that they would choose.

• 1:28:39Mayim Bialik?

  There's this notion of, you know, as Americans, that we're, we're being punished, you know, for being on, quote, "the wrong side of this." So, you know, anyone I know who was raised without a dad would say, "Yeah, I understand why, you know, the, the statistics are in our favor to be raised with a dad for all these reasons, but if I don't have that situation, why should I be punished? Why should I be denigrated? Why should I be denied resources? Why should my mother..." Be denied the ability to raise us to the best of her ability if she's a single mom. So for me, there's like this like very, very mean punitive component to Project 2025 that does not feel like it is elevating Americans at all.

• 1:29:25Jonathan Cohen?

  Sometimes when we have these conversations, Miami, you turn to me and you say, "It's too much. Why are we talking about it? It feels hopeless." But the message that I would encourage people to take away from this episode is that it is important to know what's going on and to be aware. Don't be hyper vigilant about it. Checking your news feeds for some multiple times a day, for some even daily, can have an overwhelming impact. It can feel stressful. We can get into despair spirals. But while maintaining your physical health, your emotional health, your ability to regulate and to calm down and get the rest you need, it's important to know what's happening because as David said,

• 1:30:10Jonathan Cohen?

  public protest and public outrage does have an impact. And to know you are an active participant in the country and in the world that you want to create. Having awareness about what's happening is a step towards that. And we're all players here in this. Take seriously what people say because it's not hyperbole. The likelihood is they aren't joking. Believe people when they tell you who they are.

• 1:30:38Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, well said. And beyond that, all people who love America should want a balance between the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branches, period. Those three things were established for a reason. None is supposed to be able to overpower any of the others. There's a system of checks and balances. It's what distinguished this country from the monarchy that we were rebelling against when we fought in a bloody war to gain our independence from a country that was trying to control us.

• 1:31:15Mayim Bialik?

  And tell us how much we should be taxing people, how much revenue that country should be gaining from us, right? We were trying to assert for ourselves rights so that we could be a land of the free and a home of the brave. Yes, this country was also built on oppression and suffering and tremendous injustice that continues to this day. And we have material here of a country that still doesn't have to give up. We don't have to give up. We don't have to throw in the towel. And for me, this conversation should not be about which president you would like next, who you voted for, who you didn't vote for, what you believe in should happen with Elon Musk or shouldn't. This is about the principles of this country

• 1:32:00Mayim Bialik?

  that we should all value. And the executive branch cannot and should not have a disproportionate amount of power. It makes us threatened and threatening to have an authoritarian government.

• 1:32:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Maybe when you guys invade Canada, you'll figure out the parliamentary system, and that will help you guys balance your government.

• 1:32:23Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.

• 1:32:29Speaker 07

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