BONUS: One month of DOGE shit

Ryan and Grant discuss what we've seen one month into the second Trump Administration, and what it means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What was your favorite part of Musk's press conference with his son at the White House where his son told Trump to hush and then wiped his booger on the desk? Did you, what, what, did you like the booger or telling Trump to hush?

• 0:15Ryan Broderick?

  I enjoyed my extremely complicated feelings of, you know, I think Trump is a despicable person. And I felt really sad because I thought I was watching elder abuse. And I felt a really weird feeling of like pity. And also like, yeah, you deserve this. But it still made me profoundly uncomfortable. The entire, the entire thing made me feel very strange. That's my fun answer.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Wow. Nothing is fun.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  I'm Grant Irving, producer of the show. Joining me today, Elon Musk's biggest fan, longtime supporter of elder abuse, host of the show, Ryan Broderick. Welcome to your podcast.

• 1:05Ryan Broderick?

  Hello. Thank you for having me on my show. Uh, our listeners should actually pause right now and type penile implant into X.com, the everything app to find out more about the latest. Uh, I mean, I guess everything on the site is fact checked. I didn't see a community note. So it seems like Elon Musk is suffering from a botched penile implant. It must be true. So.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Still feels bleak. So Trump two has been happening for roughly a month. We decided that rather than record an emergency podcast twice a day, when awful things seem to be happening or supposedly happening, we'd hold off and reflect on the hysteria once some time has passed. And that time feels now. So, but, but before we dive in, how's your spirit?

• 1:53Ryan Broderick?

  I've done some semblance of a job as a reporter for my entire adult life and around, I think it was like during COVID, I was like, I have to have a personality that is not watching the news, which I would recommend to all Americans. It's a unique American pathology that I have not seen in other countries. Obviously, that includes a bit of privilege. But I think if you do not have to look at the news for a job, you shouldn't. I wish there was like a thing where like you could get all the news updates you needed like once an evening, like before dinner, like in an easy format.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  You mean the nightly news? Like, like, like what we used to have?

• 2:30Ryan Broderick?

  Or like, or like in your car in the morning? Yeah, I wish there was just like a, or like you could pick up like, I don't know, like

• 2:37Speaker 00

  condensed material.

• 2:39Ryan Broderick?

  Like a, like a small book, like a small thin book for a couple, a couple cents, a couple quarters. And in the morning, you could read all the news and then you wouldn't read the news for the rest of the day. And then maybe if you wanted, you could read another small book containing the world's news at night. I feel like that's probably a healthier way to live. But, you know, I'm just spitballing.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Maybe in a beautiful future, we'll get there. So it feels like Elon Musk is president. Is that what you expected? Does it feel better or worse than if Trump was, if we were really in Trump 2? How's your reflection?

• 3:13Ryan Broderick?

  People are acting like he's president, which is bad to me because he's not. There was a court filing like released by the Trump administration this week, the week that we're recording this, February 18th, saying that he has no legal authority. He's not even a member of the administration. There's not like he, he isn't anything. And obviously he's like doing things, right? Like he's saying that he's doing things and people are listening to him. And that's what depresses me more than him doing it. Like, we're all just sort of going along with this and it is making me feel genuinely crazy. Because Doge is effectively like a bunch of contractors working for the government's IT department. And everyone is just sort of being like, well, I guess they're saying that like, it's

• 3:57Ryan Broderick?

  literally like, there's nothing in the rules that say a dog can't play basketball, but it's like with our social security numbers. Like, it's a crazy thing.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Let's do what we do on the show, where we'll go through, we'll go through some major benchmarks.

• 4:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Doge and Elon are the noisiest thing, but then there's the much more insidious broad things that are happening. And we'll, we'll get there, everything non Elon eventually, but let's, let's go through the, let's go through the hysteria here where you are just constantly trying to like blow a whistle being like, this isn't real or shouldn't be real. But if we treat it as real, then it's true.

• 4:33Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  You said what Doge is, but can you, do you want to just give the definition and the?

• 4:37Ryan Broderick?

  The Department of Government Efficiency is legally classified as a temporary organization inside of the US Digital Service. They are contractors, they are not federal employees, they are becoming federal employees, which is dangerous. Well, I mean, as of this morning, it once again, like I was reading a thing where like they are genuinely now beginning to appoint people because the true dangerous person here is Russell Vought.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:01Ryan Broderick?

  Someone we've talked about on the show before, he is a genuine, he was like the genuine mastermind at the center of all this. I think, I think Musk is a clown and like is not particularly like Musk is, okay, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but like Doge itself as an organization is, is to me, not the scariest thing here. And I do think it is sort of like working as a bit of a sin eater inside of the organization where all of the attention is going there, all of the ire is going there. And it is allowing much more insidious actors to carry out like long-term catastrophic changes to the way America functions.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  And if that part sounds fun, that teaser, you're going to have to give us $5, your last $5 before we all end up in camps. It's like seven people, it's like seven, yeah, it's like, it's a bunch of teens and flunk and like 20 year olds.

• 5:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the whole thing is kind of being like operated day to day as we understand it by Amanda Scales, who is a, she was installed in the Office of Personnel Management. She used to work at XAI, which is Elon Musk's like company that makes Croc. There's a bunch of teenagers like big balls, I forget his full name, the 19 year old former camp counselor. But it's not all teenagers, but there are, there are a lot of young kind of edge lords in there. So it's a real who's who of guys you would bump into at a crypto convention, essentially.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Think back to what now feels like a million years ago, when you received a tip, a tip from the CDC.

• 6:32Ryan Broderick?

  That was a very confusing day, so. And and once again, like, there are a bunch of outlets doing really good work trying to untangle like exactly who's doing what, which I think is the real question here. Like, who is asking for what to happen and who is, how involved is Musk? How involved is Doge? We received a tip via Signal. You can message me on Signal at ryanbroderick69420. If you want to send me an anonymous or confidential tip, happy to keep you on private or off the record. So we received a tip.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  We're so fucked when government officials are reaching out to somebody with 69420, and they're like, you're the, you're the source we need.

• 7:14Ryan Broderick?

  We've been receiving pretty regular tips. Some of them are hard to chase down, but this one, basically, we were told by someone working with the CDC that the entire website was going to be taken offline. And as I started to talk to them more and talk to others within the like, the US healthcare system, what we eventually figured out was that it was during the DEI purge. So a couple of weeks ago on a Friday, every single government website was told to remove any reference to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, or risk having their entire site shut off at 5:00 PM on that Friday. And so we ran

• 7:58Ryan Broderick?

  with it. Turned out that like, yes, the CDC was removing stuff from their sites, as was every other federal website. And for that weekend, most of the digital infrastructure of the country was being, you know, taken down, changed, altered, which caused a lot of hysteria and a lot of confusion. And it's like, very, it's a very smart ploy by Elon Musk. Let's assume this was all him. It's a very smart ploy, because in 2025, if you remove a website, most people assume you've removed the department. When in reality...

• 8:36Ryan Broderick?

  From what I've read, most of what Elon Musk's team is doing is like moving columns around on a spreadsheet and claiming that it's actually doing something. Now, obviously, USAID would be like the big exception here where it was genuinely paused and it is causing like incredible amounts of catastrophe around the world for US, you know, workers. But for the most part, what Doge seems to be doing is superficially altering government websites, like digital documentation and hooking up like deeply insecure servers to previously secure government databases and doing god knows what with them. But for the

• 9:21Ryan Broderick?

  most part, it is seeming to be very superficial. In fact, like even the buyouts they offered to federal employees don't seem to even be real. Like the people who tried to take them, like couldn't take them. I was talking to a federal worker about this where there was just mass confusion because they don't really have the jurisdiction to do anything. So most of it is extremely superficial and obviously working very well on social media because that's, in my opinion, what its actual goal is, is to sort of cause chaos.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Here's an example of the general tone of the chaos, if any of our listeners are smart enough to now not be on Blue Sky or anywhere else. This is from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. "I'm telling you, I'm trying, dear friends. I'm struggling here not to engage in hyperbole, but I don't know what else to call these people besides political commissars. And again, they report to Elon Musk. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the US government. We're in a dystopian quasi-science fiction territory here."

• 10:28Ryan Broderick?

  This is the nuanced thing that I've struggled to communicate on various podcasts and social platforms recently, which is that like, they don't have any real legal authority, but when you give it to them, they can use that. And like, even if what they're doing is extremely superficial and chaotic, it doesn't mean it will stop there. Let's call it what it is. Like, let's, let's call this a coup. Let's call this like a constitutional coup, for now, constitutional. In a coup situation, time is, is really all that matters. You're, you're, the clock starts ticking. But the, but another sort of important piece

• 11:07Ryan Broderick?

  of this is like correctly identifying the level of damage and reacting proportionally. Because they're trying to use some sort of law to enact it. You have to kind of keep the hysteria to like a reasonable level, just so that you can react appropriately and, and intelligently. We're not at the point where like we saw in South Korea where like politicians have to like break down doors and jump over fences to get in to like vote. But like, we will get there. Don't worry. We will get there. But for now, like, we do have other mechanisms in place to stop this. Like, a lot of federal judges are like blocking a lot of the executive orders, or like telling Doge they can't do stuff. Like,

• 11:48Ryan Broderick?

  we are still in the we have laws moment. Where I think a lot of people in Blue Sky are fantasizing about the moment we don't. But like, for right now, we do. And

• 11:57Speaker 00

  I found this secret desire in me for a deep state to be real. You've described this as waiting for the adults to step in. A part of my brain believes at some line, Obama and Bush, like triumph, like

• 12:15Ryan Broderick?

  All the old presidents come back and like

• 12:17Speaker 00

  We'll step, we'll step in with, with, with like, with tanks. And like, we're, we're back at neocon. Like, we're just invading Middle Eastern countries and like, running relatively sustainably. Like, that's, that's

• 12:31Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, do you think that George W. Bush managed the Middle East in a good way? Is that what you're, is that what you're saying? Do you want him?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  No, I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying, we will just go back to where like, America felt normal and we were doing atrocities.

• 12:44Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Well, I'm going to ignore you wanting war crimes internationally to feel comfortable at home. I, I too am a Green Day fan, but like, you know, it's a

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to go back to the American idiot level of panic.

• 12:58Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I want to focus. I want to focus on the desire to go back. Because I do think the most important thing we can say in this episode before we go to the paywall at some point is that you can't. There is no going back. There's never been a moment of going back. There's all those like viral images of like women in Iran having a Coca-Cola in 1970, whatever, before the Islamic Revolution sent them back to the Stone Age. And it's like, it didn't actually do that. It created a new government. There will never be a moment, and I'm going to say this as clearly as possible for everyone listening. There will never be a moment in America again where politics felt like they once did.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Counterpoint. I've attended Market Hotel's indie sleaze party. Which, which brings me back to my policy. You know, it was three times more expensive than, than partying when I was 19.

• 13:50Ryan Broderick?

  Because you've walked right into my trap.

• 13:53Ryan Broderick?

  Indie sleaze is not an American term.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  No, no, it's not real. I'm aware, I'm aware that it's a rebrand, but it's still.

• 14:00Ryan Broderick?

  Need the jump on TikTok. I heard it for the first time ever. I was, I was there, man. I was there. Uh, wait.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  I was there, yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Are you doing math? Is that what's happening in this pause?

• 14:13Ryan Broderick?

  I was there in 1968. I was there at the first Cannes show in Cologne. I'm losing my edge. I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks. I'm losing my edge to the internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978. I'm losing my edge. Look. The thing that you remember will never come back. There will never be a not-internet politics. There will never be a quote-unquote "normal politician" again. The biggest problem with the politics in America during the Biden era was this feeling like we could. We could go back to like normalcy of like neoliberalism and look where it got us. Like, you can't go back.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  To your point about like you're having trouble with the nuance because it's like if you freak out as if. The constitution doesn't exist now, then you're in a world where you've let them get that far. But also, if you're like, "The judges are gonna knock all this down. This is just bullshit." You're also not taking the problem seriously. I think that is the most insidious and kind of brilliant horrible thing that's happening, where to anyone who is not paying attention to this all this time, all the time, there's no way to talk about this without sounding hysterical. There's no way to talk about what is happening without sounding like either a hall monitor, or like you're like talking about like gobbledegook.

• 15:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And like, that's not, that's not abnormal. I've talked to older people who lived through dictatorships before and after. I've read about them as well. It's not, it's not abnormal to have that sort of frustration of just like, "I sound insane if I care, and if I don't care, it could just happen." It's like a feeling of like, of like helplessness. And, you know, you feel gaslit on this level that like, I mean, the term for it, and I try very hard not to reference this guy in everything I do about this subject, but it's just really hard because he's, he was really ahead of the game.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Morrissey.

• 16:23Ryan Broderick?

  Morrissey. I'm talking about Morrissey, my favorite far-right UK influencer. The term you're talking about is hyper-normalization, which is the name of a documentary by Adam Curtis that every person should watch right now. It's three hours long and it will horrify you. But it was coined by Alexei Yurchak, an anthropology professor who was born in Leningrad. Okay, here's a good quote for it. "We thought, we thought it was difficult in normal times, but then the hyper-normal came, and not only were things difficult, we could see that there was no end of the difficulty and no ability for us to change our lot." And it's this feeling described in another quote, "We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying."

• 17:08Ryan Broderick?

  That is the feeling that you're having right now, which is that everyone involved knows that there's a lie playing out on a societal level.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  The most recent example is that like Doge has.

• 17:20Ryan Broderick?

  Doge in general, the concept of Doge is hyper normal. We all know that this, they have an AI generated logo of like a Shiba Inu, named after an internet meme, run by a guy who is like,

• 17:34Ryan Broderick?

  not a government employee in any capacity. This is hyper normal and the longer you're in it, the more dangerous it becomes because you start to lose the contours of normal, like you're living in a prism that doesn't make any sense. And the first Trump administration, looking back, was like fairly standard. There's a game I like to play with people where I'm like, name one thing Trump did in 2016, 2020.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  The only thing you can say is like, the only thing he passed was like the whatever this shitty.

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  He did some tax stuff. He pushed through some executive orders that were pretty much undone immediately after he left office. And he helped install a bunch of Trumpist judges. But for the most part, he was.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, my, my, my bad. Abortion doesn't exist because of him.

• 18:18Ryan Broderick?

  That's not true. I thought that was Biden.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Well, but it was his Supreme Court.

• 18:21Ryan Broderick?

  He basically, he pushed through a bunch of judges on the federal and Supreme Court level. And yes, obviously he stacked the deck for himself. But which are, and I'm not dismissing that, those are big things, but he was a fairly standard in ineffectual president. This time around, he, he has created an ecosystem and he has aligned himself with people who are very, very good. And I'm not talking about Musk. I'm talking about the Project 2025 people. And they have created a world where with the help of Musk, you cannot tell what is real, what is not real, what is worth caring about, what is not worth caring about, what can you do? What, what can't you do? Like we are just in a total breakdown of shared understanding. And, and it is going to get worse.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  I want to talk about all of that for the real ones on the other end, but I do, I want to. I think one real thing that, that Doge is doing, this comes from your favorite guest we've ever had on the show.

• 19:19Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, can I tell you who my favorite guest is?

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:23Ryan Broderick?

  Not PJ, that's for sure. Wait, did he, wait, are we talking about PJ? No, wait.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  We're, we're talking about.

• 19:29Ryan Broderick?

  Charlie, I don't like him either. Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:32Ryan Broderick?

  I don't like any of our male guests.

• 19:35Ryan Broderick?

  I don't, I don't, I don't like them. I think they, I think they're aggressive and I think they ruin the vibe of the show.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  You, you need to get off AI therapy and get a real therapist.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  That's something for you to explore.

• 19:46Ryan Broderick?

  I find male guests threatening and they make me nervous.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Charlie, along with Ian Bagost, I'm, I'm sorry Ian for pronouncing your last name wrong. I'm sure. They talked to IT contractors and workers for the government as, as like during the Doge takeover. They anonymously said, one of them said, you can't unring the spell. Once these those guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want. So either through intent or carelessness, one of these guys described that, uh, like they could just like fuck up the code of something and like parts of government could stop functioning. And I do think that that is a real thing. They might not be real, but once they have access, real consequences can happen that I think we cannot

• 20:35Speaker 00

  really imagine in a, like a serious way.

• 20:38Ryan Broderick?

  I a hundred percent agree. And the damage they've done already is so extensive that it will take years to, to fix, if it's even possible.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Can you give an example of that?

• 20:48Ryan Broderick?

  USAID would be the biggest one, which is like not a total Doge move. USAID was like, sort of like, maybe this is useful. Like the three prongs of, of the Trump regime right now are Stephen Miller and immigration, Russell Vought and the Project 2025 people and the Office of Management and Budget and Doge. So, uh, Stephen Miller and immigration, that's all the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp stuff, the ICE raids. And that's his, that's been his pet project for a decade. Like he is just an absolute demagogue maniac who looks like Kiff from Futurama. And, uh, Russell Vought and OMB, I mean, they wrote it down in Project 2025. They're very clear about what they want to do. They, they want to handicap congressional spending by effectively turning this like.

• 21:34Ryan Broderick?

  It's not obscure in the sense that like it's unimportant. It's like kind of obscure in the sense that I feel like the average person doesn't really know about the Office of Management and Budget. But it's it's the biggest department within the executive branch. And it can basically determine like all spending around federal agencies, information technology and stuff. And then we have the Office of Personnel Management, which is effectively the HR department. So they're targeting how the government spends money and how the government hires and fires people. And they're doing that, if you follow what Project 2025 laid out, they're doing that to handicap the government entirely. Like Russ Vought has like this deranged PowerPoint I was watching the other day where he just

• 22:17Ryan Broderick?

  talks about like what we're gonna do is, he said he wanted to traumatize civil servants and give them like severe PTSD from how like aggressive they are about harassing them and making their lives miserable. Take that with a grain of salt, but like that's what that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to, they're trying to guck up the works and then in the process, use that as cover to do longer term grift and and and spread and like encode hate into our laws and and repeal like protections for vulnerable populations and but that's what they're doing.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  When you say it's gonna take years to undo, when Biden is president again.

• 22:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's right. When Obama and Biden and Clinton all come together and create a triumvirate, which worked very well for late stage Rome. So it'll be good when we have that.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  When they morph all together and take the substance and it just becomes Hillary Clinton. Like what you're saying is undoing all the ways that things are mucked up, getting like the systems working again, getting the staff back in the right places or just back in general, that would take years of work.

• 23:27Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. The FAA stuff, I just saw, I just saw a plane do a barrel roll. I haven't seen, should I not fly?

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Should we stop flying? So I'm supposed to go see my mom.

• 23:37Ryan Broderick?

  I have a personal angle on this one because I I am the son of two flight attendants. My mom is still one to this day.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  It makes complete sense that that's where you come from. Keep going.

• 23:46Ryan Broderick?

  Like I grew up with very vivid memories all the way up until 9/11, like watching planes explode and my mom being like, I think I know people on that plane. Then it stopped. We effectively got rid of plane crashes almost entirely. Now, obviously, there are huge international like incidents where like, you know, like, like the Malaysia Airlines flights and stuff like that. But those are, those were so rare considering the amount of planes in the air. And in the last like month or two, we're averaging like a high profile plane crash like once a week at this point. And that is not something that you can just like easily fix. Like, let's say, let's say, like, every single Republican vanishes. They get, they get blipped tomorrow, and we have a perfect neoliberal society once again. You

• 24:31Ryan Broderick?

  can't just like rehire a bunch of people for the FAA. Like, it doesn't really work that way. Everything we're dealing with right now, for the most part, will be in our lives in some capacity for like, the majority of my life. Now, I'm

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is just not, which is just not going to be long, knowing your health history and also the state of the world.

• 24:48Ryan Broderick?

  What's the word about my health history? I have perfect health. I have very high blood pressure, but other than that, I have perfect health. I have, I have like stroke level blood pressure, apparently. But I, other than that, I'm great.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  I can't imagine why. Ryan's doctors and I talk weekly, you know, I purchased Ryan's hole. That's, that's where this is coming from.

• 25:05Ryan Broderick?

  You are producing my entire life. That's right.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Your colonoscopy, by the way, has been rescheduled to next week.

• 25:10Ryan Broderick?

  I had one of the, I had one of those once, actually, because I, I hurt my tailbone. But the, the hospital I went to was right next to a Taco Bell, and I was a kid. And so I ate a bunch of Taco Bell, and then I had to have the inside of my rectum looked at because I had bruised my tailbone falling out of a chair in school. And the, the

• 25:30Speaker 00

  That's the live moss lifestyle if I've ever heard it.

• 25:34Ryan Broderick?

  The, the interaction between Taco Bell and the lubricant used by the doctor to check the inside of my butt, had an incredible reaction. Just like, honestly, a lot like that plane, just barreling down that tarmac, just fire and, and blood and destruction, once it was all done.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  You're welcome, listeners.

• 25:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  The thing I think I was counting on, and maybe it's still too early, even though this past month has felt like a fucking year. I thought that Trump was annoyed with Elon like before he even got in office. I thought he was tired of him being around. I thought that JD Vance would have been trying to stab him in the back by now. What I really remember about Trump one was they were knife fighting at every corner vying for like who was in charge and like what was the the aim? And um, is that just because we've elder abuse Trump in where like he just doesn't have the wherewithal to like to care that he's getting outshined? I thought it would bother him most that somebody is getting more attention than him, but he's just seems like sleepy Biden.

• 26:41Ryan Broderick?

  A lot of people, myself included, kind of thought that that would happen. Um, Trump World 1.0 was a reality show. I think it might be due to age. I think it also might be due to desperation. You know, I think Trump really internalized not only being shot at, but also just like the possibility that he could have died in jail. I also think he straight up doesn't care. Like I just, I actually think he doesn't give a shit. Because this is one of those sliding door moments that I'm fascinated with relitigating in my head over and over again, where Trump is banned effectively from social media in 2021. He eventually starts to come back, but by that point, he was like, I'm gonna just stay on my own platform, Truth Social.

• 27:26Ryan Broderick?

  And I remember like people kind of making fun of him being like, he has no relevance. But I do think he learned something very valuable at that moment. It was, it's almost like we cut the cord on him and forced him to evolve. It's not super dissimilar from like going from an ad based uh, income stream to a subscription based income stream. Like he sort of learned how to like find his, his, what is it? Like your total thousand you need? Like I, I think we, we, we sort of inadvertently forced him to evolve faster than the rest of us. And it's one of those quirks of history where like, he could have chosen like a different path and actually like bet wrong on history, but unfortunately, he, he kind of evolved in the direction everyone else was moving in.

• 28:10Ryan Broderick?

  And he is now much more focused and direct. And it drives me crazy because like I was one of the people advocating for like, get him the fuck off social media. He like, people are gonna die. People did die. And unfortunately, he like, he evolved in the exact direction we all evolved in.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Let me see if I'm getting this right. He's getting what he emotionally needs from his truth accounts. And so he's abated. He's like more interested in that, even if like Fox and friends are talking about what Elon is doing instead of him. Like he's getting, he's getting that emotional need felt. I want to add to this. I think it's also like, he wanted to win. He wanted to be a winner. Once you're a lame dunk duck in your second term, like he never cared about like,

• 28:55Speaker 00

  activating anything. He just wanted to do good enough in the first term to win a second term. Like there's no, there's

• 29:01Ryan Broderick?

  Or a third. Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  But there's no incentive now. For like, for like, for like, there's, there's no more he can reach. Must feel very empty.

• 29:12Ryan Broderick?

  I would hesitate on trying to like, pin down where his ego lands, only just because like, we can't know, really like, I mean, I've, I've definitely read behind the scenes stuff about how he supposedly thinks and feels, but I would say the difference is that he is in some way feeling, I think what we all feel, which is that the TV doesn't really matter. And, and his obsession with traditional forms of entertainment and celebrity have clearly changed. The Trump of 2016 would not be on Aiden Ross's kick stream.

• 29:53Ryan Broderick?

  He would not be talking, he would not be talking to Theo Von on a podcast. He would be like calling like Barney Frank, like a fat nipple freak on The View. Like he would be, he would be like in a beef with like Lorne Michaels or something like he, 10 years ago, he was much more interested in a world of celebrity that he grew up being obsessed with. I mean, this is the guy who, who would go on late night and have Letterman make fun of him just so he could get attention. And over the last 10 years, and I think especially in the last five years, he has embraced a much, much different celebrity ecosystem.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  You think he understands that because we took the Twitter away from him?

• 30:33Ryan Broderick?

  I think we forced him to learn. You know, in the big book about Hitler I'm reading, there's all these moments where this like weird thing happens that puts them down the path or keeps them on the path. And if this thing had gone slightly differently in some way, you know, like if that bullet had been like a centimeter closer, or like if he hadn't lost his Twitter account in 2021, like you can ask all these questions. And we definitely, we shaped him into something much more effective for the moment we ended up finding ourselves in now. And we couldn't have known in 2021 that that was the last days of Twitter as a concept, but also just like the last days of like

• 31:14Ryan Broderick?

  the platform hegemony of the 2010s, the sort of Gangnam Style, Ellen Show moment. Like, it was all ending and we, and no one really sort of, I think, clocked how dramatic that end was going to be three or four years later. Okay, I've been watching a lot of House lately and he likes to use metaphors, right? So it was like the city was burning down and we didn't notice and we put him into the woods first. We like kicked him out of the, into the woods, not realizing the city was burning down behind us and we would all eventually be out there too.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  And on that note, we're gonna wander into the woods and we're going to look into what parts Ryan is actually most worried about a month into this fucking monstrosity.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Honest to God, I think the only thing that could make me feel better is you guys giving us $5, which you can do it.

• 32:05Ryan Broderick?

  Give me $5.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Patreon.com backslash Panic World.

• 32:10Ryan Broderick?

  Also, if you, if you unsubscribe from Garbage Day and you then subscribe to Panic World, you don't have to.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  I love you. I love you if you do that.

• 32:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, sure, but you don't have to email me about it. Like it's at a certain point, it becomes hurtful. So you don't have to email me about it.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Look, look, Ryan supposedly is doing a much better job of having his mental state be intact despite the state of the world than I am. And honestly, the only thing that makes me feel good is when I see our numbers go up and I see that people give us $5.

• 32:42Ryan Broderick?

  Number go up.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Patreon.com backslash panic world, $5 month. More stuff there.

• 32:49Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our deranged logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at Patreon dot com slash panic world. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude at multitude dot production slash ads. For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bad man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you, chill out, touch grass while you still can.