Michael Weiss: The Vice President Is Looking Pretty Stupid

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The amount of sugar and cheese is minus action. Hello and welcome to the board podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We got a double header for you today in segment two. Maybe the dreamiest congressional candidate will be joining us. So stick around for that, particularly if you're on the video podcast.

But first, slightly less dreamy but I've been charming in his own way.

He's on Substack of the Foreign Office. He's the author of ISIS. Inside the Army of Terror. He's an editor at the Insider.

“A Russia-focused independent media outlet. It's Michael Weiss. How you doing, Hansel?”

Slightly less dreamy, Michael Weiss. That's got to go on a business card. Slightly less dreamy. I mean, I'm doing you see, I'm staying forced forstack. My stars. Now he's running in Montana. Oh my goodness. It's more for your wife anyway. How many shallomays does he get in the Tim Miller scale of dreaminess?

He's not even on the show. He's not even on the show. He's not even on the show. Yeah, that's not my, not your cup of tea. Yeah, not my model, exactly. But just like objectively speaking, you know, this is a man. Like shallomays, you know, kind of a wee lad. My wife was walking behind him in Central Park and just got jealous.

His legs, she said, are basically the size of two things.

All right. Michael, don't get me excited this early in the morning.

“What did they say? The camera adds like a hundred points of testosterone.”

Yeah. I mean. Okay. I'm getting for clamping up testosterone hot and bother. Yes. Yeah, lack of lack of testosterone. Trump has got what you set up the sub stack. It looks like the deal that is emerging.

I know you is quite some more even worse than something that Trump called the worst and dumbest deals ever made being the JCPOA. Might you just talk about what you know at this point. We haven't actually seen the text of the deal which I was telling you that's own right. The White House put out a talking points paper.

I really enjoyed the first sentence of the talking point, which is this is great for the American people who are concerned about

being new to by the Iranians. So this is great for the American family actually. Family. Yeah. If you are a family in St. Charles, Missouri and you were worried that the Iranians might put a nuclear warhead onto a ballistic missile and fire it at your farmstead, then you can just sleep easy tonight. So that's point one. It's us as they're going to feel relief at the pump and at the grocery store. I'm not sure why the grocery store factors into Iran and the settlement of the war, but yeah.

I mean, so we don't know heck of a whole lot because as you say, the U.S. has refused to release the MOU. J.D. Vance has described it as about a page and a half. So let's just back up a second and underscore. This thing is not a peace agreement. This isn't any kind of treaty or some kind of lasting term sheet. This is basically an agreement to extend the ceasefire for another 60 days and to spend those 60 days trying to get to something more substantive and permanent, including on the nuclear issue and

including on presumably, you know, war in Lebanon, a whole sort of basket of interrelated things.

“What do we know about this thing based on what J.D. Vance and Jared Kushner told reporters on a background call yesterday?”

I wasn't on the call, so I'm not bound by any background covenant here. I just had a transcript of it leaked and I could just tell you what J.D. and what Jared said. Now it's interesting with Jared was on the call. Yeah. Because he has, does he have a job?

What does his job? Well, I mean, he's like plenty potentiary of the president for multiple portfolios. I mean, he's doing Ukraine stuff. He's doing leverage by-outs with the Saudis. I mean, he's up to his eyeballs in the geopolitical diplomacy and it sounds like big business. And that's probably one of the reasons why he's selling this story.

Yeah, sure. That's a news story that somebody that doesn't work for the government who doesn't have a security clearance is briefing the press on background without their name. Not only that, but that's actually a bigger news story than this bullshit spin that he's offering on background. That's just one guy's opinion. And the attribution that they're demanding of the press is that describe Kushner as a senior administration official.

What administration? Trump English.

Which makes him sound like he's on the National Security Council or something like that.

“But, you know, I would say there are three main points.”

I mean, without going into sort of the weeds of what was discussed, there are three points that come out here of this very clearly. Number one, the US is ratifying or confirming Iran's control of the straight of foremost, because what they're saying in this MOU or how they're describing contents of the MOU, the straight will be opened by Iran for the next 60 days free of charge. So the Iranians say we're not charging tolls.

We're charging environmental fees or some kind of administrative tax or surcharge. Or whatever the US says, no, no, you mustn't do that.

But what they're basically saying is, yes, we acknowledge that you are Iran,

which did not control the straight of foremost as of February, whatever the day before the war started. You now control it. And one of the things we have to litigate is who's going to control it in perpetuity. Maybe it's some kind of control. You get the deals on Sequa.

Correct. You know, make sure that we's, right? Well, this is what you're doing. The rare fish. Yeah.

So that's point one. Point two, the ceasefire also applies to Lebanon. Why is this important? Well, for two reasons. Number one, you will recall way back in the long, long ago,

one of the operational objectives of Epic Fury, as the war we know, was to eliminate Iran. It's why it is to think about that. It's called Epic, but it's called Epic. It's a great name, I mean. So yeah, it's like, you know, if you like type into Claude,

hey, Claude, give my 12 year old gamer kid the name for a cool military campaign. Claude would be too embarrassed to say Operation Epic Fury. But here we are. So one of the operational objectives was Iran must end its patronage, financing, arming of terrorist proxies, including Lebanese's Bala.

This agreement or this MOU basically abends that operational objective

by certifying that Iran continues to control Lebanese's Bala by interlinking the war in Lebanon with the war in Iraq, right? And you had Donald Trump today at the G7, get up and say, he's quite tired of seeing how the Israelis go to war with his Bala. They level entire apartment blocks.

“I think he made a comment like we'd rather see the Syrians.”

Upman Alshara would be better fighting his Bala in Lebanon than the Israelis. So this is a complete reversal of one of the core objectives of this war, right? Number three, JD Vance and Kushner kind of going around saying, oh, there's no money up front. There's no money up front bullshit. Arm the call, Jared Kushner said that there will be,

"small gestures made toward the Iranians for performance-based behavior." So in other words, if the Iranians make good on opening up the straight, they get money. They get money anyway. Why?

Because the naval blockade we imposed is costing them hundreds of millions of dollars per day by restricting their ability to export oil. So the minute we start rescinding our naval blockade and consequently they start exporting more oil, they're going to make money. And in a matter of a month, it's going to be in the billions of dollars, right?

Then you had this kind of back and forth, last Friday, the mayor news agency, which is ultra conservative faction of the Iranian regime controlled state media outlet, put out their version of 14 points at this MOU. JD Vance took to Twitter and said, you know, I'm a little disappointed seeing people who are otherwise very skeptical of Iranian propaganda,

a fall for Iranian propaganda. One of the big items in this memo, and I remember talking about it on

morning Joe, with Scarborough, was a $300 billion reconstruction package for Iran,

$300 billion. Everyone went nuts. JD Vance took sprinkling cold water on it saying, don't believe the hype don't believe the propaganda.

“He's asked by CBS yesterday, what about this $300 billion?”

Well, that's something that could be part of the deal assuming they behave correctly. Well, hang on. I thought it was fake news. Now it's real. Now the FTE publishes a more elaborate explanation saying, well,

that's not going to be a government run reconstruction fund. It'll be private enterprise. So here's where you get Jared, and the Whitcloth family into some real conversation. It's nicely of us to the senior administration official. Yeah, also has a real estate.

Jared said. Jared said on the call that one of the goals would be to assuming Iran behaves properly. And, you know, JD thinks it's, quote, cool that he now thinks the IRGC has seen the error of its ways after 47 years. Yeah, we're going to come back to JJ.

But okay, so Jared said one of the, the, the end goals of this whole thing would be to quote, corral international investment in Iran. What does this sound like to you? I'll tell you what it sounds like to me. In 2016, after the JCPOA, the Barack Obama designed arms control agreement with Iran to limit

but not eliminate the nuclear program. After that was signed ratified. John Kerry went on what was known as a roadshow. He traveled to London. He met with European bankers. And it was quite awkward even for members of the Obama administration because Kerry was going

around saying, hey, everything's cool.

Come on in, the water's fine. You can invest in Iran.

And by the way, we won't even enforce the remaining sanctions we have on the regime. So, Kushner is the new Kerry. Now, if you're a neocon, if you're, you know, an Israeli hawk, if you're an American pro Israel hawk and you're seeing everything I've just described to you, danger will robinson danger.

You know, Donald Trump was meant to be the guy. He called the JCPOA, one of the worst agreements he ever saw.

“And basically, whether or not he realizes it because I think he is just basically”

farm this out to his, you know, squad of fact totems, including his vice president and son-in-law. Whether he realizes it or not. Right now, he is sleepwalking into something that would be, I think, materially worse than the JCPOA because not just, it's not just about a

nuclear, you know, arms control agreement. This is about normalization with Iran. Bring Iran back into the international community. And potentially creating windfalls of cash for the Iranian regime. Not just from the Gulf Arab countries, but European nations, Asia, you name it.

And yes, members of his own family probably looking to capitalize on this. Because everything is about them and self enrichment. My only quibble with that assessment is I don't think they're sleepwalking into it. I think their eyes very wide open, walking head, head long and easy to do. Except that I would say that Trump is also very sensitive and receptive to the pushback he's getting, right?

Because you can tell based on his, his tenor right now. I mean, the Wall Street Journal has come down on him like a ton of bricks. They have an editorial today calling this a capitulation. They were very pro-war. Now they see the warning signs.

They're editor at large as tweeting that this is a colossal mistake. I'm just running out there. I know that the Wall Street Journal editorial board thinks that we have TDS at the bulwark. And thinks that the Atlantic has TDS, but maybe we should have read a Rob Bob cake in article. Some point in the last five months if they didn't see this coming.

I told you everyone predicted that. You asked me at the start of this thing. I said I think this is stupid.

“I think it's stupid for a number of reasons.”

Not least of which you don't go to war with an erratic megalomaniac who does not like military campaigns. In a Donald Trump likes acts of war, he likes spectacular, big operations where everything goes boom. He declares victory and he changed the channel. He did not have the stomach to send marine expeditionary units to cease cargile.

He was never going to put boots on the ground. He wasn't going to go the distance.

And the Israelis, I think, were completely hoodwinked thinking, oh, he's very pro-Israel. He helped us in last June bombing the Iranian nuclear program. He's in it to win it. Colossal mistake, BB has such a gun his face right now and it's going to cost it. He probably will lose the election as a result of this.

Let's talk about the Israel set of this for a second. Because I got to a little bit of tiff this morning at the end. In the podcast business also, it's podcast called Beback, which is, you know, he's American. It was a Republican foreign policy guy, a big Iraq war guy. And the podcast folks a lot on Israel and Israeli issues.

You wrote a book about Israel. And the strategic blunder of the pro Israel hawks. I think you can not overstate. And I know that they're very sensitive about bringing this up at this point.

“But I think they're hoping against hope that things get better.”

Call me back to not do the podcast. I sat down to podcast since the agreement because he's like, I'm just waiting for the exact text. I need to see the exact text. I don't want to be somebody out there blabbering about this without knowing the exact text. We don't need to see the exact text to know what's happening.

I'm like a licensed very capable of podcasting about this based on the background briefing calls from J.D. Sonema and like the pro Israel hawks Israel itself agitated Trump to get into this war. Not saying that they were the puppet masters behind it, but they pushed for the war, they pushed for the war in the situation room. They thought that they had a partner in this effort to overthrow the Iranian regime.

That was the goal of the war at the beginning. It was a regime change. It was the goal of the war at the beginning. They decapitated the head of the regime. And when they got into this, that was the plan.

This was their one opportunity to settle all their scores in the Middle East. And Donald Trump was going to have their back on it. It was an idiotic bet from the start. Anybody who knows anything about Donald Trump and did not come out of a coma for the last 30 years knew that it was an idiotic bet. They did it anyway.

And I hear they are. Trump this morning is like talking about how they shouldn't even be involved in Lebanon. And maybe Syria should be taking a great role in what's happening in Lebanon. And he's telling BB to fuck off and he's telling reporters that he's telling BB that he told BB to fuck off. And it was a short term bet that that I thought was going to be a medium term disaster turned out to end up being a short term disaster.

Right. And BB's popularity, his poll numbers are cratering. You know, look, the Israelis are looking at this saying, what do we get out of it? All we seem to have gotten out of it was.

We have been alienated from our greatest ally and our most important ally.

The United States is now talking about restricting our freedom of movement. You know, is a very telling thing that happened last week when Israel bombed his balla.

In fact, it did retaliate by sending a missile at Israel. Donald Trump's response to that was Israel don't respond. Right. I mean, unheard of Israel cannot not respond to a missile attack by a terrorist regime like Iran. It simply cannot, it's strategic doctrine goes, could put.

So suddenly, you know, Netanyahu gets on the phone with Trump, spends an hour. Cajoling him persuading him, we have to do something in retaliation. Donald Trump's like, well, get it over with quick because you're going to fuck up my whole deal, my whole grand design. What is this? I call this a pair of golden handcuffs that have been placed on the Israelis.

They went to war with the United States.

They thought this is amazing.

The first time we have combined military action in the region against. Essentially, the, the mothership of all of our discontent, right, Iran is the head of the snake. That's what the Israelis were called. We need to cut off the head of the snake and the Americans are with us to do this.

“Instead, this war is ending where the, there were four operational goals I mentioned won, right?”

Eliminate the financing and patronage of terrorist processes. Now that's been reversed. Number two, destroy the missile program. Well, US intelligence estimates they have about about around 70% of their mobile launchers around 70%. Of their pre-war stocks and, oh, by the way, access to, I think it's like 31 out of 33 missile silos along the straight-of-form was whips.

So much for destroying or even degrading substantially their missile program. The Israeli say we got more of that that they didn't get enough of it, though, that Iran is precluded from firing missiles at Israel when it wants to retaliate, right? So we know that operational objective has not been achieved. Number two, eliminate once and for all the nuclear program. Well, okay, they're not the centrifuges aren't spinning because they've been destroyed or heavily damaged.

Highly enriched uranium buried under the ground, but in this MOU or in the contours of this MOU based on what's being discussed, there is no understanding of how we are going to exfiltrate highly enriched uranium or any uranium from Iran. That's all to be left, that's left undecided for a later day. The can is going to be kicked down the street and the Iranians have it in their interest to kick the can down the street, which is why CIA, John Ratcliffe and Marco Rubio, and even Pete Higgs, that's God bless him.

I never thought I'd say that.

Are saying we don't trust the Iranians. We don't need to go that far. You understand that? I didn't mean to say that. I retract that comment.

Oh, pardon me. Yeah.

“Maybe instead of Pete Higgs, God bless him.”

Maybe like even somebody as mentally challenged as Pete Higgs said, even like one of the dumbest people that you've ever met to say. What did this situation say? God love him in the Joe Biden. God love him.

Anyway, this is why CIA is leaking. The Iranians are not to be trusted on the nuclear fund. So there's three operational. The one operational objective that you could argue has been completely achieved is the Iranian Navy is in the dream now. It's been destroyed.

Okay, well done. That worth the expense and blood and treasure for this campaign. I ask you. I ask any Israeli. The answer wasn't.

Right. And now the money that Iran is going to make on the back of this thing. What are they going to use it on? I think it has been a possible school. Yeah.

Yeah, people. Right.

“You know, maybe well, you know, they'll just quietly murder another 30,000.”

That's going to never help us on the way throughout Iran.

Probably. Yeah. Absolutely. And you're quite right. Regime change was always the goal and don't let the revisionists tell you otherwise because

one of the exit interviews slash profiles of David Barnea, the now former Mossad director. It was published in the Jerusalem Post. They explained quite clearly. We were going to run arms to the Kurds. We did.

The expectation was the Kurds were going to create this insurgency to fight the IRGC. Instead, the Kurds in Iran horded the weapons and the starling terminals. They were going to install Mahmoud Amad and Ajah. As the Saitrap in in Tehran and possibly other actors that they recruited. The idea of the goal from the start was get rid of this regime.

That has failed. And now the IRGC is firmly in control of the country. And they control at least half of Iran's economy. So they are going to be the beneficiary of any deal. I don't know about y'all.

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bowlwork. That's MACK WELDLN dot com code the bowlwork. Okay. So speaking of whether or not we should trust the Iranians with this extra money and whether, you know, maybe a new day has dawned and terron. That seems to be part of the pitch from the vice president. I want to play some audio for you of him with Jake Tapper yesterday.

While people listen to this, I just, I do want to then listen to for one key word, the word cool. And just keep that in the back of your mind and just put a pin on the word cool. So we're going to come back to that. But let's listen to J.D. Vance talking to Jake Tapper yesterday. The coolest thing about the progress we've made over the last few weeks is that you see people

“within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials say, you know what?”

We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust. But we recognize the way that we've done business with the United States for 47 years as a mistake.

Let's try something else.

The coolest thing. The coolest thing. The coolest thing. They're going to try something new. The IRGC is like, you know what? You know, this rate of terror that we've thought down in our people, Deaf to America, Deaf to Israel.

That's not right. We want to join the community of nations. I mean, you know, I know Vance is like tight with treat of parcy and the Quincy guys. But even they would blush to say the IRGC says it's seeing the error of its ways. I mean, if you look at the pentagons in-house assessment, it's own history of the Iraq war.

IRGC back militias have more American blood on their hands than any other entity in Iraq, say for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, right? This is not a cuddly, kittinish military enterprise or organization here. They've got to send some time face-to-face with Steve Wick. They've got to hang with Wick.

They didn't even have it. They'd be like the cudd of his jib and they're just like, this guy. Right. We can have what this guy has. She's got like a little corrupt deal with this thing.

They installed with the New York Post calls a probably gay Supreme Leader. I mean, it's a new WokeD IRGC man. Come on, get with the program. Exactly. You know, you can have a wife and a sidepiece that will have to show their soul. I can tell you a different thing.

J.D went further than that on a background call. And I guess Michael, you ruined it by telling us that you've already broken the White House agreement on this and you were not part of the agreement and said that it was J.D. But Sam Stein and I were able to identify one of the speakers on the background call as, well, based on that word, cool.

Here's J.D. briefing reporters on the progress. And it's a similar thing to what he's saying to, to J.D., everybody goes a little further. One of the really cool things and interesting things about this entire process is that we actually have a direct relationship with a number of people at the highest levels of the Iranian government. Maybe the real treasure is the friends we've made along the way.

So J.D.D. Vance, you know? The ones we've made along the way. Yeah, the ones we chose to make the friends was just bomb a girl school. If we bomb a girl school, then we could communicate with them. And because before the war we couldn't have had a direct relationship with a number of people.

It's like J.D.s discovering diplomacy from first principles.

“Yes, I think it's very, it's, it's very interesting.”

And I have to say as somebody who really fundamentally dislikes J.D. Vance, I'm gratified to see him going out front as the principal salesmen of this thing. Because this thing is a disaster for the United States. I mean, do you know the people who are briefing me and leaking to me? The most furiously right now are Republican hawks people who, you know,

found the J.C.P.O.A. and Nathema. They are in absolute panic mode. All right. Evians, the FDD, all these fucking wrongs. The FDD guys are, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, the guys I'm talking about are telling me the FDD guys are out to fucking lunch.

They're in a cult of their own where they're saying, "Well, we need to see the deal." And like, you know, I mean, like, you know, they have absolute faith in Donald Trump to save the day on this. And okay, you know, I mean, this is when you, you know, you go to some,

Because I don't see that from Normie Republicans who have spent 30 years working on the Iran issue. Also, they, they fundamentally understand just how completely dysfunctional and batshit their own party is. They are the ones that are, are the most agreed in the most anxious right now. And J.D. Vance going out front, selling this thing, does several things at once. Number one, pisses them off, makes his ability to become the Arab parent

for 2028 a little harder because he looks stupid and naive and untrustworthy.

“Number two, Rubio, everyone's like, "Where's Marco Rubio?”

I'm like, he's gone into occultation like the 12th in mom. He's hiding. Actually now he's in the G7 meeting with Zelensky. He wants nothing to do with this because he knows that this is a fucking turd, right? And he, he knows that this would scuddle his chance of being the nominee in 2028. But what does this also do? This gives Democrats hilariously, ironically,

this gives them such ammunition because they can basically use, you know,

the same narratives that they were peddling under Obama to sell the JCPOA. Vance is now peddling but peddling, woefully or in artfully and in such a deranged fashion that it's giving them ammunition to basically campaign as the party that is tough on Iran. So Democrats can run in 2028 as, "We're the Hawks on Russia and frankly, relatively speaking. We're also the Hawks on Iran because look at what this guy did.

He just gave away the police were not the idiots. We're not the idiots, right? Yeah. Right, you know. These are the idiots on Iran. Well, that's great. My man who did the the Bull Work Plan theme song. There's now working on some Toy Story Five stuff.

It's like Toy Story Mind and I was just kind of thinking about it.

“Kind of a spin off. You guys really have made it, huh?”

Oh yeah. And I was just kind of thinking of like JD and, you know, the Iranian Foreign Minister with a little Randy Newman. In the background in Switzerland, you got a friend in me. And we'll see how it goes for JD. I'm happy he's making some friends. We'll see. He's got his book also. I just want to shout this out.

He's got his book out about his conversion. A true miracle that he found a new god and a new political god at the same time. He found two gods at the same time and he converted to both of their faiths simultaneously. Yeah. And it's something that can only happen, you know, with divine intervention. And so we're excited to read the book. And so JVL and I will be doing a live reading of the book together.

It's some point on Wednesday. So keep an eye out for that on your subject and YouTube feed. I think that will be enjoyable. Get it. Get a rosé. Ready for that. Hiring people can be hard for me. It's just not my favorite part of the process.

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And one thing I'm always telling college kids when they're going out there to interview is somebody who's really excited for the job. Everybody's looking for an interviewee that is thrilled about what they're trying to do. Because you know they're going to work harder. It's true for us, true for me. I'm looking harder when I know that the podcast is going to be fun.

I'm working hard every day you guys know that. But yeah, you know, there's that little extra Jewish. If you know that you're excited about what you're doing.

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Marcus the G7 I guess we've been talking about maybe he's doing some diplomacy there. I assume he's not doing any media. Marco loves doing media so that's unusual. Why would he touch this thing with a barge pole? Well, it's going to have to come around on it. He's going to have to come around on it because Daddy Trump once said and Marco finds his way around on everything eventually.

But it's pretty telling that he is nowhere. I would prefer him at the G7 while Trump meets with Zyppercutter than doing this. You noted though that the fissures in the fissures here are mapping exactly along the rush exactly. And isn't that interesting, right? So you've got Woodcoff Kushner vans. The people who want to trust Putin, they want to end the war on terms favorable to Russia.

They're not particularly fond of Ukraine.

Woodcoff and Kushner have never been to Kiev.

Woodcoff's been to Moscow I think eight times. He's going again soon allegedly. And Rubio, who often says the party line and toes the administration line on Ukraine, discreetly does things to help the Ukrainians.

He scuttled that hole, Fugazy, Dmitry Vittkov info up, laundered by our friend Barack-Revita Axios. Turn that from being codified U.S. policy, which was the goal of the Russians to put it out in the press so that we would have to accept it as the actual plan of action.

And basically you've never heard of it again, right? It was watered down to the point of melody.

And now the Ukrainians are doing well. I'm sorry, they were first to write on everything. And I was told that in an access to this. I've been first to write on the show. This is where you leave me a stray.

No, but I mean, it's true. He's like, and this is an argument I have with a lot of people who, like myself, are deeply critical if not hostile to this administration. There are certain actors in the administration. I would rather have be in the administration than not.

Rubio is one of them. And the other I have to say is John Radcliffe, the CIA director. You talk to the Ukrainians, you talk to the Europeans, you talk to people close to CIA. And they'll tell you, one of the reasons that the US intelligence relationship with Ukraine not only persists but has deepened and expanded is because of Radcliffe.

And he has some weird mystical ability to convince Donald Trump of doing things that are against Donald Trump's instincts. Usually when they're on the golf links together at the weekend.

“And so I think it's very interesting that it's Radcliffe the one leaking to Axios.”

This deal is a disaster waiting to happen. We can't trust the Iranians.

But basically, the factions within the White House are fighting it out in the press, right?

And what Rubio does next, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure he will say something that kind of sort of ticks the boxes, but we all know what where he stands on this. Going back to the Israel thing, there's funny. I don't believe this is true, but there is a lead report out of like a right wing Israel source

and one of their, I think it was one, that Trump threatened to fire Rubio and unheaks up if they didn't get a word, which seems totally fake. What that does is acknowledge that everybody knows what the factions are. And if you're trying to get a change of results, like trying to do something to exacerbate that internal rift. We also saw the New York Times reported citing the Pentagon that the Pentagon was doing

in the election suggesting the Israelis were spying on not just any old Americans, but J.D. Vance and his team.

“Well, now I think you know why they were probably doing that because they saw what was coming, yeah?”

It's pretty noteworthy. The darker thing is interesting, because simultaneously to the well-read educated people who know history, people who know geopolitics crowd, he seems more adultish, more adultish. I don't want to give him the credit to be an adult. He still is kind of like a little guy in a big chair. But like that's not the path to winning a Republican primary.

And so say what you want about J.D. and I will say a lot of negative things about him every single day on this podcast for the foreseeable future. But I don't, I don't know that his bed is wrong when it comes to domestic politics within the Republican party base. So I think that's interesting. But again, it all sort of sinks or swims on who Donald Trump sees as a worthwhile successor or worthy successor. And I think the problem of Vance has is, you know, I think of J.D. Vance as the way I thought of Ed Miliband.

He's just fucking weird. Yeah. He's unlikable, he's anti-charismatic. You know, he gets up on TV and he says ridiculous things like the IRGC, it's cool man. They kind of get it now after 50 years of fighting us, they want to be friends.

No, like an even the base, it's like they may want an end to forever wars. They may have been against this war. But they don't want somebody who sounds like a dupe. Like he's like, you know, fallen in love with a strategic adversary. Yeah.

I'm like a milk stop. I need some bracelet. Yeah, one of the things, one of the things that's been interesting about maga, if you look at the polling, they've not necessarily turned pro Russia. And, you know, one of the other things I've been paying attention to is this kind of civil war,

or this split within maga on one day on war. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But like in it, Laura Lumer now, going to town on the Russians, talking about atrocities committed against Ukraine.

And, you know, obviously there's personality. There's ego. You've got Tucker, Megan, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor, Greene Thomas Massey.

All basically declaring their support for the Kremlin.

Not just with respect to the war in Ukraine, but geopolitically, they should be strategically aligned with the United States.

“And now on the other side, and a lot of this is also falling along the same battle lines that we've just described, right?”

You know, the pro Israel, anti-Auron element is also now increasingly anti-Russia, because they think the Russians are meddling about and conducting influence operations to try and create this kind of schism or social unrest in the United States. Particularly among conservatives, right? Turn conservatives into anti-Semites, turn them into anti-Israel activists. And, you know, there's some truth to that, of course.

And I don't have any faith that Donald Trump is going to abandon his lifelong quest to be besties with Putin. No. It takes one phone call. It takes one meeting. Everyone gets excited when he says something that seemingly pro Ukraine.

This is all a game of management, right?

“I mean, I think the Ukrainians are very clear-eyed about what needs to be done.”

He's never going to be pro.

The best you can do is stop him from becoming so anti that it actually affects their fortunes on the battlefield. And right now, there are fortunes on the battlefield. They're quite good, right? Well, they are. We, so we had an album on the podcast. We just talked about the progress that Ukraine's making on the battlefield. I talked yesterday to Kaylen Robertson on over on YouTube.

He is on the ground and Ukraine and he was there at the church bombing. The lava of bombing. Yeah. And so, you know, there's simultaneous, like, there's progress on the battlefield. And yet, you know, it's a burden on Ukraine.

It's like they're living through this situation. Where you, to continue to live through this where, you know, you have non-military targets getting hit with Russian missiles and drones. You know, that, that continues a pace, right? And, you know, that continues a pace so long. So anyway, so Trump has a lot of ski today at the G7.

What's your take on the state of affairs there? I mean, some of the optics going into this are okay of the big meeting that happened in the White House in the last couple of days was Trump met Usik, you know, the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who is exactly the kind of guy that Ukrainian should have sent to me Trump. Because, you know, he's big, he's good looking, you know, he's a fighter and he's a winner.

And do you remember the, of course, you do, the infamous meeting in the White House in February of 2025, where both Trump and Vans dressed down Zelensky humiliated him. At that meeting, the Ukrainian delegation is a way to flatter or befriend Donald Trump. One of the little prizes they gave to Trump was a replica of Usik's championship belt. And when the meeting all went to shit, everyone was like, oh, crap, we got to get Usik's belt pack.

And Trump just kept it, right? So now he had the belt and a year and a half later, he meets the champion himself. And apparently, I mean, this all went down very well. So Keith Kellogg, the former special envoy to Ukraine and his daughter, Meghan Mobs, they are arranged for this meeting with Usik.

And you can see from the photos, I don't know if all of them have been released publicly.

“Trump is actually, he's smiling, he looks happy next to Usik, right?”

He's less happy next to Zelensky because he doesn't like Zelensky.

In fact, he hates Zelensky and that's never going to change.

Why? Because in his mind, he sees Zelensky as inextricably bound up with his first impeachment in term, right? And, unfortunately, the Ukrainians have no work around solution for that. As I say, and this is, I want to be clear about this. It's never going to be Trump will be on their side.

And imagine if he were, imagine if a guy like Trump who's obviously willing to go to war with countries that everyone says you shouldn't go to war with. Imagine if he had gone all in, with Ukraine. They probably would have driven the Russians out of Crimea by now and then some, right? But the Ukrainians are doing OK, actually better than OK for the first time in several years, for a number of reasons, number one.

They have realized that they need to domestically source the munitions required to fight this kind of war, which is ever evolving, ever modernizing, right? I mean, this is a drone war. It's not necessarily being fought with heavy armor and tanks. I mean, you need infantry to hold the line, of course.

You need human beings, and they're always going to have a manpower shortage.

But they have really got the advantage in terms of military technological innovation. And that's done two things at once. Number one, it's now really introducing Russian supply lines, particularly in the south. They're cutting off the lines of communication to Crimea. And their drone operators are talking openly about this as a strategy now.

Number two, it's allowing Ukraine to claw back some territory. They continue to lose territory in one place, but they claw back territory elsewhere. But number three, and perhaps most importantly, it's made a utilitarian argument for Ukraine. It's not just about moral support, solidarity, the humanitarian suffering. And now Ukraine has something to offer the West, including the United States.

And I mean, even Trump's, you know, idiotic sons are investing in Florida-based drone companies that are looking to acquire Ukrainian drone technology.

“So I mean, that's the register that I think the Ukrainians need to use with this administration, and they have.”

The other Russia stores this week from the BBC. It's like pretty crazy. It feels like it's out of the show, the Americans. But I guess the show would be called the Brits or something, but there is some Russian spy outfit that

I mean, this is what the Russians have been doing for a few years now. Since the war, and since international travels been restricted, rather than send their own operatives into Europe,

they are recruiting just either organized criminal elements or kids, riff raf, people who are basically what I would call gig terrorists.

Looking to make easy money, in some cases, a thousand pounds, or even less, they connect with a Russian handler on telegram. And the handler tells them, "Go and graffiti a wall with swastika's or stars of David. Go and foment race hatred over here." Or in this case, go and fire bomb the home of the Prime Minister of the UK. Now the suspects actually picking up more than a thousand pounds for that.

“I think it was just not very much more than that, actually.”

And these are just kids, in those cases, they're looking to make easy money. So what the Russians are doing is they're recruiting Ukrainians, right? Because they want it to look like Ukraine is behind these spade of terrorist attacks.

But really, it's Russians.

And in this instance, the handler was, I think, a 23-year-old kid who's the son of a Russian diplomat. What was interesting to me, though, and this kind of, all my greatest hits come back around. This kid studies at Moscow State University's Diplomatic Academy, which is run by their foreign ministry. The Diplomatic Academy at Moscow State University has a media program run by Rybar. Rybar is a sanctioned state media organization that does, among other things, according to the US government,

tries to foment, you know, ethnic tensions, race hate crimes in the West, all kinds of provocations, sabotage operations. And two of the instructors in this program on information warfare run by Rybar. You mentioned the Americans. Literally, one of the instructors was an SBR illegal known in the United States for however many decades, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has Donald Heathfield.

“You remember when the FBI rounded up all those guys, including Anna Chapman?”

That was the premise for the show of the Americans. This guy is an SBR legal now teaching kids how to recruit people in the West to blow things up in the West, including the Prime Minister's house. Another guy involved in this program was a quote unquote Diplomatic stationed in the Russian embassy in London back in 2010 when I lived there.

And I wrote about him. What did this guy do? His name is Sergei Nalobin. His father is FSB. He was a general in the KGB and an FSB officer, was actually the boss of Alexander Litvinenko, you know, the FSB defector who Putin poisoned with Polonium in the UK.

Little bit is most certainly a Russian intelligence officer. He was stationed in the Russian embassy and he helped found an organization called Conservative Friends of Russia,

which was a basically Tories for Putin.

This is going back what 15, 16 years now. Sir Malcolm Rifkin, who factors government, he was the president of this organization until he realized it was a front created by Russian intelligence. And Alobin kicked around the world, he left the UK, he went to Estonia. Now he's sitting in a fucking ivory tower in Moscow, teaching kids how to recruit other kids to blow things up in the West. So you see, I mean, these efforts were put in place many, many years ago.

Nothing is new here. The Russians have just now got, you know, they're on a war footing. They're recycling all their old quadrays who claim to be interested in rapprochmond or normal stable relations with the West. No, they're looking to set things off in the West. They're any kids listening to this in the back of your parents' car and you're trying to make some extra cash, like only fans or something.

Okay, like there are a lot of ways to make KGB money these days, besides firebomb and prime ministers. That's a bad, that's a bad thing. Last thing, you know, I've built this point for a few days. Given the humiliation in Iran, no matter how Trump tries to spin it,

“I think it seems obvious that what is next is a retrenchment back to his Don Road doctrine nonsense,”

you know, with Kuba seeming to be at the top of the list there. Do you have a sense for what's happening, you know, with regards to Kuba? Yeah, so the policy has told to me by somebody who would know is coercive diplomacy and coercive economic measures designed to force Cuban intelligence and the hardliners in that regime to open it up, privatize the country, allow foreign direct investment, probably from the very outspoken and hyperactive diaspora in Florida.

And short of that, you know, if there needs to be some kinetic operation, there probably will be. But their goal is not to do any kind of military campaign. You know, I saw a lot of chatter, they're going to snatch Raul Castro, just turn 96. He can't get out of bed without the help of his grandson, Raulito. Raulito is one of the guys that the Americans are parlaying with because they see him as amenable to some kind of broker to agreement.

They just haven't found a delsy Rodriguez yet that they can rely on. But one of the interesting things that they've been doing, you know, people assumed that because we've had this blockade in place since, you know, 59, 60 sanctions have been crippling on Cuba. No, the blockade was related to American transactions with Cuba. Now they're imposing sectoral sanctions on Cuba going after Gayesa, which is, I mean, like the IRGC runs the Iranian economy. The Cuban intelligence runs the Cuban economy. So what they're doing is basically putting a gun to the head of these strongmen in Havana saying, you can keep some of your ill-gotten gains.

“Like, we're not here to take your money away, but you have to work with us. You have to do business, Allah Donald Trump.”

And if you don't, then we're going to take everything away and you're going to lose it all. So it's kind of mafia tactics, I think, more 89, 91 in terms of, you know, the transition they're looking to achieve rather than A of pigs to electric bugaloo. Now who knows, it's Donald Trump, right? You know, mercurial, erratic, megalominical, Cubans could piss him off. In the meantime, that has been, I know, doing some wrong reads on this, and like the economic ramifications there. It's terrible. It's really horrifying.

I mean, there's, I think, 23 hours of blackouts a day, hardly any food in the grocery store.

You know, they were very well known for their medical industry, Cuba would always send doctors to places like Venezuela.

I mean, also intelligence assets, but, you know, this was their big thing. Michael Moore did a whole documentary on Cuban health care. All of that's, you know, could put now, it's, it's an emisorated third world island nation. And I think that's part of the game here. You know, we can give you relief. We can give you humanitarian assistance, but it's not going to be run through the regime. It's going to be run through the Catholic church or charities that we select. And this is Rubio's, this is his kitten caboodle right here, right? He's the western hem guy. That's why he's staying out of the Iran thing.

If he can deliver Cuba, if he can put an end to casheroism, at least as it's been known for the last half century. I think in his mind, he is the air apparent. I think in Donald Trump's mind, he's more likely to be the air apparent. And in the GOP's mind, I mean, good luck to Democrats taking Florida because that'll be that state wrapped up for them for the foreseeable, right? So there are political calculations clearly, domestic political calculations here.

“But I know people that are very close to a three-letter agency who say, they don't want to do war.”

They don't want to do an invasion of any kind or rendition of anybody. They think they can get it through other means. Who knows? Well, that's my kind of handsome right there. He's a noodle boy, like Chalame, you know, he's smart, crafty. It's Michael Weiss, good heritage. - You're talking about me.

- You're talking about me. - You're talking about me. - You're talking about me. - You're talking about me. - I'm just trying to...

- Trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro.

“- I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro.”

- I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - I'm just trying to make a man's for the intro. - See, if I don't watch out, you're gonna pass on to the audience there.

- All right, noodle, man, let's make a life.

- Appreciate him as always.

- Thank you very much. - You've got wisdom. - Up next, Sam Forester. - All right, we are back. I had Sam Forester, I'm gonna start with a,

I got a bone to pick with you. - That's okay. - Oh, perfect, we're starting on the right foot. - I was doing some research to prepare for this interview. And I came across the interview,

you did with something called the pulp. I don't know the pulp, but in that interview, the reporter says that you invited him to your home or to someplace where you were in a sauna. And you did the interview while doing a schvitz.

- And so I'm like, why wasn't I invited to do a shirtless interview with you? I guess it's a question. I feel like I'm a second-class journalist. I didn't get that.

- So I'm gonna have some way to make sure we get a second interview in, you know? - I can't give it all away, I want to. - Yeah, okay, wait, I'm available for sauna interviews. I guess it's all I'm gonna offer here.

As well, I'd recommend people read that. It's pretty good. In it, I kind of learned about your background, but I still am not sure I really know what a smoke jumper is.

And so I thought maybe you could just start by telling us about your background and what exactly smoke jumping entails. - Smoke jumpers are just another kind of wildland firefighter. We are early delivered. So we parachute in remote wildfires

to put them out before they grow. And the way this smoke jumping program

is always been pitched since 1939, when it started,

So we jump out of fixed wing aircraft at airplanes,

parachute at 3000 feet nowadays on the system that we use. And it's just another way to get to a fire with less icon, but I hold out more on the back end. - That sounds scary, that sounds scary for my take. - It can be.

- Yeah, depending on how big the jump spot is, it's either terrifying or beautiful, but a way I write an interview with a Russian smoke jumper in the way he describes smoke jumping is for three minutes fly like eagle

and for three weeks they like mole. And that's pretty accurate to me. - Are there increasing needs for that? - Like with climate change, everything, it's hard for me to kind of get a grasp on that.

It kind of feels like we've been having more fires in the mountain west lately. - Oh absolutely. I mean, it used to be fire season and parts of the west, it's just a year-round occasion now.

You got fires in Colorado or California

that are burning all the way through December, January. And that means a whole lot more resource needs that we're all paying for. And it's both the fact that summers are hotter and drier and longer.

And it's also the fact that we have a hundred years of large-scale fire suppression on the landscape and disinvestment from active forest management, from the sort of things that you would do between fire seasons to make sure that homes

in the wild and urban interface don't have trees growing right up to your back porch. And to make sure that those fires aren't quite so hard to fight once they start, that's a lot of what I'm running to change.

It's the fact that when we disinvest up front, whether it's wildfire or health care, we end up in the state of constant crisis response governance where we all end up paying so much more for so much less.

And it's the same if it's a fire burning into a subdivision. And so you've got to call in a large air tanker to drop retard to stop that thing before our house burns, or if it's a 62-year-old woman sitting in the emergency room at St. Patrick's,

the hospital here in Missoula. We all end up paying so much more of the least effective way to solve that problem. - Yeah, so let's talk with a little bit. So that's gonna relate to your origin story

of why you decide to run for Congress and the cuts that you were seeing following doge. Talk about that and what you saw on the ground 'cause then I think obviously, I know it just so widespread

it's kinda hard for people to get their hands around everything. I'm for good reason USAID got,

“I think, a lion share of the attention as well as”

the people who are losing jobs in DC because they know the DC reporters, right? But this stuff was happening all over the country. Talk about what you saw up close. - Yeah, I mean, when all these doge cuts started,

I was going into my fourth season of Smoke Jumping. I was also a vice president at my union's local.

It's in a few local 60 where the first unionized

national forest in the country on the low low here, just outside of Missoula and they ended up firing about a quarter of the fourth service in Montana. And one year, just last year and most of the people that they fired in the name of efficiency,

were folks making less than 20 bucks an hour. So I'm in tools in the woods and making sure that you can make it up a road to a trailhead or up a trail to access your public lands or conducting the science to keep our air and water clean.

None of that is about efficiency. It was all about power and consolidation. And when I reached out to Ryan Zinky, the Shlob we got sitting in office here is our representative.

I got crickets time and time again. So I decided if he's going to come take my co-workers and my members jobs, I'm going to come take his. - And then he backed out, so you kind of won and step one already. And now you run against a different kind of mega-stitch.

- Yes, yeah. We got another political puppet in Aaron Flint. He's a little talk radio host who's been spying in Hayton hot air on the radio for the last 10 or 15 years. Well, a lot of us have been actually doing the damn work

and trying to help our neighbors.

“I think that it is a perfect little encapsulation”

of what we're looking at as a country. You know, one side that is just trying to inflame Hayton the vision and well, one side that I think we need to change to make a version of vision of what this country can be which is bringing people together

and actually start to solve big problems again. - Let's not turn spewing hot air into a pejorative. Okay, so that's so much fun. - I did a way on that. What are you hearing from people in Montana, right?

Because this is something that I'm trying to wrap my arms around which is it seems to me that Trump is disproportionately hurting people in rural America, whether that be farmers with the tariffs. You know, if you just look at the economic stats,

it's a lot of the more rural parts of a country that have been hit harder. This is something that affects everybody in Montana, right? The types of cuts you're talking about. On the other hand, a lot of the voters who live in those areas

like the information they're getting are from people like your opponent. You know, they're getting a lot of information on Facebook, talk to radio, podcasts, et cetera. Is it breaking through the damage of the policies

“or causing like, what are you hearing from people on the ground?”

- Yeah, I would say it's, you cannot miss it, right? If you're now panning early five bucks a gallon at the pump, and you're in a place like Montana, where, well, you'd measure the distance in hours instead of miles between one town or city in the next,

everybody is feeling it. And we are in a state here in Montana,

market in the country.

Wages relative to the cost of housing,

the cost of buying a house is doubled or tripled or worse in the Zula or Boseman or Flathead Valley. And, you know, I worked between fire seasons for a group of homeless shelters. The Montana Coalition was all of homelessness for three years.

We got cities where homelessness has doubled or tripled. Across Western Montana, and that's because housing is on affordable, so people are feeling it. I'll tell you, one of the tough conversations I've had in the last five months of this campaign

is a lot of people asking me a different version of that question. It's like, well, a quarter of your co-workers voted for Trump or Brian Zinkeed, did they see that they were wrong, right?

Do they see that they messed up? And that is kind of missing the point because a lot of these folks were hurt and before Donald Trump got elected a second time. And that is how we got into this mess.

I mean, I was making $19 an hour jumping out of airplanes for the US Forest Service at the end of 2024. And a community where you cannot find a home

for less than a half million dollars if you're lucky.

And I'm seven years in and there's guys who are 20 plus years in making that same wage in the same community, the same housing market. So their life did not improve materially over the preceding four years.

And you know what if your life gets worse on a material basis while one party's in power and you vote for the party

“out of power, that's how democracy works.”

And it's a shame that those are the kind of options that we left people with. So let's give people a better option. - Yeah, I understand the tendency to want people to be like, you know, you really nailed it.

On this Trump thing, you're exactly right. I mean, you know, being told that you're right, everybody likes being told that they're right, but it's not really how politics works. It's not politics.

I guess my version of that question to you. When you think about your, you know, a lot of the guys you work with, we're Trump voters, you said it. And so an article that I read. And so, you know, politics comes up, you're chatting with them.

Now you're running, of course there's some issues where, you know, they're just gonna be fundamental disagreements, right? Of course there'd be some areas where maybe there's some alignment. Nobody wants high costs for gas and housing. I'm wondering, is there anything where you are talking to them?

And you're like, you know, I think that these guys had a point in their criticism of the Democratic Party. - Oh, yes, how much time you got, Tim? - Absolutely. - As much as you want.

- I mean, a big part of why I got into this is because, you know, we've had some, you know,

“naturally momentous leaders in the history of Montana, right?”

I mean, John Tester, I got to sit down with last week. He was somebody who was able to get things done even in the terribly broken confines of the United States Congress and Senate that we've lived with over the last five or 10 years, like Mansfield, John Ranking, but what I see

when I look at Congress is a Congress where the average

member is worth three to four million dollars,

depending on the day and how good the stock market's doing. Meanwhile, the average Montana's making 60,000 bucks a year. What I see when I look at Congress is a place where the average members were 15 times the average American and you look empirically and working people have fallen behind.

As a matter of material well-being and real wages, adjusted for cost of living over the last 10, 30 years, and it does not seem like there's a sense of urgency addressing that grievance, right? Economic grievances to nearly the extent that they're out of be, right?

And what happens when you don't address people's basic material needs when the market is not meeting those things is they fester and they turn into misdirected grievances and you got people like the schmucks and power who tell you, you know why you're poor,

you know why your life's getting worse, it's because of the brown people or the women. And it's not any of those folks. It's the very small slice of people getting incredibly rich. All of these broken systems and those same people

of something they're caused in the Congress and into the halls of power and the way that even when we can pass major good policies like the bipartisan infrastructure law, a disproportionate amount of that money goes to large corporations and not in the working people's pockets

and we should be pissed off about that. - I hear you on all that, that sounds like something Joe Biden could have said, though. I mean maybe you would have had any credibility saying it, but I do wonder, you know, I mean some of this stuff

for voters in Montana, it's cultural like they think that the Democratic Party was too lacks in immigration or too lacks on crime or whatever it is. You know when you think about those issues, are there areas of commonality or common ground

at all with mega voters?

“- I think broadly, and I'm sure you've experienced this too,”

I think that somewhere where we have messed up as we got the power of language all backwards, as a movement on the left, as Democrats, whatever you want to call it. And I got a front row seat to this because for the last eight years I've been fighting

wild and fire for six to nine months a year and then in between fire seasons, I go work for groups like the ACLU of Montana doing really important work, defending our basic constitutional freedoms

when the fire rate made it their mission to attack those things. And they attack them largely because they don't want you talking about the fact that they're picking our pockets by cutting the top income tax rate, they want you talking about where someone's going p.

And that's not the role of government at all. I would offer. And what I would see is sometimes I got one or two days between a fire season where I just worked a thousand hours of overtime and then I'm on a Zoom meeting

doing ice breakers or offering our pronouns, which I am perfectly comfortable with

“in which I think was a healthy part of the movement,”

but which a lot of the folks that I worked with would not be comfortable with because they aren't steeped in that language, they perhaps they haven't been through that. They haven't gone to university,

they haven't been in spaces where that's part of it and what we invented of doing is creating a language of power where a lot of foreign working people actually would not feel comfortable in that space. And if we as progressive is care about poor and working people

and improving their lives, we should be creating spaces where they would feel welcome to and where we are not going to eject them immediately if they stumble and if they fail to keep up with a changing language that is changing before their eyes.

I think that's somewhere we've messed up as the left and that's somewhere where we've ended up leaving a lot of people behind who should be part of our coalition. That's right. A lot of the language stuff came from college education folks

and not working people. You know, we're working people just weren't talking like that. And also there's a sillyness to it. Again, I respect everybody's, you know, right to exist and we should certainly not try to infringe

and anyone's basically rights to live however they want.

But like Sam Forestag is a he/him. Like we didn't, you didn't need to announce it really. You know, like nobody's confused about it.

“And so like that's why there's like an element of silliness to this.”

Like it feels a little silly. It's hard. Yeah. And as just as importantly, we don't need to eject somebody from that space if they aren't ready to be using that language just yet

because these things take time, right? And because, you know, again, if you're out in the field for six months and then you show up in a space like that, well, some of these folks, they quite literally do not know the words and you should not have to know the specific words

to be involved in a space where you're changing policy or involved in what the future of our state looks like. I just want to talk to you about Kyle Palsy real quick. So you said you're doing ACLU work. I'd like to hear a little bit more about that broadly,

but particularly there's a bit of a question around freedom of speech. And I think that the right weaponized this topic successfully going after the Democrats in the Biden administration, going after ways in which some of that was about canceled culture. Some of this was about, in my opinion, kind of marginal things

about the Biden administration trying to tell tech companies what to do regarding content related to the pandemic, et cetera.

But this worked and we do have a first amendment in this country.

“And I think there are a lot of voters devoted for Trump.”

They thought he's going to be a free speech candidate. Something that the ACLU works on as well. And so I'm just wondering what your work was focused on, where you fall on those conversations around free speech. Yeah, I mean, they ACLU as it was conceived.

Actually, it's an organization that's supposed to defend your civil liberties regardless of what side you fall on. The ACLU was defending the KKK's right to protest, not because they're not smuggs, not because that is not a despicable organization. But because our first amendment, the right to free speech and demonstration

is something that benefits all of us when it's out in the open instead of suppressed. So we can address hateful ideas. What I was working on was largely criminal justice reform. It was free speech. It was pushing back against a lot of what I would offer

or distractions that the Republicans in power in this state were spending two-thirds of their time singing and dancing about, while they picked all of our pockets and continued to cut top tax rates for the people who needed to least in this state. And what I found is that there actually are a lot of opportunities

to find common ground and work across the aisle. I mean, we ended up getting some major criminal justice reform policies passed in the state. Even in 2023, when at that point I was working organizing with Montana and it's in this project, we passed a reform to ban fines and fees for juvenile defendants and the criminal justice system.

Kids facing time behind bars in Miles City and Eastern Montana who were getting out of duty with 10,000 plus dollars of debt just from the court fees that they'd racked up. And you wonder why recidivism rates are so high, right? You wonder what the heck you're supposed to do when you get out of duty at 18

and you got $10,000 of debt and no resources, no prospects. Well, that's the system that is designed for people to fail. And we were able to pass that in a Republican super majority. Because even folks, you know, on the right people who voted for the other side, they might know what it's like to have a family who's tied up in the car's rural system.

And those are broadly the issues I was working on. One other issue I wanted to ask you about its foreign policy. Obviously, we got the memorandum of understanding, I guess, with Iran that we're working on, maybe a deal on Friday. We're talking about that in the first segment.

Wonder what your thoughts were on the war broadly, how Democrats handled it, and kind of what your mindset would be on foreign policy issues if you got in there? I would say if there was anything redemptive about the America first platform, it was this notion that we were going to end these needless and less wars. And it turned out that that was just another lie.

And now we are running chaos and cruelty over season Iran at immense cost and blood and treasure to us as Americans, to service members. And that doesn't benefit any of us. And what I read, I had line that we are playing that potentially,

spent $300 billion to pay for reconstruction of the damage that we rot as a country.

I mean, when I go around Montana, I'm sitting down on a mobile home lot last week with a guy who has watched your lot rent increased by two to three times in the last five years. There are people being priced out of house and home. There are people who are losing health care coverage by the millions. Because while we let those ACA subsidies expire and we don't have the gall or gumption to actually

fix a health care system, $300 billion could do a lot of good. It could pick it for a lot of free childcare and instead what it's paying for is us rebuilding something that we just blew up.

“That's a damn shame and we should be so pissed about it and I think people on both sides are pissed”

as I'm talking to them. I'm going to talk about managing the democratic coalition. You've done something so far that's pretty impressive. I don't understand how exactly, but if you're just on Twitter, if you're on the internet,

there is like a never ending war speaking forever wars between kind of like the Bernie people

and the moderates in the democratic coalition. I'm not going to go with you with that energy, if we're talking about that. I wish it was being channeled a different place. It's not how you've been able to do that. I've heard from my lefty friends that you're a candidate that they're watching and supporting.

I was seeking whether to campaign from you, a lot of my more moderate friends of the Smith and the podcast you're the day with the Jordi Dems. They supported your campaign, John Testry mentioned and supported your campaign.

“Can you tell other people what the special sauce is on that?”

Because unfortunately, I see a lot of Democrats who sometimes find themselves in the sour spot where both sides don't really feel like they represent them. And for whatever reason, you've managed to unite the tribes a little bit. Talk to about how you think that went down. I would say it's too fold, but this campaign has been based on it.

It's two premises. It's first that the basic function of government is to meet

help people meet their basic material needs when the market is not meeting them. And right now, the market is not meeting a whole lot of basic needs. Right now, people are failing to afford a roof over their head. Right now, people are working two or three jobs at a time in a place like Montana. And struggling to afford healthcare when a marketplace plan is 800 bucks a month for bad health

insurance or when child care costs $19,000 a year if you can make it into a child care program, let alone retirement where people such security checks are not keeping up with cost living. And those material needs are actually unifying issues. People who voted for Joe Biden or Harris or Donald Trump. None of them want to see their neighbors homes bought out from underneath them.

And my basic notion here is that if we can focus on those things first, we can build a coalition and we can get to the other notions of empathy and compassion in the level that we need to extend our neighbors next because it's a whole lot easier to extend to kind of up with the compassion that you ought to do to your neighbor if you're not having to work three jobs at a time just to fill the damn fridge. And that that's a reasonable expectation.

And the second premise here is that people are tired of being so damn angry or I am like, it does not get us anywhere to have these campaigns where the entire premise of why you should vote for me is that you should hate the other guy more than you hate us. And that is what it felt like living through the last campaign. It felt like we had a whole lot of candidates who were saying,

“look how terrible and it's brochure and despicable the other side is, that's why you should vote”

for us as Democrats and that is not cause enough to engage with politics or to give people any sort of hope for what our government can do for us. We should be really pissed at both sides if that's the sort of campaign they're running because to me that reads as distraction from the actual issues that people are facing on a day-to-day basis. And I think the way that we get past that is to say, well, here are the concrete ways that we can fix the material problems that you're facing.

And you know what if a government, if a Congress that is largely populated by the rich and

powerful is not addressing working people's problems with the level of urgency it deserves,

maybe we should start sending working people to Congress again. Because you bet your tail, I'm going to deal with a housing crisis with a little bit more urgency. If I know what it's like to be working three jobs at time while I'm going to classes and still coming up short on rent and most people in this country, at least people I know, here in Montana, know what that's like, most of the people in Congress, it does not seem like they do. You're covering out a heavy material

and serious material that's very important to voters there and I appreciate that. I appreciate that. And so this is a tough transition for me because I'm a podcast host, but we're going to end with something a little more frivolous. John Osaf. John Osaf, Raphael Warnock would not tell me what their work out routine is. Okay, both of those guys are fit. You know, they're going to the Senate and they're looking good. You know, the Republicans have somehow co-opted this with Maha,

even though they have a lot of fat body politicians in Congress. There was a guy Abe Hamaday, who is a Congressman from Arizona that was posting a weird AI meme about how it's important to be fit yesterday. I feel like the Democrats can recapture some of this. So my question for you is will you finally be the person that tells me what the work out routine is? So, you know, my answer was like a good proof. Our arms, you know, we're trying to figure out what to pay.

Well, I'll tell you a regular sauna does a lot of good and I can tell you could use a sauna to him. So you should swing by. I could thank you. Yeah, that my work out routine has rapidly

do good for your health, but for for jumpers, there was always calisthenics, right? If I got time,

if I got 30 minutes, I'd go out there and I'll jump rope and do burpees and that's pretty good

“way to smoke yourself in 30 minutes. So that's why I've been doing jump rope and burpees, huh?”

Oh, yeah. How many burpees do I gotta be doing to get into smoke jumping shape?

Well, I got like you, you look pretty close from what I can tell, sitting across a screen.

No, I'm not. Thank you. But I'm not that close. Thank you. I'm the ladies' weights class, and I'm getting mugged by the mom. So, that's true. All right. We'll look into the burpee routine.

“Well, I'll ask Claude to see if they can help us with it. All right, that's Sam Forsick. What's your”

website? People want to support you and what you're up to? The website is SamFremontana.com. I'll

spell it out. Yeah, please go check it out. Check out our policies. You're going to find an excessively detailed policy platform because policies my love language. And if you can spare it, please go and donate because I need all the help we can get. And the angry

“hate spewing talk radio host, nothing like Tim Miller, the one that I'm against here in the”

general election. He's got a whole lot of money behind them, and we got a whole lot of people, so I need help from all over to win this thing. And it's a stretch race. I wrote about this last Friday, but, you know, it's doable though. Republicans won the seed for a while, but tester won it narrowly, very narrowly, Obama won. I know there's been some redistricting but he kind of map out what it would have looked like along with the district, so it's doable, but it's a stretch

and hopefully it can be a place where we can kind of turn the tide a little bit. So, appreciate you very much, Sam. I look forward to seeing you in the sauna soon. Thanks, also to Michael Weiss for his expertise. Everybody else, we back here tomorrow with another edition in the show. See you all then. The board podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the Lord of Lead Producer Katie Cooper,

Associate Producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, an audio engineering in editing by Jason Brown.