Transcript
Zain
0:01
This is Strategist episode 1014. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, it is late at night, but we've got so much to talk about. Do we not, Carter? We
Carter
0:13
We do. We have so much to talk about. I got another massage today. It was fantastic. So way better than the last one I talked about with Corey and I. This one was amazing. Wait a minute.
Carter
0:27
I felt a real full relief. don't
Carter
0:28
don't worry about grammar don't worry about the grammar i actually
Zain
0:31
actually fully appreciate i felt
Carter
0:33
felt a full release she started right up at my head and she was playing with my head until i just like
Carter
0:42
was almost like an explosion and i felt like i was just so
Carter
0:46
so relaxed at that moment it was amazing what
Zain
0:48
what are you doing man what are you doing what
Zain
0:50
what what are you doing why
Zain
0:51
why are you doing this what What did I...
Zain
0:54
Or a family program. Is this a new
Corey
0:55
new bit that you're looking to
Zain
0:57
it's a family program.
Corey
0:58
program. You guys, we do a bit... You're trying to lean into Carter the Pervert? People listen to
Zain
1:02
to this hooked up to their aux cable and their Corollas, okay?
Carter
1:09
That's how you don't
Carter
1:10
don't listen to this.
Zain
1:13
With their kids inside and on top of the car, okay? This is a family program. I
Carter
1:17
I don't even know what you guys are talking about. I had a massage. The last one was... I'm going to tell you what, Stephen. So I want to let you know this one was good.
Corey
1:24
I'm going to tell you what.
Corey
1:26
I'm going to hit the intro music again. We're going to leave that on the record just so your shame can live forever, but we're going to give you another shot. Okay.
Zain
1:38
This is a strategist episode 1014. My name is Zane Belger with me as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter.
Zain
1:46
Corey, how's it going? So nice to see you and you alone.
Corey
1:49
So I got this massage today.
Corey
1:52
And the release was incredible.
Corey
1:55
Started with the head.
Zain
1:59
What are you doing? This is a family program. People listen to this in their Hyundai accent.
Zain
2:06
accent. Not on aux cable.
Zain
2:09
That's a fair point. With their kids inside and on
Carter
2:10
on top of the car. What are you doing? Can we get this one another go? Can we just give this another shot? You know what? Let's give it one more shot. I think we got this this time. You ruined it again. Okay. Here we go. One
Zain
2:20
this is a strategist episode 10 14 my name is a belchie witsby as always cory
Corey
2:25
cory hogan steven carter
Zain
2:28
how's it how's it going cory well
Corey
2:30
well you were telling us just before the show about this massage yeah
Carter
2:33
yeah i want to hear more about the massage you got yeah
Carter
2:36
did she start with your hair is that what you were saying earlier i'm
Zain
2:41
i'm gonna fucking explode
Corey
2:50
what what's so funny about it's still still
Corey
2:54
still better than twitter blue
Zain
2:57
let's move on to our first segment our first segment red splash blue check cory what do we want to talk about which which color do we want to talk about the united states do we want to talk about the red that didn't happen do you want to talk about the blue that's happening everywhere.
Zain
3:14
you want to do?
Zain
3:16
Let's talk about Twitter. And in fact,
Zain
3:19
let's make this a sub-segment called Corporate Advice. Corey, we did some corporate advice last episode. We did. It was so exciting.
Zain
3:27
I'm going to actually go back to this corporate advice well. But let's start with where we gave corporate advice to last time. Let's start with Twitter Because, Corey, a lot of things have changed at Twitter. Elon Musk has introduced the new $8 blue verified check. He introduced the official badge. He took away the official badge. Now everyone can be, according to an incredible meme, BBC News Alert, because you just pay $8 and you just get to do whatever the fuck you want. But it has led to Twitter being, and I say this without exaggeration, fucking incredible. I have never seen Twitter be as amazing. It's never been this good. It's never been this
Zain
4:07
good. It's never been this bad, but it's never been this good. It is actually now doubling down on all the problems that it's had. But let's also talk about the fact that the chiefs of information security and privacy and compliance have quit. it. Elon Musk has now asked all employees to come back to the office in an email. Later in the day, he's told all individuals who don't show up to the office that your resignation is tendered and accepted. He's also just casually inserted that the company might be on the brink of bankruptcy.
Zain
4:44
I'm missing a shitload in between.
Corey
4:46
between. I can't keep
Zain
4:48
to keep up. Trump, Daniel Smith levels of activity that he's putting out there. What's the corporate advice today for Elon Musk? Last time, if I will, can I paraphrase yours just so I can remember? Was it something about direction and action, right? To not equate those two things. What would it be now for this guy alongside
Corey
5:09
still? Fucking still that. You mentioned the official badge and the retraction of the official badge yesterday. day. Within the last two hours, they've reintroduced the official badge. Oh, it's back. Okay. After Elon Musk saying, I killed it, it was a bad idea. Less than 24 hours later, this thing is back, at least for now. We'll see if it's back when Elon Musk wakes up in the morning. It's impossible to say. Executives have been fleeing the company left, right, and center. They had something like six other high-profile resignations today, including their chief information security officer. Their lawyers are telling them they're no longer in compliance with an ftc um you
Corey
5:47
you know obligation that they have to to effectively always run their upgrades through these security reviews and uh the whole thing is it reminds so when i was in the 12th grade
Corey
6:00
had a friend uh we'll call him dave b we'll keep his last name anonymous yeah
Corey
6:06
he uh he had a house party for the super bowl it was awesome it was the best and worst party i was ever ever going to go to in high school it was so much fun and uh this this rather affluent house that his parents had did
Corey
6:21
did not do so well over the course of the night and at a certain point despite his parents being out of town clearly one of the neighbors had said you better get back here and and the parents showed up and it was it was like one of those things that we couldn't stop talking about even as we lived it we knew it was a bad thing that was happening uh but it was just so much fun what do you do like you just and this
Corey
6:42
this is this is the house party that i had in the 12th grade but with absolutely everybody online it's like this is we can see twitter dying in front of our eyes but
Corey
6:55
but i'll be fucked if we're not going to have fun while it's going on right like it's just it's just crazy do you think it's crazy what's going on
Carter
7:02
on do you think we should take a moment and explain to zane what a party is the
Carter
7:05
the party is when you bring over your friends you have more more than one or two of them.
Carter
7:09
And they fill up the house. There's drinking and dancing and carousing, I believe is the word.
Corey
7:15
Carter read about one in a book. Yeah.
Carter
7:18
I also did not get to attend any high school parties, Zane, so don't feel bad about it, okay?
Zain
7:24
Yeah, this is coming out of clearly a sense of deep bitterness. Carter, what's the corporate advice you're giving Twitter today? I mean, Corey's was slow down, but
Zain
7:34
but at the same time... Also,
Corey
7:35
Also, it's get out, right? Right. Yeah.
Corey
7:37
Yeah. Find a way to declare victory and get out. You're not good at this. Well, what do you mean get out? Like,
Zain
7:42
Like, well, actually, so let me stick with you, Corey. What do you mean get out? Like, is he done with Twitter? You think it's the writings of the wall? He can't fucking do this job? Well,
Corey
7:49
Well, he's got to find someone else to run it. He's way too in the hole at this point. He's got to just hope that in the next 10 years, somebody can claw him back to this investment not being the worst thing in the world. world. Because right now, it seems inconceivable how quickly he's destroying this company, but he is. Could
Zain
8:09
this end up being, without exaggeration, one of the worst business investments ever, period?
Corey
8:16
Without exaggeration, yeah. He might have lit $44 billion on fire. You know what I was thinking today? I was thinking, how long would it take you to physically burn $44 billion of cash. I Googled a picture of what a billion dollars look like, tried to multiply that by 44 in my mind. You
Corey
8:34
You got to assume that you got to expand it, compress it. You know what? Two weeks. Two weeks might actually be tough unless you were really dedicated to the cause. It's just one person trying to burn money.
Corey
8:46
He's found a way.
Corey
8:48
other thing I want to throw on the table here, Zane, that you might not be aware of is that, of course, the banks own some interest in this right yes they do yes and on the secondary market this debt's apparently trading at like 60 cents on the dollar yeah
Zain
9:02
yeah i saw that uh
Corey
9:03
uh which you can kind of extrapolate out to giving twitter a value based on kind of book values that were there before of
Corey
9:11
of about 8 to 12 billion dollars this is something he bought for 44 billion dollars two weeks ago two
Corey
9:19
two weeks ago now he overpaid two weeks ago but
Corey
9:22
but but this is crazy like you know there may be 30 billion dollars less value than he purchased after two weeks of ownership carter
Zain
9:31
carter the desperation is clear that
Zain
9:34
that he's trying to make moves that pay the bills that he's trying he and he's ultimately admitted we're gonna do a bunch of shit a lot of it's not gonna work uh
Zain
9:42
uh i don't think he saw any of these things through to have have any data points it seems manic at this point rather than oh okay well that experiment we gave it a 90 or 100 day uh sort of runway and it didn't work um what
Zain
9:57
what do you what are you kind of thinking of right now and as you see twitter um in its glory in its peak form uh just before what seems like its imminent death well
Carter
10:10
well let me ask you guys this do you guys think like cory said that uh Elon Musk came up with the idea that there was going to be an official tag on the official
Carter
10:20
blue check mark. Accounts.
Carter
10:23
The legacy blues. We don't know.
Corey
10:24
he's the one who killed it, so
Carter
10:26
so it could be quite possible. Here's my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that that was done by someone who was high enough up in the organization to know the utter chaos that he was going to be bestowing on the organization itself if he continued with his course of action. The The idea that BBC breaking news could be owned literally by anybody, you know, Chiquita Bananas could could, you
Carter
10:51
you know, declare apologize for for coups. Or or,
Zain
10:56
for example, like if if someone was like, oh, my God, like Flair Airlines is tweeting about the strategists with
Zain
11:02
badge. If that were to happen,
Carter
11:04
happen, if that were to happen online,
Zain
11:05
online, if someone were to do that, yeah,
Zain
11:08
that would be that would be terrible. there would be a short small window where someone could do that and spend eight dollars to tweet their favorite podcast on behalf of their least favorite airline but i mean it's crazy i
Carter
11:25
i am not that could
Carter
11:26
i am not committing cory to buying that person no i'm not doing it i wouldn't do that no no one no one
Carter
11:33
should do it level but
Carter
11:35
but if that would happen can do it i think someone would wind up with that patreon level because that's the kind of guy that zora that cory is right cory rewards those who does who do great things anyways i think that that was someone trying to stop him from hurtling himself off the edge and what the
Carter
11:55
he immediately said no no i want to hurdle myself off the edge and and now that he's coming back to them and saying well maybe that wasn't such a good idea and they're and and they're the person who probably suggested it, is probably one of the three or four people who walked out the door today. But he has to start listening to good people who are around him. You know, what's every lot that we're there, there are fewer now and there'll be none soon. But he has to start listening.
Zain
12:23
You know what's funny about this, Corey? If Elon Musk didn't buy, okay, everything, comma, if Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter, okay, and he was still a power user as he was prior to purchasing Twitter. And some numbskull CEO slash new owner of the company instituted this policy. Elon Musk would be the first fucking person to jump on this. He'd hate this. And so in some ways, he is reaping what he sowed. But this is the troll-like behavior that he has modeled online that is now coming back to him in many fold. I think this guy fundamentally didn't understand the product he bought. But with the moves he made, the irony is that it's what he probably would do and the behavior he has historically modeled on the platform that is now making this even more, I shouldn't say delicious, but momentarily
Corey
13:17
Delicious is great. No, no, listen. Delicious
Corey
13:18
Delicious is fine. Let's talk about your point and let's not just dance on Elon Musk's very stupid grave, which I do a lot of right now. Okay. He didn't understand the product he bought. And this is one of the hazards of social media more broadly that I think politicians and political observers should keep in mind, too, which is your bubble is your bubble. It is not necessarily reflective of the environment overall. The things people want to happen isn't necessarily reflective overall, including, in this case, the advertisers and a whole other part of the United States.
Corey
13:50
Elon Musk, I think, really did believe, based on the reply guys in his feed egging him on, that all he needed to do was make Twitter this free speech champion and just let, I don't know, some sort of weird version of the free speech market figure it out. And how quickly he has gone from like comedy
Corey
14:10
comedy is now legal on Twitter to you
Corey
14:13
you can't trick people. Your account has to say parody in the title if it's a parody account. right uh you know he he is just it's not like you're it's not even glancing it's he's rapidly contradicting things he said two weeks ago right i want to i want to read you this is from the new york times this is just a little bit of text just to tell you just again
Corey
14:34
again i want to stress he bought this place two
Corey
14:36
two weeks ago two weeks ago yeah
Corey
14:38
today as we record right at
Corey
14:42
the meeting on thursday mr Mr. Musk warned employees, by the way, this was his first meeting with Twitter staff. At the meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk warned employees that Twitter did not have the necessary cash to survive, said seven people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure. He mentioned bankruptcy. Mr. Musk added that he had recently sold Tesla stock to, quote, save Twitter. He has sold nearly $4 billion in Tesla shares recently, according to regulatory filings this week. Yeah, fucking crazy.
Corey
15:19
How quickly has this thing gone to they actually seem in imminent peril?
Zain
15:25
You know, Carter, there's a business strategy here. There's a communication strategy here. We've talked about how this will become an endless case study year over year. There should be a live action, live wire, day-to-day case study if you're in a B school right now. But Carter, there's also leadership lessons
Zain
15:43
lessons here. Can we talk about those a bit?
Zain
15:46
How he's conducted himself, his leadership style? Because leadership, we talk about it in politics quite often, and we kind of say some have the magic touch, others do not. Some are born leaders, others are not. What sort of leadership strategy, counsel or lessons are you seeing, you know, to Corey's point, maybe not necessarily dancing on Elon Musk's grave, but that he has highlighted,
Zain
16:08
highlighted, underlined, spotlighted with his behavior, either positive or negative in some way? Yeah,
Carter
16:14
Yeah, I think that the first thing I'm noticing is he's coming in as the expert, right? And I think that anybody who's been a consultant, you know, we're hired to come in as experts. But the very first thing that we have to do is actually prove our skills
Carter
16:30
skills and our capacity to the insiders, right? You can't just step in and say, I've got all your solutions, here they are. You know, it just blows up in your face. And half the time, the insiders are saying, you know, we've been railing for these types of changes and management wouldn't listen to us. And your job as a consultant is often just to listen to what the employees have been saying, shave off some rough edges, and make some recommendations. This guy walked in, knew all the answers. I mean, he's basically a walking advertisement for the Donning-Kruger effect. He thinks that because he knows everything about these subjects, he must know everything about Twitter. um about twitter and the problem is uh that he doesn't he he may be a brilliant engineer the jury's still out but he sure is not a brilliant marketer for social media
Corey
17:31
you know it's it's one of these things most
Corey
17:33
most new bosses at a company do a bit of a listening tour they're
Corey
17:36
to go around they're going to try to take stock of things they're going to pull old documentation forward try to assess what's been done in the past you know and if there were
Corey
17:45
because you don't want to reintroduce ideas that have been tried before and if if you are you want to understand that it was an execution problem not a concept problem all the way along here
Corey
17:55
carter we've talked about this before but i've often split kind of a seasoned consultant from a very junior consultant on one thing that junior consultants do and it's something elon musk is doing right now which is when you're new to a file you come in and you say what a bunch of idiots. What a bunch of clowns. Why are they making these stupid ass decisions? I'm going to make different decisions. Whereas a more seasoned consultant who,
Corey
18:19
by their season, they've been around for a while, they've survived in the industry. They'll say, well, hold on. But
Corey
18:25
But why did they make these decisions? What led them to these particular conclusions? Why are they making these choices at this current moment? And what does that tell me about the situation I find myself in, which does not mean things
Corey
18:39
things are unchanging, but it means that there are inputs that need to be considered and a situation that needs to be navigated.
Corey
18:46
And so one of the things I'm struck by right now is that when we think about Elon Musk's successes, and there are people who will argue how much he had to do with
Corey
18:57
with Tesla, how much he had to do with PayPal, all of that I actually kind of assess that he had a lot to do with them, what
Corey
19:06
The thing I would say is the
Corey
19:07
the significant difference in this case is he
Corey
19:11
he either built or was instrumental in building or was in on the ground floor on PayPal, on Tesla, on SpaceX. The culture was his culture. The people were his people who believed in him. him. The significant difference in this particular moment is he did not build Twitter.
Corey
19:28
He came into a fully functioning organization that existed as a whole, that had a culture, that had a way of doing things, that had a history.
Corey
19:36
And he ignored the history and he ignored the way of doing things and he ignored the culture. And he's just tried to impose his view based on his timeline on this very big, complex organization, global in scope with all sorts of very complex relationships with governments, with industry, with partners. And ultimately, this is the Dunning-Kruger effect. He has rapidly exceeded the limits of his knowledge. And I
Corey
20:03
I have no sympathy. What shocks me is just how quickly this is all happening. How when he had his first missteps and the market bit back at him, that he didn't say, oops, I fucked up. I've got to go a little bit bit slower here i've got to figure out what the hell i'm doing he doubled down he tripled down the comment in this same article the new york times reporting is just wild on this right you read it and just sort of boggles the mind like yeah this is a real thing but he you know he's basically asked by reporters or
Corey
20:32
or sorry he's by his company hey what are we like what are we doing here is the question he's like oh we just all need to be more hardcore is his answer so like Like, what the fuck does that mean? Remaining workers need to be more, quote, hardcore.
Carter
20:45
What does that mean?
Corey
20:46
mean? He doesn't know what that means. That's
Carter
20:47
That's literally what you told us before we got on this podcast.
Carter
20:50
That's why I opened with a massage story. You fuck.
Zain
20:56
Carter, you've never been hardcore in your life. You wouldn't know it. You're not from the Northeast. He's a softball
Zain
21:00
softball kind of guy. Yeah, he's a softball kind of guy. He's not hardcore. Like Corey, myself.
Corey
21:05
Yeah, that's what they always called me.
Zain
21:07
Justin Haver. The three of us. I mean, those are Lenti Wong. I mean, these are the hardcore, you
Zain
21:14
you know, Corey, let me quote to my favorite movie, Dave. Of course, you remember the scene in Dave where they figured out through the algorithm that Stanley Tucci leaves for Zachary Quinto. Yeah.
Zain
21:25
And they realized that, of course, shit has hit the fan. And he says, do you know why I'm in this chair at all? Oh, I love
Corey
21:31
love that. I mean, why are in
Corey
21:32
in the big bucks? Such a power move, right? Yeah.
Zain
21:33
I'm here for one reason, one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from
Corey
21:39
from now. And all I hear right now, silence.
Zain
21:42
love when Dave said that, Carter. One of
Zain
21:46
favorite scenes in Dave.
Corey
21:47
Such a power move, by the way, of very accomplished, very smart people to be like, I'm not the smart one here.
Zain
21:55
Well, no, let's actually dig into that. And my guys might be thinking I'm extending
Zain
22:00
extending this for no reason. Yeah, you're making us hurt.
Zain
22:04
There is something to be said about leadership and
Zain
22:07
and leadership strategy as it relates to be able to ask the right questions versus always have the right answers. How many times have we seen that? It goes to your point of seasoned, Corey, right? You say seasoned consultant, I say seasoned executive, seasoned board member. Remember, you know, I've seen many times that sometimes it's those that are most insecure in their abilities or their worldview or their capacity or skill are the ones that are dictating solutions rather than trying to fully understand the scenario or the problem. Exactly. Yeah. No,
Corey
22:40
No, I agree with that 100%. And I think it is a broader lesson about leadership. what's fascinating to me in this context is that yeah
Corey
22:48
yeah i mean he's he's kind of in the steve jobs mold of like he's got this clarity of vision he knows where he wants to go right
Corey
22:55
but lest we forget steve jobs career wasn't an unbridled success either he was ousted from his own company at a certain point in the
Corey
23:03
and had to learn a little humility there too i do wonder if if we
Corey
23:06
we don't see elon musk running a version of this where he's gonna have a hard lesson at this
Corey
23:12
an expensive lesson um
Corey
23:15
but yeah like uh if
Corey
23:17
if you're truly a leader you're
Corey
23:19
you're truly somebody who can can
Corey
23:20
can uh you know elevate the people around you and be elevated by the people around you you
Corey
23:25
you want to listen to them not just be dictating to them
Corey
23:28
because other you know you will be as smart as you in
Corey
23:30
in that situation and what you want to do especially with a big organization is be as smart as many people but
Corey
23:36
but to do that you need to listen to people that's why you hire experts. You don't want to rate limit your entire organization by your intelligence or your capacity. And
Corey
23:45
And what Elon Musk is doing right now is rate limiting Twitter, an organization that was 7,500 people, now 3,700 people. But in reality, one person, one
Corey
23:55
one person who is making decisions, and those decisions, they are going to live or die on. And right now, they are dying on.
Zain
24:03
Carter, speaking of rate limiting, you want to listen to the people around you. You want to after having your ass handed to you in the U.S. midterms, probably not go to Mar-a-Lago the following Tuesday for a 9 p.m. Eastern announcement about your future. You probably want to listen, don't you, Carter, if you're one Donald Trump, but he's not going to.
Carter
24:25
No, because he knows the reason why the Republicans lost. The reason why the Republicans lost, and they didn't lose, just for the record. It looks like they still have control over the House.
Carter
24:38
But not nearly the control that they were looking at. I mean, I've looked at the numbers now and it could be as small as a one or two seat majority. It could be as large as 10. But I think it leans more towards a smaller in the House, smaller lead. lead. And then the bigger, uh, perhaps upset was the, uh, the gap between, you
Carter
25:02
you know, uh, the, the statewide offices, the big, the big endorsements by Donald Trump at the statewide level. Um, those, those were, those victories were few and far between and were basically had to be set in stone. And, uh, Ron DeSantis, um, certainly everybody in the pundit world was, was picking him up and carrying him around as the new Trump, the new crazy talker to the Republicans. And there
Carter
25:27
there weren't a lot of arguments coming from anywhere except even Mar-a-Lago. We didn't hear a significant pushback from the Donald Trump people.
Zain
25:37
Well, we have today in writing. And Corey, you know, we were talking about in the past, is it important that politicians know how to write? After reading that statement from Donald Trump, I'm going to say the answer is yes, because it is terrible. It is just random capitalizations of random things. I won't get into that. I want to actually talk about the midterms in this frame. And I want to see if you guys have any thoughts on this. Corey, I want to talk about the midterms, less about the results, because there's so much commentary about the results. What happened? Why did Oz lose? Why did Vance win? Is DeSantis actually special? Lots of hand-wringing. We'll talk about that. Talk
Zain
26:13
Talk to me about how narratives congeal and form leading up to the midterms and whether we should be trusting those narratives or not. Because what I found most interesting was a couple of things happening. Number one, a lot of commentary that said the red wave was coming. A lot of commentary that said this is going to be disastrous for the Democrats, combined with that their current message on abortion and democracy is not working, that they should have been sticking to economy, that it's not going to motivate their base. It's not going to motivate the ring around their base, the folks that they need to show up. And then we're starting to learn that a lot of the late breaking polls that started to craft this red wave narrative were Republican sponsored. There were partisan polls in that sense. So talk to me about, in your mind, some of the things that our our listeners should understand around narratives forming, because despite the media being what it is, pretty powerful, the narrative that is kind of ultimately formed or was formed in this midterm election, and not necessarily bearing out in that sense.
Corey
27:20
You know, you can kind of think of these
Corey
27:24
midterm narratives or just election narratives in general to be a
Corey
27:28
a combination of like waves stacked on top of each other or eliminating
Corey
27:32
or reducing right there's kind of the big overarching oscillation that happens which is the
Corey
27:37
the party that wins the general tends to do worse in the midterm and there's a lot of data of that where you know the president's party loses in the midterm
Corey
27:45
it's kind of an american historical
Corey
27:49
it just just happens uh so that's one narrative that's feeding into the the narrative as we found it the other of course is polling and what what do people think is going to happen and and how does that set expectations uh overall uh
Corey
28:03
uh relative to um you know relative to what you would expect in a midterm election so what we were seeing here was that there was a wave coming um and that wave seemed to be overwhelming general dissatisfaction uh by americans on issues like uh access to abortion obviously with the dobbs decision basically everything the supreme court has done has been deeply
Corey
28:28
um and so a lot of pundits were looking at and saying boy like the democrats are you
Corey
28:33
you know they're i'm looking at this one wave which is that they're supposed to lose the midterm but that should have been canceled out by the wave that is super unpopular supreme court decisions things should have been neutral but look at this polling this polling is negative for them they're in a bad spot right here
Corey
28:49
right Right. This is not looking good for them. And so when it looks like they are underperforming in the polls relative to what the narrative seems to suggest, at least as it sits, then that almost becomes a narrative in its own right. Let's call this the third wave. Right.
Corey
29:04
And then, of course, you have the analysis that comes at and after the election, which is what we're now in here, where the result ended up being neutral. So one of the things I find kind of funny is if you just remove one of those things, if you just remove polling and say this is a polling miss, this
Corey
29:22
this kind of makes sense, right? Like Dobbs was unpopular, but the midterms have a general trend to them. And it kind of was a wash. It was not too bad for the Democrats, pretty neutral.
Corey
29:33
And I mean, we haven't even talked about the fact that one of their parties has basically disavowed democracy at this point. Right. So, you know, in a funny way, I think it's weird that we think the Democrats did so well when a party that is denying the last election still looks poised to win the House, could win the Senate. it i
Corey
29:52
mean even even if they don't that's a lot of people who are now elected who have these views um but uh then there's this other story which carter was getting into which is about trump and his effect on all this and his candidates so it all gives us much to talk about but at the end of the day the democrats are going to end up in a worse position than they were in all likelihood um and democrats are cheering which to me is kind
Corey
30:17
kind of funny yeah
Zain
30:18
let's let's i'm gonna i'm gonna come back to that. Carter, talk to me about narrative. Talk to me about narrative, trying to craft narrative, trying to set narrative, because perhaps from your practitioner's eye and your practitioner's ear, the
Zain
30:33
the Republicans may have internally known that this was not going to be a red wave, but man, oh man, did they engineer that narrative masterfully heading into it to try to maybe will it into existence. That's not masterful.
Zain
30:44
Okay, well, it's a question. It's an open-ended question. I ask it as an open-ended question for you to respond to? Well,
Carter
30:49
Well, I don't think that they knew that they weren't going to have the red wave. I think that they thought they were going to have the red wave.
Carter
30:55
The dominant narrative, and Corey went through a few of them, but I think the dominant narrative on all of this was that president's
Carter
31:03
president's parties always do poorly, especially when the president's in the 40% approval rating.
Carter
31:09
And the only time in the last 40 years or so that that didn't occur was 2002, 2002, right after September
Carter
31:17
September 11th, when George Bush had a 70 plus approval rating and was able to win seats in the House. That's the only time. So when you craft a narrative, when the media is crafting this narrative, and let's be clear, I think that this is mostly a media narrative that is embraced by the Republicans and fought by the Democrats. That narrative is not wrong. So often, it's very It's very easy to see why someone would grab that narrative. The narrative makes sense on its face. Every time this happens, every time a president is where Biden is, people lose.
Carter
31:56
lose. You know, the Democrats are poised to lose. And the polls showed that. The polls showed that starting in September. And I think that Corey pointed that out in a couple of our podcasts along the way that starting in September, we started to see a return to the norm. And the question was, did Dobbs happen too early in the summer? And did people move away from that issue and towards the other issue of the economy? And let me answer the question. Yes, they did. They did both of those things. In areas like Florida, where they put abortion on the side, because they were able to pass a 15-week abortion ban, which most Americans feel is adequate. There's not a huge uproar about, you know, we need to get to 20 weeks or it's, you know, the end of the world. A 15-week abortion ban seemed acceptable to most Americans, certainly to most Floridians. That
Carter
32:50
That was taken off the table, huge red wave, huge red wave, right? In Pennsylvania, they
Carter
32:58
they didn't have abortion on the agenda. They instead had an election denier on the agenda. Will
Carter
33:06
Will you elect Doug Mastriano? Is that his name? Let's go with that. Yeah. Yeah.
Carter
33:11
Well, you elect Doug Mastriano, who who does not believe in the election results.
Carter
33:15
And they didn't want that in other places where they literally put abortion on the on the agenda, California and a few other places where they ran the plebiscite or the referendum questions in those areas. is they stopped the red wave. So in a state like Florida, where they had to tell the story that these people were election deniers and they didn't support abortion rights, the
Carter
33:41
the red wave was real and the Democrats lost. In the places where they showed the story, where they had real clear evidence that this person was an election denier and it was clear, or that abortion was literally on the ballot, they did much better. And the reason I think think they missed this, is an over-reliance on national polling. National poll takes 1,200 to 1,500 people and projects the outcome of the elections. For the most part, it works very well when it's a national style of an election. When it is a state
Carter
34:16
state-by-state election, it works far worse.
Zain
34:22
Corey, we talked about the regionalization last time. We talked about it through the lens of Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams, national figures trying to run and win viability regionally. I think this election, once again, kind of proved that America's, whether you say two countries or four countries, this is a regional, you know, we're entering this regionalization phase. Carter mentions here. What do you think the lesson is to learn on media narrative here, to learn on endgame narrative as we saw play out in these midterms?
Corey
34:53
the lesson's the same lesson for any election observation right which is you've got to get down to the base facts you've got to say what's in front of you one of the ironies we haven't touched on is what it's thursday on sunday stephen carter was like i don't believe in fairy tales red waves coming gonna be huge now there's some other guy on the podcast i don't remember i think that was a while ago was the jeb bush was
Corey
35:16
was the jeb bush that he thought i don't remember the other guy's name but the other guy said i don't know i mean like there's some countervailing evidence that suggests maybe there won't be as big of a red wave you know is
Corey
35:25
is you know my my pessimistic gut says there will be but my head says there won't i don't know was
Corey
35:31
the same guy that thought
Zain
35:31
thought bernie sanders could give hillary clinton a run for her money i wonder if it's the same guy i think
Corey
35:36
think he did yeah
Zain
35:40
the way your mick jeb bush president against hats are available strategist.ca That's true. This is
Corey
35:45
is something that it's kind of easy in hindsight to point these things out. But what you've got to try to do is sit there and say, what's spin and what's not? And yeah, there were a lot of polls, the late breaking polls that showed the Republicans doing particularly well. like the the guy who runs real clear politics basically bet his reputation that the republicans would go and just overwhelmingly win the senate not even win the senate like it wouldn't even be close like fuck shit up yeah yeah and uh that obviously has not happened like at this point even if the republicans win everything outstanding they didn't dominate right there's no domination that occurred here um
Corey
36:27
um so to the point that carter started on like i think the republicans legitimately believed this this this thing that uh you know there was going to be a red wave and they they convinced the simpler minded uh that that was for sure going to
Carter
36:41
to be really hurt right there what
Carter
36:43
what would you do what
Zain
36:45
about this what would you do if you were the democrats right now because there's a bit of parading around but cory's still right like they're taking this as like
Zain
36:56
like they're taking this as a moral victory because
Zain
36:59
we didn't do it yeah
Corey
37:00
this is Just the
Zain
37:01
the straight expectations, like Biden giving a lengthy press conference, Kamala being like, you did it, Joe. Like, fuck, whatever.
Zain
37:09
just like, she seriously did
Zain
37:12
that. She did what? She said that at a podium. I'm not just, you know, trashing her for no reason. She did say that. She like brought the line back, Carter.
Zain
37:22
What would you do for the Democrats? Are they right in this case from a political strategy level to talk about expectations? how they crushed it, let Biden add wind to his sails for 2024, move on, written story? Or would you be doing something else? Would you be advising him to do something else at this moment in time? And by the way, as we record, we don't even know if we're going to need the runoff in Georgia to decide the Senate. Nevada's still undecided as far as I recall in the most recent results.
Zain
37:55
But Carter, what would you be doing if you're the Democrats?
Carter
37:56
You got to take a victory lap.
Carter
37:58
You have to. So what they're doing is
Carter
38:00
in your mind. When people feel like you're dead and you're not dead, when they're talking about 20, you
Carter
38:06
you know, 20 seat swing and instead it comes your way. I
Carter
38:11
mean, sure, you've lost the Senate or you've lost the House, but you've lost the House by such a small margin. And now Kevin, what's his name? The new Speaker of the House, Corey.
Carter
38:23
kevin mccarthy yeah that's right i was going the right direction there um
Carter
38:26
um kevin mccarthy don't
Zain
38:27
don't doubt yourself carter you're a white man you're a middle
Carter
38:29
middle-aged white man don't doubt yourself never
Carter
38:32
never embarrassed ever i'm embarrassed for my pigment at this point um
Carter
38:37
the point you know he he's gonna have to how
Carter
38:40
how does he keep everybody in line for everything right he doesn't
Carter
38:43
doesn't it's gonna be a fucking
Carter
38:45
shit show he's really in trouble like you've got there's
Carter
38:48
there's still going to to be, you know, Corey talked about this universal understanding that the, you know, the Republicans don't universally stand that the election
Carter
38:58
election was stolen. The ones who get the headlines stand that way. And it is a much larger group than I am comfortable with, but it is not 100% of the Republicans. And I think it's going to be fascinating watching Kevin McCarthy try and and figure out how to hold on
Carter
39:16
on to this group and
Carter
39:18
and keep them all together in a way that we watched Nancy Pelosi struggle when it was only a six seat majority for the Democrats and the Democrats quasi held the Senate and quasi had the president's chair. I mean, one argues, is Biden even sitting there?
Zain
39:38
to me about Democrat strategy right now. What would you suggest? Is the victory lap correct as carter suggests um
Corey
39:46
um yeah well it is an expectations game right and the republicans set expectations high for themselves that was a tactical mistake it was a strategic mistake it was a mistake just across the board and now they've given the democrats the ability to declare victory while losing the house you know you did it joe is a very funny thing to me what the fuck did he do right um and look i i'm gonna quibble a bit with carter there's reporting in the washington post it's not everybody who won but a majority of gop nominees deny or question the 2020 election results and a
Corey
40:22
and and yet this is a party that is in likelihood going to be in control of the house has almost got control of the senate very
Corey
40:30
very sizable showings across the country here So let's not declare victory, you,
Corey
40:37
you, me, Stephen. But if you're Joe Biden, declare victory. Declare victory. Say, look, we've kept the wolves at bay. We're back, baby. We got a spring in our step. There's no election to suggest otherwise besides Georgia's runoff in the next bit. And that's great. That's how you rebuild the momentum and you try to make it true. Where the Republicans ran into trouble is they tried to, if they were doing what you suggested, which is just trying to spin the idea that they were winning to try to make it real, doing
Corey
41:06
doing that the month before an election is dumb, right? Because it's like, it's happening. It's real. People are making their decisions based on the inputs on the ground and around them. If you want to try to control the narrative like that in such a big way, you don't do it during an election. You do it before an election. And
Corey
41:24
this is Joe Biden's before an election. Now he can use the next year at least to try to talk about how he's back.
Corey
41:31
That said, the other thing that they have to be mindful of is that their narrative is going to play into the Republican narrative and maybe to the better for their country, maybe to the better for them. I'm not actually sure how it all splits out. But one of the really interesting things around this expectation game has been the Republicans feel like they deeply underperformed despite getting the House. So we're talking about the Democrats view. I think the Republican view is more interesting because you've now got a civil war between DeSantis and Trump.
Corey
42:01
What is going to happen there?
Corey
42:02
What is it going to mean for the GOP?
Zain
42:05
If you're if you're team DeSantis right now or DeSanctimonious, as he's called by Donald Trump, not one of his better nicknames. No,
Corey
42:13
No, like, you know, Laurie, my wife was saying that he's like, she said, he used to be so good at this nickname stuff. You know, he'd come up with one about Marco Rubio. He'd come up with one about- Lil Marco.
Corey
42:24
Lil Marco. Yeah, Lil Marco, right?
Corey
42:28
Marco. Stay in power. Low energy Jeb. Low energy Jeb Bush is exactly where I was going next. Crooked Hillary.
Corey
42:34
And they stuck, right? Sleepy Joe Biden. Sleepy
Corey
42:39
Sleepy Joe. They stuck. stuck he
Corey
42:40
he also had sleepy eyes
Zain
42:40
eyes chuck todd which i thought was a
Zain
42:43
it's not sleep it's not like he's it's not like he's actually sleepy his eyes are sleepy yeah it's like sleepy eyes ryan reynolds or sleepy eyes yeah they've uh all the ryans the goslings yeah
Carter
42:55
yeah the reynolds all got sleepy
Zain
42:56
sleepy eyes yeah trump and i need to do drop a collab we need to go more hardcore drop a collab carter uh desantis did
Zain
43:05
did you get that as a callback i know it was really i love a good callback you You know, I love
Corey
43:08
love a good callback.
Zain
43:10
Trump and I working from home. Good callback. Carter. Yeah. DeSantis. Yeah.
Zain
43:17
He might, his victory might be overrated in the sense that it was not necessarily as unique as it's made out to be, but he did stitch an interesting coalition together. You mentioned it yourself about the red wave in Florida regionally. What
Zain
43:30
What does he have to do next in
Zain
43:32
in order to capture this momentum?
Carter
43:35
he's got to tell everybody he's the only winner in the republican party everybody
Carter
43:39
everybody else was a loser you know let's go further and
Zain
43:43
you what would you it's thursday through two days after the election what would you tactically suggest you do if that's the case let's go for it i'd
Carter
43:49
i'd have him go around and uh you know visit as many winning candidates as possible make himself look like the leader of the party um outside
Zain
43:58
outside of florida yeah of course go
Carter
43:59
go outside of florida and start, you know, meeting with, you know, go and see Governor Abbott and go and see, you know, start pulling together the grand coalition of Republican governors again, which used to be a really powerful organization, but kind of stopped being powerful in the face of, you know, celebrity politics, you know, and politicking that they were afraid that that their buddy would fuck them over when they became the nominee
Carter
44:30
or didn't become the nominee, as the case may be.
Carter
44:33
But this is a great opportunity for DeSantis to show that he was the real winner and he's got the real power. He's got everybody. Everybody's listening to him. Another one of those stupid stunts of flying the refugees to Maine
Carter
44:50
Maine or wherever the hell he put them. That's fantastic. let's go do it again do it again show the world why you won uh
Carter
44:59
uh and show and remind everybody that the reason you're winning is because you can do shit and all donald trump ever did was talk shit
Carter
45:06
and i think that if you were to do that type of stuff he'd be he'd be cooking with fire
Zain
45:11
goy what does a desantis need to do is it is a carter strategy here uh doing the uh offline version of a coursera course going to every every state teaching him how he did it how he how he's He's done it in Florida and how you can do it too with a couple of easy payments of $19.95.
Corey
45:27
Yeah, maybe. Because my first instinct, if it was anybody besides Donald Trump, would be you
Corey
45:33
you give him enough rope and he's going to hang himself. But that clearly has not worked. Doesn't
Carter
45:37
Doesn't hang himself. In the last
Corey
45:41
for whatever reason, he's absolutely proven immune to these things in the past.
Corey
45:46
So yeah, I think you do need to go on a bit of an offensive here. Somebody at a certain point has to say this guy is weak and I'm going to assert myself. And
Corey
45:53
And that's been the challenge with Donald Trump all along is that people talk about we've all got to stand up to him together. We've got to be a coalition against Donald Trump. We heard that before the 2016 election, right? We've heard that even from Republicans who have left, you know, like Schmidt to create like, you know, the Lincoln Project and whatnot. They've
Corey
46:11
They've always been a coalition-based approach. I think the only thing that takes down Donald Trump, the strongman at this point is another strongman. It's
Corey
46:19
It's somebody who can come in and just prove themselves to be more effective at that domineering thing than Donald Trump is now. Is this good for America?
Corey
46:30
But it does seem like DeSantis is going to need to step up and just sort of declare that he's the new big dog if
Corey
46:37
if he wants this done. and
Carter
46:38
and and instead of me allowing him to trump to make a mistake you don't actually care if trump makes a mistake what you're just trying to do is is put him in the corner like you're the big dog um and just piss on him and then yeah and i'm told he likes that so it works out
Zain
46:56
that's a callback too yeah
Carter
46:58
it's a long yeah that was
Zain
47:00
that was yeah wow we're gonna have to this
Carter
47:03
this is gonna get an e-rating isn't it let's check the tape
Carter
47:05
tape this one's gonna be e-rated it's
Zain
47:09
speaking of uh the russians having leverage on you carter um talk to me about talk
Zain
47:16
talk to me about this um if
Zain
47:18
if you are donald trump right now i could stick on this forever but i'm not going to i'm this is
Corey
47:24
is my final sort of question on if you are donald trump right
Zain
47:27
you've clearly shown that you've got no restraint you've got no ability to to kind of to stop yourself.
Zain
47:34
How would you, if you were trying to talk sense into him about the movement and Trumpism and what he's built, how would you persuade him about
Zain
47:41
about his launch? What we suspect is a launch on Tuesday. Well, we'll end this part of the conversation there, but give me your thoughts on that strategy wise.
Carter
47:51
You've got to launch on Tuesday. It's got to be bigger than anything else you've ever done. You've
Carter
47:56
You've got to make sure you're hitting DeSantis with something harder than the sanctimonious um you
Carter
48:03
you know you you've got to return to being trump um and
Carter
48:09
and you you know your best case scenario is that they lock in chains the day before right or the day after um because you know fighting from out from underneath the the
Carter
48:24
the attacks of the justice Justice Department might just be the only thing that gives you the strength that,
Carter
48:32
know, that people expect you to see. I mean, if you just get done in by, you
Carter
48:37
know, civil trial after civil trial, that's not going to project any strength and you need to project strength. And this this is the Tuesday
Carter
48:48
Tuesday is the most important day in the Donald Trump in
Carter
48:50
in Donald Trump's life if he's going to have a political resurrection.
Zain
48:56
You'd still tell him to go on Tuesday?
Carter
48:58
Well, if he doesn't, he looks weak. I
Carter
49:00
I mean, weak, weak, weak, weak, weak, weak, weak.
Carter
49:05
his whole shtick is being the strong guy.
Carter
49:08
It's over if he doesn't go.
Zain
49:11
Does he have to go on Tuesday, Corey?
Corey
49:13
Yeah, I think he does. For exactly the reason that Stephen said. How do you not go if you're Donald Trump at this point? How do you pull it off? The only thing you can do is modify. like if you wanted to all of a sudden go for the jugular and i don't know where desantis is from where the hell is desantis from doesn't matter
Corey
49:31
maybe jacksonville okay yeah
Corey
49:34
well that's where he was born i don't know where he's from um go
Corey
49:37
go into desantis's hometown say
Corey
49:39
say you're going to do your rally there you're going to take it right to him maybe maybe you up the aggression but you simply cannot back down at this point if your entire brand is
Corey
49:49
is being the pugilist who's going going to fight and tell it like it is we
Corey
49:53
all know he's full of shit but he
Corey
49:55
he likes to have a brand of telling it like it is we're
Zain
49:59
we're gonna we're gonna leave the american topic there but carter in the segment of red splash blue check can i talk about a bit of a blue splash is that is that fine if i end this off there as a bit of a teaser you
Zain
50:10
are the blue splash made in brooks medicine hat by by Danielle Smith. She
Zain
50:14
She wins her by-election. She gets just above 50%. The NDP come in second. Barry Marshida, leader of the Alberta Party, comes in third. I want to do a deeper sort of analysis set, so to speak. But Carter, one of the narrative questions that I find interesting that's coming out of this that I'd like to get your guys' thoughts on today before we jump into to this on Sunday. Does margin matter?
Zain
50:40
Does margin objectively matter? Did it matter that Danielle Smith just barely got above 50%? Or like the NDP are saying, she lost medicine hat in the area of medicine hat in that particular riding. What do you make of that? And we'll use this as a jumping off point to our conversation on Sunday, but your top line thoughts on Danielle Neal Smith and her victory in the by-election earlier this week? I
Carter
51:09
I was looking at 50%. You
Carter
51:10
You know, if she'd come in under 50%, I think that would have been really quite devastating.
Carter
51:15
She did not. But 54.5 isn't exactly some sort of staggering victory either. So she didn't die.
Carter
51:24
die. It wasn't a horrible, horrible performance for her. But it wasn't as strong as it should have been or could have been. Let's leave it kind of like that.
Carter
51:34
Um, I would say that, uh, her losing medicine hat outright was
Carter
51:40
was a really bad day for,
Carter
51:41
for, for her. That
Carter
51:43
That is something that is, that is a lot, much larger signal. Uh, medicine hat is not the second most, uh, liberal small city in Cal in, in, in, in Alberta. Um,
Carter
51:56
I mean, obviously the most progressive
Carter
52:00
well, I shouldn't say, obviously I think that the most progressive is lethbridge
Carter
52:06
and but this really does say that you
Carter
52:09
you know the seats that in lethbridge the seats in medicine
Carter
52:12
medicine hat or the seat that's really urban in medicine hat are
Carter
52:16
are is at risk and that
Carter
52:18
that would have been hard to imagine uh
Carter
52:21
uh not that long ago right danielle smith is supposed to be coming in and that's supposed to be her her base her strength and it's just nowhere near as strong as it should be.
Zain
52:33
Corey, use it as a jumping off point. Also, give me your thoughts on margin of victory. And to Carter's point here, does the Medicine Hat conversation, sure, it might be a big piece. Does it have longevity? Is it worth mentioning beyond the news cycle to draw a point about her relative weakness in your mind? Talk to me about both of those things. Yeah.
Corey
52:56
Yeah. So I've been thinking a bit about the Medicine Hat election, and I've come to a couple of conclusions here. Let me give you some top line analysis right off the bat.
Corey
53:06
So this riding, Brooks Medicine Hat, has only existed since the 2019 election. But if you were to take the 2015 results and transpose over them, like say what would the results have been if you took the wild rose vote, the UCP vote, or sorry, the wild rose vote, the PC vote, the NDP vote, what you'd see is that in 2015 during what we'll call that orange wave, the NDP got about 23% of the vote in that area. Right.
Corey
53:34
Right. And then this by-election, they got 27%. So a little
Corey
53:37
little bit up from there, but it's a by-election. So I'm actually going to call it, their vote was basically consistent
Corey
53:43
consistent with their high watermark.
Corey
53:45
Not bad for the NDP though,
Corey
53:47
because of course, in 2015, they
Corey
53:48
they won the election. Like
Corey
53:50
Like that does appear to be, if you want to extrapolate out, that does appear to be enough to win the election. But there's something else I want to point out here. The
Corey
53:58
The Wildrose UC or PC vote combined in that election was 72%. In
Corey
54:04
2019, the UCP plus the independent who was a former UCP candidate who was turfed was 73%. So consistently, the right in that writing has gotten 72, 73%. Daniel
Corey
54:16
Daniel Smith only got 55%. So I think the combination of the NDP hitting what is their 2015 high watermark and Smith being, I
Corey
54:28
I mean, low, like really low, that
Corey
54:32
that is a disaster for the UCP. That's a potential wipeout disaster for the UCP. But
Corey
54:39
But there's something in Brooke's medicine hat that's not going to exist everywhere else. And
Corey
54:43
And that's a strong Alberta party candidate. Right.
Corey
54:45
And as much as we make fun of the Alberta party here, Barry
Corey
54:48
Barry Morishita is the Alberta party leader and
Corey
54:53
and he got what, 17% of the vote? If
Corey
54:55
If I look at this here, 16.5.
Corey
55:00
seems to me almost like very strong evidence that his vote is not coming from the NDP side of things, it's coming from the UCP side. And
Corey
55:09
And I'm going to say something here that I cannot believe I'm saying, but
Corey
55:13
but I think the best thing for the NDP in this election would be if the Alberta party could get their boots on, because
Corey
55:20
because it's clear to me that there's a number of right wing voters who are looking for anywhere else to go. hmm
Zain
55:28
we'll use that as a jumping off point as we discuss this more on sunday we'll leave that segment there following it to our next segment steven carter are over under our lightning round carter we do this all for you the entire episode even if we're recording close
Zain
55:44
to midnight it's 11 o'clock almost
Carter
55:47
it's really fast by thursday
Zain
55:49
it is price your bedtime well you know what What would make bedtime better for you? Could be some dollars underneath that pillow, Stephen Carter, because the UCP are planning to flood Danielle dollars to Albertans, according to a new Calgary Herald article that help ease it with inflation, but of course, with an election to follow. Are you in or out, Stephen Carter, on the Danielle dollar strategy that might be headed into our mailboxes sometime in the new year? Let's
Carter
56:19
Let's see. uh flooding alberta with more money to fight inflation um am i in or out i'm out zane i'm out and this is the second time danielle smith has floated this she floated this also in the 2012 election when she was leader of the uh the wild rose party at that time um she
Carter
56:39
she we called them uh danny dollars uh so danny dollars i think we'll have to return to um it's a bad idea it was it's it's a bad idea to take money and just flood the zone like this without some sort of some sort
Carter
56:57
sort of reason or rationale behind it beyond just giving people cash. I know that most people will like it, but it will do nothing to address the core issue, which was, which is inflationary pressure. So it's, if anything, it's only going to make things worse. I don't think it's going to destroy anything, But it's certainly not going to bring
Carter
57:18
bring us out of our
Carter
57:20
our malaise. In fact, I'm not even sure that we're in an inflationary malaise, except for Corey's new mortgage payment, which I'm remarkably not caring very much about at all.
Zain
57:34
Carter, Corey, before I come to you on this, with your raw Machiavellian political strategy hat on, are you still out? Yeah,
Carter
57:42
Yeah, I am. I don't think this is the way that gets you the best return on your, if you'll forgive me the phrase, return on your bang for your buck. There's a lot of money that goes out the door to a lot of people that will make absolutely no difference to, you know, they all of a sudden will have an extra 150, 400 bucks, whatever the number is. And it's very fleeting and forgotten. It's not like people are going to go, oh, yeah, Danielle gave me that money that saved my ass. How well do we remember Justin Trudeau and the money that flooded out of the federal government? You know, we are fleeting. We're asking, that was nice, but what do we get now? And Danielle will find herself in the same spot when things
Carter
58:24
things progress, much to her chagrin, I'm sure.
Zain
58:29
Koi, are you in or out? Let's just ask the question through the raw political strategy lens. Are you in or out on potential Danielle dollars hitting mailboxes sometime in the new year in cold, hard Canadian non-Bitcoin cash?
Corey
58:47
I think they'll be popular, right? I do. I suspect that giving money to people and saying it's because of a windfall, because Alberta's back, because I'm standing up to Ottawa is a package that'll work for an awful lot of people.
Corey
59:01
you're going to have the ndp sitting there sputtering a bit trying to find some sort of clever line like yeah you've got danielle dollars but there's smith social collapse or you're faced with ucp underfunding with these danielle dollars or you know they're going to be looking for this tag that they can throw back at it but at the end of the day uh
Corey
59:20
uh people like free money what can you say right so you're probably not going to want to say much and you're going to want to move on and you're going to want to change the focus, but you're not going to want to dwell on the logic or not of the Danny dollars, which have no logic.
Corey
59:34
Stephen's right. Like you're going to fight inflation by giving people money. Why don't you fight fire with gasoline? It doesn't make any sense at all.
Corey
59:44
good strategy. But I think, well, I
Corey
59:47
think a good trap for the NDP. A good trap for the NDP because the NDP are going to want to swing at it. And I think the NDP partisans are going to want to swing at it. and that is the liability the ndp have they're going to have people online arguing against free money and that's going to not be popular with people
Corey
1:00:04
so you've got to change the channel quickly if you're the ndp if
Corey
1:00:07
if you manage to do that i ultimately don't think you've bought very much if you're daniel smith because those dollars will be forgotten quickly they always are people
Corey
1:00:15
people don't give the feds a lot of credit for the gst rebate the fact that it just doubled does anybody give give a fuck uh you know i mean i think actually a lot of give
Zain
1:00:24
give a lot of the feds credit for the serb that looks
Corey
1:00:27
looks like it's a lifetime
Zain
1:00:27
lifetime ago and yeah
Corey
1:00:28
yeah like what i was gonna say listen don't get me wrong people appreciate the money are they gonna vote for justin trudeau because of it no
Corey
1:00:35
right and so um you know it's it's limited return as long as the ndp doesn't take the bait and as long as ndp partisans can just keep their mouth shut and say yeah
Corey
1:00:45
yeah we all like free money but But let's
Corey
1:00:48
let's talk about these other 30 things that are going wrong under the UCP.
Zain
1:00:54
Corey, I'm going to stick with you for our next one. Overrated, underrated, the latest iteration. Please don't take an hour. Please, Corey, don't take an hour.
Carter
1:01:01
hour. It's going to be an hour. Of
Zain
1:01:01
Of the crypto crash. It's
Carter
1:01:02
It's going to be at least an hour. I'm just going to turn off my mic and
Carter
1:01:05
have a little snooze. The
Zain
1:01:06
The crypto crash, its latest iteration. Corey, this could be Professor Hogan, or this could be Hard Corey. I don't know.
Zain
1:01:14
So you choose. You choose which one.
Corey
1:01:23
uh look crypto is going down it's it's hitting new depths we're at the point now that uh in the last year it's down bitcoin is down about 75 so hey congratulations if you bought bitcoin in november of last year you
Corey
1:01:39
you sure lit some money on fire you're in elon musk levels of return at this this point and but truly i mean sorry about that that sucks a lot of people were shilling this stuff and acting as though it was the next great thing and a lot of people wanted to not miss a bus right um but one of the challenges is with the current iteration it is so drama laden like you've got one of these big exchanges essentially sewering one of these other big exchanges and and then being like well we'll buy you to bail you out no we're not going to do that but But like it took a tweet of one guy to effectively wipe out an immense amount of value in another exchange, which has then propagated into other exchanges going down and other, you know, exchanges maybe even too strong for some of these, you know, they're almost
Corey
1:02:26
almost like crypto style hedge funds. And
Corey
1:02:29
the thing is, now
Corey
1:02:31
now you have people saying things like, oh, I wish this stuff was regulated or, oh, I, you know, there should be insurance for this kind of thing. Oh, you mean like banks, like fiat currencies, like the things that you've been railing against? Put that aside for a minute. The
Corey
1:02:45
The real banks, the real money, the real money that has launched Bitcoin into the stratosphere has made it like a trillion dollar thing at one point, right?
Corey
1:02:55
That money's out. That money's saying this is way too volatile. That risk is much beyond what we actually even assessed. And we thought it was pretty risky. And you'll have a few people do it speculatively. But I think the days of pension funds buying into Bitcoin exchanges, they're
Corey
1:03:13
And they're over until something more dramatic happens on the regulatory side, which is so against the ethos that I just, I don't see it. So like one of the things is people
Corey
1:03:24
people are quick to point to, oh, look at the other times crypto has been up and then crypto has been down.
Corey
1:03:30
There are some fundamentally different things going on here. And the main one is what drove the last rise was scale, and that scale is out. That scale is not interested now because the volatility and the unprofessionalism of the entire sector cannot
Corey
1:03:48
Carter, anything to add?
Carter
1:03:49
Well, just there's a reason why money evolved to be state-backed, right? Right. The
Carter
1:03:55
The reason it evolved to this, again, it's almost like Musk ignoring the
Carter
1:04:00
the history of why,
Carter
1:04:04
you know, how Twitter
Carter
1:04:05
Twitter has developed. Well, money has developed in much the same fashion. Currency didn't begin with state backing. It moved to state backing when it became beneficial to the state to do so. This will never be beneficial to the state to back any of these cryptocurrencies. It doesn't make economic sense for them, and it doesn't make sense as a nation state. So don't expect that this is going to be bailed out. I mean, Corey's point about it being against the ethos also has a strong point to it, but But it's against the ethos of government to bail out something that is this speculative.
Zain
1:04:51
Corey, final question here. By Christmas of
Zain
1:04:55
of this year, will Elon Musk still be CEO of
Corey
1:05:01
Yeah, because who else would want that job? Who would take that job at this moment? Would you
Zain
1:05:04
you take that job if you were offered it tomorrow?
Corey
1:05:06
God, no. Would you? Would you want to work for Elon Musk? I mean, at one point, I thought maybe Jack would come back and run it. And that
Corey
1:05:14
that doesn't even seem plausible
Corey
1:05:16
plausible at this point.
Zain
1:05:18
Carter, Elon Musk still CEO of Twitter by Christmas? Well,
Carter
1:05:21
Well, on paper, I mean, what is it when you're bankrupt? Do you remain CEO when you're...
Zain
1:05:31
Oh, I could say so many things. I
Zain
1:05:33
I could say so many things.
Corey
1:05:35
Like of the three of us here, who's most likely to know the answer to that question, Stephen? Carter,
Zain
1:05:41
Carter, what are you talking about? Carter.
Zain
1:05:44
we're gonna leave it there that's a wrap on episode 10 14
Zain
1:05:46
14 of the strategist my
Zain
1:05:48
name is zade velji with me as always cory hogan stephen carter we will see you next time