Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
Nukes, ICE, And A Shutdown
A president told reporters he wanted to “start testing nuclear weapons” while flying to meet Xi, and the timing set off alarms. We break down what it would actually take to light a test in Nevada after three decades offline, why subcritical experiments and modeling already safeguard reliability, and how treaty logic—if you test, we test—has kept a fragile peace. From the START framework to real-world launch notifications and telemetry games, we pull from lived experience in satellite monitoring to explain how quickly trust erodes when declarations and data don’t match.
Then we take the conversation from megaton headlines to street-level power. A string of ICE clips shows masked agents grabbing phones and conducting chaotic stops—signs of poor identification, weak discipline, and no de-escalation. We talk about what communities can do: coordinated observation, legal observers, and local pressure that forces transparency. Sanctuary policies aren’t a cure-all, but procurement, oversight, and city leadership signal whether people or spectacle set the agenda.
The shutdown sits underneath it all, amplifying executive reach while Congress trades narratives about funding and blame. We explore how stalemates turn governance into messaging, and why reopening matters to everything from inspections to courts. That leads us to money and power: defining “excessive wealth,” closing loopholes that let mega-firms chew up roads without paying for them, and reviving antitrust and procurement rules that spread opportunity to small, veteran-, and women-owned businesses. Decorporatizing doesn’t mean ditching capitalism; it means aligning profit with place, quality jobs with transit, and incentives with real community value.
If you value clear-eyed analysis on nuclear policy, civil liberties, and the economics that touch your daily life, hit follow, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review with the one reform you’d prioritize first. Your take might shape our next conversation.
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Left Face. My name is Adam Gillard. I'm your co-host along with my co-host Dick Wilkinson. How are you doing, Dick? I'm doing good, Adam. How are you? Alright, I'm doing great. This week, I mean, just coming rolling in here, we had some big headlines rolling in about uh President Trump wanting to test nuclear weapons. And this is something that I I've kind of uh you know talked to a lot about on the show because you know I used to be pretty intimate and with with the nuclear enterprise.
SPEAKER_01:That's why I said this is one of your favorite topics.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I mean I had to tell you. There's a reason why we haven't tested these things in 30 years, right? Okay. Okay. And uh the fact that he even thinks that we need to test them is just an ignorance that a world leader should not have. Like how like damaging and like there's plenty of YouTube videos out there too that you can see how horrific these things can be and how much damage they cause, even if testing underground. But uh but his timing was questionable. So when when did he uh when did he make this announcement?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for me, that is the big crux of the story is that he was on Air Force One uh going to meet with President Xi from uh you know in Beijing, and as he's like getting ready to either fly to Beijing or he's already there, he's about to like go do stuff there. Um he he said to the US reporters, you know, I told Secretary Hagesh to immediately start testing nuclear weapons. And then like within hours, he was in the room with Xi.
SPEAKER_02:And so to me, that's like one thing that that I'm kind of I was interested about was did somebody hear him say that? Because he's been putting out a lot of truth social things that just don't sound like him and don't read like him. And so I I saw the video.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well that it was one of those inside Air Force One where he's like standing in that one doorway and he was always kind of yelling back into the plane.
SPEAKER_02:Right, if he can lean, yeah, yeah, it was there, yeah, yeah. So okay. Yeah, I was wondering if it came out of his mouth because I I really worry about like some of the directions coming out because he's made it, he's normalized giving directions through social media now. Yeah. So that anybody that has control of his social media I mean decrees, yeah. Thank you for the attention. Um but and so anybody that has control of his social media, and there's times where it's coherent, so you know it's not him. Uh yeah, his last one was cut and paste the South Caribbe or something like that. You see that his last uh truth social post was South Carriage or something like that, and McCarri was misspelled with a couple D's, but it was it was just something random and just not coherent. Uh but then he'll come out with like a three-paragraph thing about like history and like the you know how it's a play plain clear labels now and things like that. Yeah, so it's clearly written by somebody else with clear agendas on where he wants things, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So the fact that he's gotta be a media uh office, right, that's like doing some of that stuff. But we know for sure he doesn't his thumbs are running the screen a lot of the time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. Um but so with uh with the nukes thing, what would happen if if he did, you know, set one up?
SPEAKER_01:Well, one how long would it take? So the estimate I heard on the news this morning was that for the underground testing facilities in Nevada that prep, you know, it's been over 30 years since any, you know, since we mothballed or shut down those facilities to just be in in like on the shelf. That it would take two years to stand one of those back up and and like refurb it and have it ready to go for a modern test. So there's no such thing as immediate for definitely not an underground, which I think for all treaty purposes we've agreed that like underground and underwater are a safer or more, you know, like more tolerable. Yeah. So, you know, outside of doing one above ground, which I don't know that you have to do much facility prep for uh you know popping something off in the desert, which you could do that fast. But I mean, if you're gonna do a treaty-based scientifically safe test, it's gonna be a couple years. So again, it's a timing to say some words out loud, and then nobody cares for the next, you know, until it's if it they were serious and they got it already in two years. That headline, the distance between one to the other, doesn't make any sense. So yeah, it sounds like gamesmanship, like you said, saber rattling. Right. Um because even Russia was like, okay. Yeah, right. They said, Well, if you do it, we'll do it, right? Which that's the point of the treaty that we that's been the state of play for 50 years, the START Treaty, right? Is like if you do it, we'll do it. Yeah, but if you don't do it, we won't do it. Right. And so we've succeeded at that. Uh fun little fact, I was at work um when the START treaty expired. I was on shift. All right. And I was on shift in a place where we were responsible for monitoring, you know, weapon movement, right? And uh that was uh it was weird. Uh, you know, it was it was uh one of those like, well, everybody knows when the treaty expires, yeah. So not that we have any indication that it's gonna be a free-for-all like that next day, but the tone of what to expect just changes, right? In one minute, it goes from we have something and now we don't have something. And I think that's a good thing. Was it like overhead reconnaissance or something? What was the big threat? Uh oh well, I mean, I was working in that field of you know, satellites, right? And so we were doing treaty monitoring of anything that gets shot off, or you know, if something is announced, but then it doesn't do what they we were told it was gonna do, right? That's another thing is if certain the tests just just launches happen in certain regions of the northern global area, right? Like the polar area, that kind of stuff, everybody's gotta tell everybody else like what's going on so that nobody freaks out and starts shooting, you know, shooting off you know, retaliatory stuff, right? But sometimes that those declarations don't go as planned, or they are declared one way and then something else happens, right? And so that was really the big thing that we figured was gonna start happening was like, okay, after the treaty ends, they may tell us the day they're gonna pop something off, but no accuracy on where, what direction, what type of payload, how long distance, what are they testing, what's the purpose, like all that stuff could just be make believe. Yeah, but yeah, they'll just start playing with scare tactics and and so that was really the big thing was we might still know the indicators of standard indicators of when testing might happen, even if it's not nuclear, but like uh war distance, you know, long-range missiles and stuff. Um, we just thought we'd start to lose accuracy on like the what was really going on versus what they told us versus what we could observe, you know. And and so it was just weird. It was one of those high pucker moments of like, oh uh oh, you know, that security plug in the city. Things just changed, man. Yeah, so yeah, but nothing happened. And then uh not too long after the START treaty was renegotiated and turned back on. So yeah, yeah. But it was a it was a little while, it was a few weeks. I feel like it was a few weeks or even a few months before there was a gap for a minute there.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so it's kind of weird. That's crazy. Yeah, I think uh you know, if he is able to do it, it's just so that he can say that he did it. You know, if he goes above, I agree. You know, I I don't think there's any benefit because we've done so much studies on this. Uh we know how like going above ground gets makes it really dangerous because if it does pop off too high, then you risk EMP and large.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and or just dispersing, you know, clouds of radiation, even right? Like again, it's too high, it's getting up with a higher jet stream, you know, movement. Like it's not good.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And you know, the the fallout paths are always, you know, they're gonna hit a major city eventually. Yeah, and you're gonna lose millions and millions of people.
SPEAKER_01:Uh so the deal, I I got a history piece there. I lived in New Mexico for a long time, right? So the Trinity side is there, and of course, there are still ongoing like um cases of litigation that are like through family lines at this point of exposure to radiation. Right. Uh the the but one of the things that I know people don't don't know if you don't live down there, the desert out there is super sparse. Um, in you know, anywhere out south of Albuquerque, all the way down to pretty much the border. Like you're gonna have just entire counties that are just very lightly populated, super sparse desert. And there are people that live out there, but they are not in declared properties because they're just way out in the middle of nowhere. So they're not on the map necessarily, right? Uh, that's still the case now in 2025. There are people that live in places that are not registered as a domicile. Now, um, think back to when the Trinity site was going on. There were people that were just uh farmers that were, you know, basically the government hadn't if there's not a road out that way, there's no address. We know people live out on those farms, but we don't know how many people and we don't really know where they're at. So the census isn't accurate and the property maps aren't accurate. Right. So there were people that were, they thought there were no humans within X number of miles away from there, right? Wrong. You know, like there were people living in farmhouses that were much, much closer and in the path of you know, radioactive radioactive material that just the government literally didn't know they were there, right?
SPEAKER_02:You know, so well it and unfortunately, like even when the government did know and they moved people out, they did it destroys the land. So you look at the bikini at all. Yeah, you know, we moved folks out and then just decimated it for a hundred years, you know, it's not habitable. Um and it's it's funny because that's where the uh the bikini became a big sellable item. Okay, is they were uh the the natives of the islands that they uh pro were protesting outside the UN and uh part of the UN is. Um, but they were protesting out there and they were wearing their traditional clothing, and some you know Western marketer was like, hey, we can sell those. And that's where the like bikinis really took off in the in the 60s. I wondered the connection between that. It was after we blew up their islands, they were protesting, and people were like, Well, they're cute, and started marketing.
SPEAKER_01:A golden ticket in the American economy, right? You just have to trade your ancestral.
SPEAKER_02:Well, no, they got nothing for it, they got no money for it or anything, but like they still have a destroyed bone well. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Uh uh. So, all right, that's the story about nukes. I mean, I guess what's our take on it? Nothing, it's a it's a fun headline for a few days, and then there's nothing. Yeah, I think it's a saber rattle at this point. I agree. And and my take on it too is there's I don't know of any benefit of like it's not like we uh created some kind of new fissile material that we need to we want to put in the warhead and we're gonna test or something like that. Like there's we know I don't think we have anything like that that anybody would care to test. Now, if you say for the next 10 years, we're gonna open up experimentation, right? And then there would be a timeline where people might start to come up with stuff, but it'd be a few years away. And of course, it has nothing to do with the political pressure of what he's trying to put together right now.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it and you mentioned uh a possible correlation between people asking for more nuclear energy and people wanting to test for nuclear energy and test the new you know uh systems and things like that that are being in place because even after 2011, we learned so much about keeping things safe. Um so that there might be some just misinformation wires for us coming out where like you know somebody told him one thing and he he immediately jumps to nuclear weapons because that's where his mind is. For sure.
SPEAKER_01:And yeah, it was on um Fox News uh business, you know, their business channel or whatever. Uh the Secretary of Commerce was on there and he said, Oh, China's opening up nuclear power centers all over the place, and they're just they're gonna blow us out of the water on power production. Um, yeah, okay. What what like that's the Department of Energy and that stuff's being tested all the time, that stuff's being developed all the time. We just need to invest in actually building the facilities.
SPEAKER_02:That's the thing that's holding us back. Well, and I didn't realize he was talking about China's government spending on that. So yeah, yeah, it makes sense that you know Trump probably watched Fox News on the flight over the Sunsan before he's walking into the media like no, you did make stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, maybe. Yeah, who knows? Those wires, yeah, that could be how the wires cross. Yeah, right. Good call. But yeah, but uh self-licking ice cream cone.
SPEAKER_02:That is the Republican Party. Make a problem, make it make a big deal out of the problem, and then say it solved. Solve the problem that you made. Yeah, yeah, the make-believe stuff. Um, but a real life problem here, uh creeping closer and closer to us here in uh Colorado Springs, is uh we had a big ice run-in, you know, yesterday, the day before, down in Durango. Uh a man and his two kids were taken by ice, and families have received no information on where they are. We uh had some protesters down there outside the ice facility, and you know, I showed you the video earlier where an ice agent is seen snatching a phone from a lady, and then when the lady went after it, uh because one, I I again I like to point out that this is not like confiscating evidence. This is a snap like somebody stealing your phone. Yes, you know, this is an unidentified mask coward stealing a phone from an old lady.
SPEAKER_01:Not a not a uh an law enforcement activity, correct.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, because the person wasn't breaking the law, they weren't being a good idea. Well, at that point, again, you haven't you have well, he hasn't identified himself as a cop either. Like you're standing around in a mask and you're not providing identification, like you're not law enforcement. Yeah, you know, you're you're a Gestapo.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so you're right, yeah. I saw it. The phone snatching was just obviously not related to it was an antagonizing event.
SPEAKER_02:Like it was meant to identify and draw her to him. And when she got to him, she he grabbed her kind of around the neck and then you know uh wrestled down a hill a little bit. And even his fellow ICE agents were kind of pulling at him to kind of like break up the fight. Break up the fight, yeah. Yeah, and it's just it's getting it's gonna get closer and closer, and it's horrific that it's happening out there. Uh, but you know, we have a pretty red area here where we have a sheriff and a mayor saying that it's okay to test things in this area. Um, so it's gonna be getting closer and closer, and you know, what what do we do as a community to to keep ICE from just kidnapping people off the streets? What can be done?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we talked before about the kind of social resistance aspect of watching where you know deployments of ice people go. That's got some gotta have some benefit. Um the I don't think that, you know, you're right politically, there's not any layer of government here from the city council to the mayor to the county commission to anybody like that. To the governor. Yeah. Like I don't think there's any protection. Yeah, but I'm saying it right even right here in our neighborhood, but you're right, even at the governor level. Um, I don't see a governmental agency that's gonna step in and try and create any resistance there. Um, so it's gonna have to be, you know, social, a socially grassroots driven kind of thing. Like there's not gonna be a call for sanity to any level of government where someone might I'm not a big fan of the Sanctuary City concept because I don't know, it just sends a weird message, I guess. And like, I don't know. I get the benefit of it, but I also see this like weird messaging behind it.
SPEAKER_02:So that's kind of I understand that, but at the end of the day, you still have to do what's right by people. And like the whole messaging and marketing, that's just because of our society and like how we've just swallowed up this 24-hour news cycle where everybody has to know everything about everything and involved in everything and have an opinion on everything. True.
SPEAKER_01:So here's something that I'll bring this up as a kind of a point on this. So when I was down in, I visited Albuquerque about two weeks ago, and they've got a mayoral race going on down there, and the incumbent is in the race. Uh, he that it is a non-party affiliated setup for the mayoral race down there, but people are party aligned, right? So it's like the secret, you know, I'm not on the ballot as a Democrat, but I'm on TV and you know that I'm a Democrat. Right, right. And so when I was there, I saw in the morning time news that was on in like the hotel lobby, all the government, the government like uh election commercials were on, right? And so it was interesting. And this is something I think this is the where you want to live, is in this type of community. The mayors were on TV, the people running for mayor were trying to outdo each other on who's the hardest against ice. How are they gonna protect the community? Because it's Albuquerque, New Mexico, right? Man, that's you know, if they're willing to go to a Home Depot in Pennsylvania to get somebody, yeah, like just go to New Mexico, right? Like especially these untrained people. You want to just go arrest people, like you know, so there's a huge risk to the population now there. So the mayors are trying to argue about who's the most like hardcore to defeat ice in the Albuquerque neighborhood, right? Um it was such a totally different flip-flop when we're gonna be able to do that what you would see here.
SPEAKER_02:Because here like the even our media is just really quiet on everything that they just want to avoid like we were talking, we tried to talk to some uh news stations about the protests and things like that, and they're like, no, we don't really do protest stuff. And it's like, well, I mean, we just pulled out 20,000 people and had a peaceful event. Yeah, that that's kind of a big deal. Yeah, you know, that that's a good percentage of the population, but but they don't want to touch it. Um I agree, local media is a little scaredy cat on a lot of political topics, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. And uh I I was shocked that the Gazette even published some stuff that I wrote. Wow. Uh but it was more from a veteran standpoint.
SPEAKER_01:So um you know, uh but yeah, it was we get to be a little surreptitious sometimes, right? Right to cross those lines and you know like deliver messages in a little bit different form or a little bit different angle, right? So but that's why we have a group like this, is so that we can find the places to do that and have that influence, right? So yeah, I agree. Well, I'm I'm concerned after seeing that video, uh that you know, the goonmanship as I like to call it, unprofessionalism, and right like that they're untrained, yeah, that they have zero discipline.
SPEAKER_02:I'm sorry, but you have to be able to stand there and get people screaming at you and spitting in your face, and you don't react. You can't insult them. Yeah, you can't get in there and be like how many people have done door guard and basic training where like your whole thing is just to stand there at the door and get screamed at, and and peace, you know, somebody like violently threatening you and you just don't react. You know, it it's part of the training when you're talking about crowd control and like being able to de-escalate situations is being able to de-escalate yourself. Sure. You know, that's always the first thing that that we're we're taught and we're trained is that you need to keep your shit together because once you're if you're out of control, that everything's everything's out of control. Yeah, and so we have these untrained people with weapons that are going up to vehicles and just shooting into vehicles.
SPEAKER_01:I saw the crash, I saw the like hard, it was um the one guy that was he was basically driving in circles, trying to get away from this pickup truck, and that was a no-lights, not marked, yeah, you know, Dodge pickup truck that was chasing this other guy in circles, right? In the middle of the street, and then finally that guy decided to start driving straight to like kind of get out of the loop, and so the other car, the truck just ran up and rammed him on the side, and there, you know, it was not they had never identified themselves, or the dude didn't know what was going on, right? This car just starts chasing him and then crashes into him. Yeah, that was like last week.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so yesterday, the day before, a an American citizen woman uh was pulled over um in a brochure vehicle shot while she had her kid in the car. Yeah, and like there's no reason, you know, like yeah, it's just untrained, unprofessional, just absolutely a trained goon squad, like you called it. You know, and this is all during a time when the government shut down. Oh, yeah, they have all these funds to go around and breaking up families, harassing people, killing people, and our government shut down. Christy Noam bought two private jets that for a company that's or for an organization that's already triggered the anti-deficiency acts months ago. So that means they blew past their budget months ago, pissing away money left and right, and for photo ops and social media ops.
SPEAKER_01:Is the scourge of immigration, as Donald Trump would call it, the is it I guess what they're trying to say is ideologically that is the most dangerous and top priority, and like can't take our eyes off the ball if we stop doing this, like it's just days until America falls. You know, that's that's the level of fervor they're putting into this mission and prioritizing, like you said, financially to the point of ignoring every other duty of the government to fund this. For what? For what? For law-abiding decisions to get snatched out uh to deport people? Like, I know that I even if you really think that immigration was this terrible, really it was millions and millions of people and they were all criminals, blah blah blah. Even if you believe all of that, is that really more important than getting the government back in operation so that every other part of society can keep moving and doing what it's supposed to do? Yeah, it can't be right.
SPEAKER_02:Well, but it's the it's also the crux of their argument when it comes to that you know 1.5 trillion that the Democrats are asking for in the House. They're saying, Well, they're trying to give that money to illegals, you know, getting getting, you know, Medicare or whatever. Yeah. And it's just a complete lie. It is. Absolutely complete lie. I heard it again this week. They never get money like that from the government. Yeah, like card holding, like green card holders can get money.
SPEAKER_01:The people that believe it will believe it no matter what face of evidence that is given to them, statements from the actual government agencies that execute those funds, you know, like it doesn't matter what you show them. Yeah, the narrative, it's that's it. It's blasting through a bullhorn in their brain. And the idea that it that that could just not be true, that there's not going to be medical aid for illegal people, yeah. They will they won't believe it, right? Period.
SPEAKER_02:They'll hold their breath and pass out before they would believe that. And that that's why like I'm just at that point now where I'm just okay with the shutdown to so that people can can learn some things about how things are supposed to work. You know, that they don't just get to that. You're right, it exposes some of the functions of how the gears turn, where the cracks in the government are, yeah, you know, and like and the folks that you voted for that are these cogs running in reverse, you know, trying to clog things up. Uh we're in an education moment. And however it depends on how many people want to take that lesson in and actually reflect on it and be like, oh man, we took this for granted. Yeah, we need to do a lot of work to fix what's going on here, and we need to prioritize people over corporations. I think that's where the big downfall kind of happened, is when we started giving corporations the power of the people. You know, once they were able to fund our elections and just you know, kind of pick their own little shadow CEOs to run in the government for them, yeah um that's where we lost our government when we started being four corporations. Sure. So uh I I think people need to wake up to that. And you know, this this fight here, you know, they're saying it's the 1.5 trillion for you know to have healthcare, which is again a valid thing to fight for somebody. Yeah, but if they and if we don't fight for it, they're gonna lose it anyways. Yeah, because like it's clear on that that they want to roll back all these social networks. Oh, yeah. You know, it's written down again. Project 2025 is a checklist. Yeah, like they're rolling back everything that they said they were gonna do. People need to wake up and see to feel some of this pain.
SPEAKER_01:Let me let me ask you this. Um actually, we're gonna take just a little bit of a sideways. We're gonna get into the financial topic here. We're on government shutdown, but let's talk about we're gonna talk about how liberal or what's seen those the left side of the spectrum determines some of the financial things like decorporatizing America. Yeah, so let's talk about that for a moment. But first, I'm gonna put this little almost like a in the textbooks where there's that little gray box that it's about the topic, but it's not part of the reading. Yeah, this with this part is okay. So um I was on the internet the other day, which is not a you know, stay off the internet, kids. It's not good for you. Um, but the uh somebody wrote the terms about saying that, you know, they're bad, they're mad at billionaires, they don't like billionaires, but then they used a term of getting rid of excessive wealth, right? That a society that had, you know, allows people to have this excessive wealth is like doomed to fail. Something like that. That was the kind of the message. And so I asked, uh, because this is where I get into it. I like to learn about people's viewpoints on things. What do you determine is excessive wealth, right? Yeah. Because I feel like almost every person you ask would have a different definition for what that is, which is why the liberal movement rarely can get a consensus around what exactly does that mean, right? And so then how would we execute policy on that definition? Yeah. I've asked 50 people this question over the past 10 years, right? Uh something like that. How much is too much? Uh fair share. Make billionaires pay their fair share, Bernie Sanders says. What does fair share mean, Bernie Sanders? No, you're never going to define that. You'll stay in office talking about it forever, but it's nebulous. It's like the global war on terrorism. It's a global war on billionaires. It's a nebulous enemy that has too much. What is too much? And what is fair share? Right. And so this guy, I said, What is excessive wealth? And he answered the question. First time ever that somebody came back with a cogent, fully thought-out response that wasn't a point in another direction of what about ism, uh, you're stupid or you're fascist or you're racist or whatever they want to say, make up something. He gave me an answer. And the answer wasn't completely insane. It wasn't a tinfoil hat, you know, brewed up in some crazy conspiracy, right? He said, if for any society, if you look at the for the wage earners is really the only way you can do this. But if you look at wage earners um and you say what's the median wealth of that culture at that time for for all working people, then 100 times that median, anything more than 100 times that would be considered excessive. And you at that point cannot have a value associated with that excessive money. It's just becomes play money, and you become like you say, we can throw a billion here, a billion there, and it's just stupid, right? Yeah, and so that was their that was their kind of window to define that. Yeah, and I was like, hey, I'm not even gonna like I'm not gonna get into the each with you on how much money is too much or whatever. Like, thank you for answering the question and having a number associated with it. Right. I don't know how I feel about your number, but dude, you're the first first person out of 50 times I've ever asked that question that answered it. Yeah, so there you go. There's my little gray box kind of tidbit. What are your what's your thought on that number? Would it be something that would be useful as a defining point? So so let's put a he said something. The math he showed it was like 2.3 million dollars a year, or maybe more than that.
SPEAKER_02:So if you make 50,000, so like average medium income for median income is like 50,000. Sure. So that would make it what five million a year? I don't know. I don't remember. Because you would add two zeros. Yeah. So five million million a year. Five million a year. Sure. So I mean, in today's day and age, that that's pretty low, honestly. Right. That would be hard to get through.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Um, but yeah, that's low on the terms of excessive, right? But then you know, that's every single year that you're making five million dollars. It's not you owe five million dollars. It's like, hey, for the next 20 years, yeah, you're gonna make a billion dollars or something like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, just give us a g a better percentage of it. Yeah, I mean, it it is nice to have a jumping off point when you get this conversation. So I was just like, oh, because like when I think of like having the billionaires and the excessive wealth, and we've talked about it a few times, it's not so much that they have unlimited money, it's the fact that people all around us don't have money to pay for their dental care or or their health care. Like you can go to space, but the people who are building your companies and delivering your packages should be able to like take a mental health day to go get dental care done. You know, like it's the fact that they exploit their workers and then gallivant around like we're they're like they're the victims. Like, you know, because people don't like them, because you know, they spend 60 million dollars on multiple weddings, do you you know, like like you're a victim here? Like sure. No, shut up, sit down. Oh no, like I I have zero tolerance for shit like that. I yeah. And like, and so when we ask about it, you can't be tone-deaf billionaire, or you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01:I'm not I'm not mad at billionaires, but don't be a tone deaf billionaire.
unknown:Come on.
SPEAKER_02:But but I mean, so you know, excess wealth, uh until we have a system that takes care of every person, whether they're a homeless person that just needs a place to stay, um, uh a mother, you know, struggling to get health care for their kid for her kids, you know, so you know they can actually you know smile and have braces. Yeah um like we should be doing these things as a society before we have people race into space or setting themselves up for a trillion dollar salary. It's ridiculous. Like as humanity, like even when you go back to you know founding principles of our constitution, you you know, like life, liberty, and happiness was for everybody, not these 800 billionaires.
SPEAKER_01:The pursuit, the pursuit guarantee, right? Yeah, right. I guess we should clarify that. Yeah, the pursuit. A lot of people are not they're gonna pursue real hard and not achieve some of those things, right?
SPEAKER_02:But but that's on us to change that. And like we the the systemic things that are you know set up in our government to keep people down.
SPEAKER_01:Like so there you go. There's there's my I guess our closing pondering point here is what I wanted to ask a minute ago. Now that we've kind of identified where you feel about that number and the fact that a number could exist somewhere in the world, right. And it's not all just you know squishy, totally squishy, right? Um, how would you envision, right? Here's the pitfalls. I guess I'm gonna talk you through decorporatizing the political system or decorporatizing just American society. How do you do that without basically relying on what sounds like communist talking points, communist principles, socialist principles, right? Like I believe there is a way to thread this needle where where a decorporatization could happen, and and it doesn't inherently mean we're all crunchy hippies living in communes. But when the topic gets argued in a 10-minute debate, you know, then there's that that's just what it sounds like, right? Is like you you're just you hate money and you want to like milk goats for a living, and like you, you know, the rat race is bad for everybody, whatever, right? So how do you how do you so like posture a you know a decorporatization and and do that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's been done in the past. You know, when you tell me more. Uh Teddy Roosevelt was before I was alive. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Teddy Roosevelt, though. Yeah, like the uh a true progressive, though. Okay. Um you know, he his big thing was taking on the corporations and making sure that other folks got a piece of the pie and just having corporations overwhelm it. And so, you know, this a big attack on DEI and like you know, special things, like right now when when uh um contracts, defense contracts go through the Pentagon, they could all go to Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing. Um, but there's rules and stipulations to go to women-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses. Were yes, past dance. So trying to break up things at the government level and and and have a legislation there that says, no, we're good, we're we're not just gonna give Raytheon a blank check to do whatever the hell they want. They have to give money to other people. Like, that's the government's role. That's what they did good is making sure that there were some layers there so that one one group of other things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. The the taxpayer spending was based on American virtues and not just the what vacuum cleaner could suck the money up the fastest.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Exactly. We went full capitalism. Sure. And you need government to balance it out. Yeah, you know, like this.
SPEAKER_01:And that was the other, I didn't want to say that dirty word, but how do you decorporatize America without suspending capitalism? Because America and capitalism are literally capitalism is the blood that America runs on.
SPEAKER_02:So you just start charging them. Yeah. It's not that complicated. But like close some of the loopholes so that like the Amazon factory down here in town that has thousands of trucks on our roads has to pay some road taxes. They pay zero taxes. Okay. Close some loopholes. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's what you're saying, yeah. And then get that money back into a channel where the voting population can control the spend of it based on the values of that community, right? Which is what we're talking about with the having government contracts that are available to people that aren't just mega corporations, right? Yeah. So you get to do that at each level of government, and I guess you can extract that money back out through public works type programs like that, where there's a cost of pay-to-play cost, right? Um, but we see the opposite of that going on right now from a financial perspective, where governments at the state and local levels compete to undercut each other on taxes, to attract the corporation, because the corporation's gonna bring jobs, right? You know, and uh you can't see me, but I'm putting quotes on this bring jobs, right? Um, and so yeah, that's a man, that's a hard one to balance because if you're a politician, you go, okay, we're gonna get 3,000 people, you know, in a big, big giant factory situation, we're gonna get a couple thousand people jobs, right? Wow, that's there's some value to that, right? There's some economic churn that gets baked out of that, right? And then you say, okay, we're willing to basically shell trade, which is the shell game, we're gonna say, okay, there's this bucket of money, which is economic, you know, juice from the employment, and then there's this bucket of money, which is taxes that should come from that just revenue stream that we charge every other business in the community. When they make money, their revenue gets taxed, right? We want to tax that revenue. But if we tax them at the same rate as we do all the other companies, those two, three thousand jobs don't come to town. Right. I'm not uh I'm not trying to say I'm in favor of one side or the other, but that's what happens at that one. When I get the governor, it does.
SPEAKER_02:Well, because those two, three thousand jobs, they vote for their jobs, not understanding so much that it's you know under$20 an hour. I think like 80 to 90 percent of their jobs are under$20. For Amazon year, for Amazon and a couple other big companies, super warehouse places, yeah. Yeah, they're always under$20 an hour. Okay, barely you're trying to earn your way up over$20,000 wages. Sure. So even fighting for those jobs, and then you know, you don't have public transportation, so you're paying for a car that's getting beat up by the roads that are getting beat up by those trucks, you know. So did they keep passing all these extra taxes down for the case? So it's like one step forward, two steps back, kind of and people just aren't educated enough to vote for people that are gonna stand up and say no, like we can't do this. Yeah, but again, it goes to Texas. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
SPEAKER_01:It doesn't matter if there's if your mayor stands up and says we have morals here, and then the factory goes somewhere else, that's you know, because there's somewhere in America that's willing to say, Well, we don't need all that, we'll give you less taxes, we'll give you whatever, we'll put you in the power grid, we'll do the X, Y, and Z.
SPEAKER_02:I don't think a city needs to grow all the time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I know that's a crazy thing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I hear having a population just constantly like exponentially growing. Like, let's take a breath. So on the report, let's try to figure some shit out first.
SPEAKER_01:That's it's uh, you know, every every executive has a report card, right? Right. So that's on the report card, right? Because how much did it something grow? Whatever, how can you measure it, right? So yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Status quo is you know, yeah, no fun. Yeah. So back to the shutdown. How long do you think we're at like 30 days right now? How long do you think the government shutdown is gonna uh roll on?
SPEAKER_01:I'm still sticking to my last week's uh crystal ball um, you know, vision that right before Thanksgiving, um I had finally started to see reporting in not uh I have a I got an inside track. I got a reporter that is a private reporter that does this like kind of private publication stuff. And so I read his I read some stuff that he's inside the space industry, right? So he's got real a better ear on the ground on internal financial stuff sometimes. And so uh he's starting to talk about dates for if they were to open back up the continuing resolution, like what are the kick the can kind of goals for each party, and which certain which uh senators are getting to the point of like, oh, well, yeah, if we were gonna do it, it would be on these kind of terms. Okay, those are the things people weren't saying those for the last three weeks. Nobody would talk about any kind of like, well, if I had my wish, this is what we would do. Yeah, now senators are starting to have those kind of conversations publicly with you know media and in out loud and where people can hear them, right? But the leadership are still 100% like, nope, we already said no negotiations, there's nothing to talk about, there's nothing to negotiate. Come back and vote to open the government, and then we'll have a conversation. That's still the position of Thune and Schumer. They have zero communication and no intentions to do anything. Yeah, so um there's it's totally mixed messaging right now. There's there's people that are starting to get a little squishy and wanting to open things back up, and then there are the the top people that are like, no, we're not doing it.
SPEAKER_02:Let it roll. Yeah, and that's the camp I'm in. But like I said, like so.
SPEAKER_01:Here's the the Republicans like the idea of let it roll because as long as the government is closed, the executive branch has almost all the powers of the legislative branch, too. And so you get as long as we stay closed, Donald Trump has basically double the power. He already took it. I know. He's already taken it.
SPEAKER_02:I'm just saying, like that's where they're gonna do their authority the last time that they approved the budget, and Trump did the like said one thing and then did exactly that. But like they've already seated the last bit of authority. This is the last bit of authority that they have. Like he was already doing all this shit.
SPEAKER_01:Remember this as you know, as a senator, you know your job is to be a part of the balancing act of checks and balances, right? But if you've basically given up the your agency of being a senator and you're always gonna vote party line, you're always gonna vote with you know dear leader, then it's much easier for you to say, hey, I'm not in I'm not in control of this, I'm not in charge of this. Absolutely. As long as the government is shut down, we get to just blame the Democrats or Schumer or some other you know, ghost imminent you know thing that's out there. Well, and and as long as you know I get to just get out of the way, right?
SPEAKER_02:Like, you know you say blame Schumer, but I think that's a Schumer tactic in itself, because at the last time they passed this, he took a lot of heat for it, like, oh you coward, you know, everything like that. So yeah, so now he's just gonna step back and be like, okay, you guys. Yeah, that's true too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, right. Yeah, you I mean it's bad all the way around, is the problem, right?
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:We uh but I could see being myself being somebody like that's not always gonna carry the water of my chosen partisan group, right? On either side, whatever. Then there's gonna be days where I'm like, I just think you guys are dumb, right? Yeah, and I would love to be able to just kick back and get all the way out of the limelight and be like, yeah, I'm a senator for six years, luckily. So I get to just chill for these couple years while stupid stuff is going on and blame somebody else, right? And like legitimately do that if the government shut down. I get to like really have an excuse instead of a BS town hall excuse. I get to have a real excuse for a little while, right? Like, I would love that. Yeah. Break it. That's fine. We'll put it back together next year, you know. That that would be Senator Wilkinson, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. With all you know this stuff going on, you know, the government shut down, you know, the ice, the blowing up boats and everything like that, all these distractions going on just makes you wonder what's in those Epstein files.
SPEAKER_00:Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I started to see joke images of the ballroom. And I know we didn't talk about the ballroom very much, but uh we uh I don't know where we're at on time, but the ballroom's a different topic. Yeah, he's probably building a little buddy room for Epstein. Well, that's one of the there was the jokes was like, you know, the Epstein Memorial Ballroom. Yeah, and like the like a bronze plate of him and you know, Trump and Epstein like carved it with their heads together. Yeah, yeah, the statue that they keep putting up in the yeah, yeah, inside the like fountain of the ballroom or something.
SPEAKER_02:It was that yeah, how how horrific is that? Anyways, all right. Well, that's our episode for this week. Thanks for tuning in. Uh catch you again next week on the face. Thanks, everybody. Thanks.
