Bill Kristol: A Stupid and Insane Foreign Intervention

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Boy, do we got a next level-sized long jumbo pod for you today. Lot is happening in the news and we got some great guests lined up this week. So we are ready for 2026. It is Monday. So we have our new segment we've been doing now on Mondays, which is our mailbag. This is for Bull Work Plus members only. So stick around at the end of show. Bull Work Plus members to get into the mailbag. People asked if I'm a secret origami head. You will hear the answer to that. Sponsored to SonPiker and others. So stick around for the mailbag. If you haven't joined Bull Work Plus yet, 2026, it's time to do it. Go to thebullwork.com to sign up. We'd appreciate having you. You'll get these mailbags on Mondays plus their JBL secret pod on Fridays and just a bunch of other great stuff. So we're doing our best to put in the work to make that valuable for all of you. We'd love to have you as part of the community. Up next, it is Monday. So you're going to get Bill Crystal talking about Rudyard Kipling. Stick around. Hello and welcome to the Bull Work Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday. And so I've got editor at large, Bill Crystal. Bill, no rest for the weary here. We got plenty to talk about today. And we get to Tim Walls not running for the elections, Governor of Minnesota and a bunch of other politics stuff at the end. But since we are last together, we have orchestrated a coup in Venezuela apparently with not a whole lot of plan for what's after that. I will say the most important subtext of the story is that we taped our New Year's predictions last year. And my prediction was that Trump was going to actually do them on road doctrine and go into Venezuela and or Greenland. And so it took three days for me to be right. My other predictions, in case you're wondering, was that Trump would have a health event and that the Democrats wouldn't win the Senate. So a mixed bag for people. Did you bet on that first prediction on what's that called? Polymarket? I did not. You could have been one of those guys who gets written up as having bet X amount and made $10 trillion. Yeah. I'm not doing any insider trading, which is a loss for me. So I have a lot to get from you, Bill. I want to use your historical perspective. You quoted Rudger Kipling this morning. I want to hear about Panama. I was a young child when we got when we cued, Noriega is really quick for me. You know, now, just to settle a little bit, the news came out Saturday morning when I was in New York and there is this kind of tendency for people to want to throat clear and say, well, Maduro was very bad. And then there's a counter tendency for people to criticize the throat clearing. You don't need to do that. And I guess my opinion on this is that like it's, it's kind of important actually to throw clear on Maduro being bad because Maduro is awful and has caused unbelievable human suffering in Venezuela. There's this massive diaspora out of Venezuela for people fleeing him, including people that then we kidnapped and sent to foreign prisons. But Venezuela is a country that, that had real economic potential and vibrancy not that long ago, like in my lifetime. And what Maduro and Chavez before him has done to the country is horrible. And I'm not one of those people that does not think that matters to the U.S. Like it does matter for countries in our hemisphere to, to not have like massive refugee crisis and be run by totalitarian dictators. Like we should have at some level some view on that and some role. And I think that like saying that clearly is important to get to the next point, which is we're not doing anything to fix that. Like this is insane. Like what we're doing is insane. It doesn't do anything to help the Venezuelan people or our interests in any clear way. Like this is all a big ego, megalomaniacal plot for Donald Trump to, you know, feel like he achieves some expansion as goals or we'll get into it. He's upset that he didn't get the peace prize or I for all these narcissistic reasons we're doing this. And because of Marco's like random compunctions, there's no plan for making life better for the Venezuelan people. There's no clear interest for the United States to do this imminently. There's obviously no clear interest in the United States to do this imminently and illegally. None of their stated reasons even make sense, which we'll get into. And so for me, it's like saying that Maduro is bad is not to say, oh, I would have supported this wasn't for Trump. It's to say that no, like the US should care about, you know, the policy and the lives of people that are certainly that are in our neighborhood. And this is not an effort to deal with that at all. And I think anybody that is celebrating because they hate Maduro, I understand, but I think they're misguided and it doesn't seem like that what's going to come from this is going to make them much happier. So that's my short take. I'm curious for you, I kind of wrote Bill Crystal Cooks next and then we're going to go into the details. No, no, I'm very much in accord with your short take. I just to just emphasize your point about the you call the throat clearing, let's just say the being legitimately happy that Maduro has gone. His election was regarded as illegitimate. We and many others didn't recognize his government doesn't mean you automatically go and interpose him, obviously. But it was more than just us looking around and saying, well, this guy's bad. Or there's an actual international effort to help the opposition to recognize the opposition and so forth. And of course, culminating, I suppose, and Mr. Pashado is getting the Nobel Peace Prize. So as foreign interventions go, I would say in that respect, it was reasonably justified, whether it fully is in accord with domestic law or international law, congressional notification, authorization, many, many issues. But I'd say I'm on the side of being not willing to stipulate that any attempt to get rid of him would have been a mistake by any American government. And that's A and B. Incidentally, the other thing we're going to stipulate in the kind of throat clearing way is what I was thinking at around 10.30 Saturday morning after hearing about it, when I woke up and reading up, a very impressive military and intelligence operation by the U.S. I'm not just saying that to be nice, but reassuring in the sense that those of us who have worried a lot that, I think not without reason, that PTAXF and Tulsi Gabbard could really ruin or damage badly our capabilities. We still have reason to worry about that three more years, obviously. But at least as of now, it seems like that's good for the country and for the world. So yeah, we're worried about people leaving or bailing, you know, competent people. Yeah, it's somewhat reassuring. So I think those two- I do notice that Tulsi Gabbard, her last post as her doing yoga on the beach on January 1st, doesn't seem like she's playing a big role here. But that's good if they've figured out a workaround there too. So yeah, no, I agree. Anyway, those are my two throat clearing points. But the fundamental point, and I'd say, incidentally, at 10.30 on Saturday morning, I was going to watch our colleagues get on the air before Trump. And they did get on the air, actually, Mark Hurling and Sarah and Sam. And I thought, you know, look, if Trump gets up there and says, we've done this, we've hatched them successfully, we've minimized, tried to minimize casualties, thank God we didn't have casualties. We're going to work with, of course, the truly legitimate government, the duly elected government of democratic election to try to work out a way for them to assume power and have elections. We're going to work out a way to have a peaceful transition there. We're working with allies in the region and elsewhere, blah, blah, blah. We're so pleased to be on the side of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. A different U.S. president could have made a speech at 11 a.m. Saturday morning that would have led someone like me, I don't know, speak for anyone else, to be, okay, at least hopeful and sort of, you know, somewhat optimistic that this would work out, okay, even with all the stipulations of how difficult these things are in many cases and the second day is always harder than the first day, et cetera. But Trump said at 11 a.m. and was really appalling. And then for a minute after this, I thought to myself, well, don't overreact, Bill, because that's just Trump talking. He's Trump. He's a jackass. But, you know, still the facts are the facts. But I now think I was right to be appalled in the sense that I think this is, you're making this point too, that I mean, he said the way he's explaining it, what it's forecasting for what we're going to do and not going to do is turn something that could be at least, you know, a hopefully okay thing, and maybe even a little better than that, into something that's very hard to see how this doesn't end badly. It's not going to help the people of Venezuela. The first thing we do is throw overboard the democratically elected leaders whom the international community was in considerable agreement should be helped to take a path to power. It doesn't mean we have to put her in power tomorrow or put the designated person who ran as her kind of when she was barred from the election and won by two to one doesn't mean we have to put them in power tomorrow. We can work out a transition. That's all legit. But the idea that we literally abandoned her, start cutting deals with the Maduro's vice president and the rest of his inner circle, including someone who's literally indicted in the same indictment that Maduro and his wife were indicted in. But that person, I think a senior minister maybe is there cheerfully going about oppressing people and whatever corruption they're doing. And then obviously everything else he said about where this goes next and then the oil. So he turned something that could have been, I think, okay, and maybe even good into something. It's just an example for the world of US greed, US kind of willfulness, Trump's own vanity, forecasting things that we shouldn't do. And I don't think we'll do, but if we don't do them, we'll also pay a price for having said we're going to do them and not do them. And really it could be very bad outcomes instantly on the ground there. Well, then he says we're in charge, that's all things. We're running Venezuela. We're not. I mean, that's just false. So saying something that's false, less than 24 hours after a big operation like this is generally a mistake. And we're not running it. And who knows what will happen on the ground. It could be stable and bad. It could be totally unstable. There could be coup attempts within the Maduro regime. There could be street violence. Oil companies are not going to go back in, in my opinion, in two months if we're looking at the situation we're looking at now, the whole oil thing is so wildly overstated. I don't even know how Trump got himself convinced of this. We have a tiny part of the oil market, right? And even if they all go back in and do great, they're going to boost international oil production by one or two percent, which is a trivial, and all things utterly trivial politically, economically, not that long. Right. It'll be nice. They have a lot of reserves and stuff to have them as a friendly country, but to be better governed, be very good for their economy, very good for the refugees to go back in. I think the odds are now greater that there'll be refugee outflows in Venezuela in the next six or 12 months, sadly, than refugees being able to go back to that country just to take one instance of why this is really going to be bad for Venezuela, bad for the region, and bad for our foreign policy in general, I think. And just really quick to point on the oil thing, like neither of us have to be experts on this, on how oil drilling works and the percentage of the market and all that, to just live as a human in a society. We have huge growth in the US drilling markets right now. Trump was the one who said, we're going to get all the liquid gold off the ground. Out of the Biden administration, we drilled more than ever in history in the United States, you're going to go to Venezuela when there is an uncertain political situation, when there are rebel groups in the hills outside Caracas, and you're going to go take this old equipment that has been decaying for the last, why would you do that when you could just go to Midland? Who's doing this? It's totally crazy. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run, and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scale-ups, online, in-person, and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. 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Go to simplepractice.com to claim the offer. That's simplepractice.com. I want to go a little bit deeper on the what's next stuff with you. But first, I just want to do the politics a little bit on the history. So there's been some kind of consideration about how the Democrats react to this, as always. Democrats always clutching their pearls. And there were some Democrats on background and Axios over the weekends saying that some are upset that the party is largely positioning itself in opposition to this operation. One said, everything Trump touches must be bad according to the base. This is anonymous. Also, another anonymously said it looks weak. I think it's interesting to call other people weak while speaking anonymously to a newsletter reporter. I think maybe a mirror look is important for that Democratic congressman. But to contrast that, I want to put this audio from Seth Moulton, who is not a pacifist lefty Democrat, is a veteran who believes that the U.S. has a role to play in the world. This was him on CNN over the weekend. And I think the Democrats could learn from this messaging a little bit. Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest? This is insane. What the hell are we doing? I mean, we've got a lot of problems in America today. And invading, occupying, running Venezuela does not solve any of them. That's simple. That's very straightforward. And that's right. You can say that and also say I hate Maduro and I hate communism. Like that, those three sentences are just the three sentences everybody should say. This is insane. Basically, everybody thinks it's insane. I think, you know, unless you're part of the Venezuela diaspora or you're just a Trump humper and you're going to be excited about anything that makes Mr. Trump look strong. But like across the rest of the country, I think that especially if this gets us into a bigger entanglement, I just think that is going to be the widespread view and saying it bluntly is valuable. I totally agree. I, Alexis Suthmoulton, I hadn't actually, I'd seen the reporter, hadn't heard the clip. I'm glad he said that. He said it pretty early, right? He wasn't like waiting around for people to, yeah. Yeah, there's Democrats on background, both staffers and members who speak to Axios. Do they speak to other people too? I guess Politico maybe. Politico probably, yeah. You know, when I hear Democrats on background say, that's when I clutch my pearls, you know, I mean, they're always wrong. I mean, they're really, you know, honestly, they think they're being clever by being on background and they say even stupider things than if they were actually on the record. You know, it's like, if it works great, which I do not think it will, Trump will get credit. It does not matter what Democrats say, right? If, for Venezuela is thriving in six months, he does manage transition to democracy, oil companies are back in, two million refugees have gone back, it's going to be a success. It doesn't really matter what Democrats say. The odds are against that. The golden days in Venezuela are here again. Yeah. Either you support it and say, I'm, you know, with the press commander in chief, I think he's made a reasonable decision. I wouldn't do everything quite the way he did, but I'm hoping this works. Or you say, this was a mistake. That's, as they say, as we used to say in the old days, a binary choice, I think, right? And he doesn't mean you're keeping the doer on power and you could have been done differently. As I was saying earlier, you were a different president, would have done it differently. George H. W. Bush would have done it differently. But Trump didn't do it differently. And certainly once he has the press conference, and once he keeps going off in this direction by calling up every reporter in town, apparently, on Sunday and then giving gaggles on Air Force One, I think you should be pretty confident as a Democrat that you should just oppose this. And it really is bad. It's even if miraculously it works out well, it's still a bad decision. What's the point? It's doing nothing for the U.S. interests. If you want to be a Democrat that is pro-central South American coups, because you have a lot of the diaspora in your district or whatever, because that's just what you have a hankering for, then just say it. Say you're not helping anybody by attacking the party on background as being weak. It doesn't serve any purpose. It just makes you feel better. Why are you talking to the ex-us reporter? Who cares? This is 2026 now. You have plenty of platforms where you can just speak your mind. You're a fucking elected official. Speak your mind. I think probably the right thing to do is have Seth Moulton's mindset on this and speak your mind like that. But if you disagree with them, speak your mind. Let the chimps follow what they may. You think you're going to get primaried and lose over Venezuela? Probably not, maybe. But at least you would have said your piece. You're an elected official. It drives me crazy. It drives me crazy that they do less. And look, if you believe in certain ways, I'm more inclined to that there are occasions when intervention is both right and maybe necessary, then you want to say that and say, but then you need to be serious about it. And you need to have troops and you need to have a plan and you need to have allies and you need to have relationship with the opposition. Or you need to have a theory of the case and more than a theory, as Mark Hurtling has been stressing and the stuff he's written for the bulwark, a plan. Now the plan is going to be flawed and things won't go perfectly. But to do it the way Trump is doing it is just irresponsible. And yeah, glad Seth Moulton said what he said. I'm hopeful that these guys have just botched the messaging on this. So it's so obviously, like pointless and stupid, their plan that I'm hopeful that that will give the Democrats the backbone they need this week. And I kind of expected that is what will happen. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale-ups, online, in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Want a game changing way to watch colors basketball? 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So this is one of the biggest contextual differences, which I went back my own mind. I was in the White House then. I was already a cross chief of staff. I took over that job about five months in. So I was in meetings and watching great interest. Obviously I wasn't involved in any serious decision making, but the vice president actually did a fair amount of work after the invasion. They gave him the job, very vice presidential job of calling a lot of the presidents in the area of small countries to reassure them that, look, we know what we're doing. This isn't a precedent to invade anyone else, Panama's special. I mean, just normal routine diplomacy. And you know, Jim Baker was handling the Soviet Union and Dick Shady was doing whatever he was doing over at the Defense Department and President Bush was busy. And so we got that job and vice president Quill did a good job of it and we got our talking points from the State Department and did all these calls. And I kind of remember that being a thing we did. I guess it would have been right around Christmas or just an into the early New Year, which again, it's just the routine diplomacy that what has no sense that Trump people are doing. So look, so the Panama thing of the building for a while, Norega was not head of state, but he was head of the military there. He was under indictment for very direct involvement in drug trafficking. There had been a lot of talk about getting rid of him for a couple of years actually. An American soldier who's in the Panama Canal base was killed in some encounter. I care with Panamanians soldiers, I think about mid December and three or four, that was the trigger for Bush making the announcement. We had troops right there. We sent in 27,000 troops and we had casualties, a couple of dozen deaths. It wasn't painless. It got kind of messed up. Norega went to the Vatican embassy. We had to kind of get him out of there. It took about a month. They got him out. They had elections. They had a democratic system in Panama, which I think is going still to this day. It's not, I'm sure it's... This is a potential difference now already, which we're going into next about like who, what's next. But the U.S. had installed the winner of the annulled election. Like they installed the person that had won the fraudulent election. And then they had elections. And they have had since. Again, I'm sure the place is corrupted. It's not perfect democracy, but it's pro-American and it's pretty democratic and pretty constructive. And we haven't had any big crises there at the time of knowledge. We had a special relationship there, but it's the canal. We'd only given that up 10, 13 years before under Carter. So it was more understandable to people why we were going into a country of 4 million where we had a huge military base and that had the Panama Canal, which was kind of important, as opposed to Venezuela, which is just badly governed, God knows. And Maduro deserves to be deposed. But I mean, it's comparable. And we all thought about the analogies. I think there are a couple of things to be learned from it. But the main thing to be learned is that that was at the time we all thought sort of incidentally that the justifications a little weak. There were some issues about the really in accord. We didn't give quite congressional, we didn't get authorization exactly. But again, it was Panama was kind of special and there was enough semi authorization, you might say, just to sit and discuss so much. Anyway, I mean, it's a very different situation and it worked out okay. And it's not a good precedent for going into a country of 30 million that's much further away. And there's a big country with other neighbors who aren't happy that we're going in and so forth. Speaking of the neighbors, I am dying for one of the administration's do just to be asked what country's border Venezuela. You can't tell me that anybody except Marco knows that Guiana borders Venezuela. Like these people have no idea what they're doing. Yeah, Brazil, I think Colombia, I mean, Central America had been a very big issue in the 80s. I mean, a big focus of obviously foreign policy debates, Nicaragua, Honduras. So we were involved in Central America. We had troops there, we had fights about whether we should have those advisors there as Salvador and Honduras and all that, Nicaragua. So it wasn't like out of the blue the way this is like, let's decide that we have a drug problem, which we do, Venezuela is not a major part of it. It isn't really, but unless we're going to go and oppose Maduro. The other thing is funny. The reason I don't actually remember that much is it was December of 1989. I mean, the Berlin Wall had fallen in November. Regimes were falling in central and Eastern Europe. Chichescu was hung up there with his wife on Christmas day of 1989. So four days actually went into Panama. So I mean, there was a huge amount going on. And in that context, this was a sort of small intervention that people trusted President Bush, George H.W. Bush to handle well, and they did handle well and worked out okay, totally different from making it the centerpiece of a foreign policy that's focused on the Western hemisphere, idiotically in my opinion. The dissent becomes the centerpiece of the centerpiece is to go in and snatch someone out, but not replace the regime. So it's nice that he's going to be in court here. I hope that goes okay. And pretend we're going to have a happy situation and oil company and then make it about our greed, not even about democracy there, not even about our national security. One foreign policy friend of mine who remembers, who was also involved in the Reagan and Bush administrations called me on Saturday afternoon and just said, what struck him about it was just how idiotic this is. There's so many places we could be doing things in the world if we wanted to be more exerting ourselves more and defending important assets to snatch, withdraw and leave the vice president in place. What's the rationale for that? As my friend put it, I mean, sort of like maybe he could have had a heart attack, right? And he could have no longer be in power. The vice president would be in power. What is this accomplishing at this point? Trump would say, I guess, that the vice president now feels like they've got to behave. Trump thinks about everything. He's the teacher and the vice president, and he's got the ruler out. He can spank the vice president if they... I think Democrats mean a little too quick to dismiss. I mean, bullies do have a certain effect. And if you bully one person very well, you know, others think twice before doing something that will literally... So they will be a very short-term bully benefit, I suppose, for Trump and his relations, maybe with other countries in the region and maybe even, I don't really think elsewhere in the world, is it so Western Hemisphere specific? Maybe some of them. They'll also be a... Bullies also have reactions against... Exactly. Mexican and Colombian left-wing presidents are being strengthened massively by this. Now, they have the American enemy. Right. And this reaction against bullying, and again, I hate to leave aside morality and all that for a minute. If you're running a serious criminal gang, you could intimidate people for quite a while, unfortunately, as we've seen from Putin and others. If you're an ineffectual, willful, vain, narcissistic bully who has an attention span of 10 minutes, that doesn't even work, right? I mean, it's not even effective bullying. And, you know, Mexico, you mentioned, I believe we started the NAFTA negotiations in Mexico pretty soon after the Panama thing. So at least some time in the Bush administration, Clinton continued them. And one reason for that was not the main reason, but it was part of an attempt to say, look, we want to have healthy relations with important countries in that region. We do have to do a casual thing like Panama, but that's not kind of the norm. So even the bullying is stupid and short-term and ultimately, I think, quite ineffective. And as you were saying, to talk more about that, because that's interesting, I haven't read up that much on the reactions of Mexico and Colombia. Hey, look, to your point on the bullying, like, let's just go into the idiocy of the Don Rowe doctrine, the element of all this is what they're calling it, going around and he's on the gaggle last night at the plane, not going to play folks the audio, but, you know, basically says, let's go through this here. Colombia is very sick too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the US. He's not going to be doing that very long. And he's questioned, so will there be an operation in the US and Colombia? Trump says, yeah, sounds good to me. He reiterated, we do need Greenland, absolutely. He reiterated that Mexico, they're going to have to look at Mexico and the drugs coming from Mexico. So I think if you wake up this morning, is the head of Cuba, you don't have a lot of economic power, who is it now? Diaz Canel. You don't have a lot of economic power or like really anything to push back, you got to be a little nervous. Okay, to your point about bullies working against the weakest soldiers, Cheyenne down is popular in Mexico. You know, the Colombian president, Petro is like the lefty new new president, has like a big support there in Colombia. We're not much more tomorrow with somebody who's like covered the region and we can go deeper into all this, but you can imagine them having a Carney-esque kind of attitude towards this. You saw like how it boosted Mark Carney, like that, you know, basically in Canada, right, where the Polly of the right wing party was going to win until Trump started pushing them around. And then, you know, Carney gets his boost from this. You have to imagine that as like the reaction in Mexico and Colombia, while they're getting saber rattled now, you know, there is a pride, a rally around the flag effort and all this. And who the hell knows what the downstream consequences are of all this? And I like the, I keep hosted on social media, like a picture of Trump like stepping on South America and stepping on Greenland and it's like Don Roe doctrine under it. The potential unintended consequences, downstream effects, sending Colombia in Mexico's situation a little differently, like sending Colombia more into the arms of China. Are you even achieving the stated goals of trying to create more control over the region? Like to me, it seems like no, and a backlash is more likely. Totally. I mean, Colombia, I'm no expert on these countries at all. Colombia was an important ally of ours for the last 25 years, though really did a lot to eliminate the worst drug cartels or to reduce their power. The country did well. It unfortunately elected this guy in 2022, I think, isn't a very good president. I think there's an election this year. I think there's a pretty good chance that it was sort of will be my candidate, actually, where he could lose unless there's a rally or his party on the trees even running, the rally to the flag effect, which would be unfortunate. So we should care how Colombia turns out. It's kind of important place, regionally important geographically and not a small country. Mexico obviously is huge and important to us. Yeah. And we have a big interest in not making every Mexican feel that they're being bludgeoned by their big neighbor to the north, which has bludgeoned them over the decades and centuries. And it's sort of important to remove that. If it's absolutely necessary, if it's something absolutely crucial to our national well-being, that's one thing. And they've instantly tried to work with us. I think Chávez has been pretty on the border and stuff has been pretty cooperative. And that's helped Trump since he did close the border. So now it's all in that respect, so kind of productive. Also sort of neglects the fact that others do get a vote, as they say, right, in war. And it's not like the Russians and Chinese and a lot of others aren't sitting around thinking, well, how do we mess this up for Trump just to make sure that other countries so get the idea that they should capitulate to that bully more than they capitulate to our bullying? It's like the Chinese and Russians have thought a lot about how to be effective police. You were right, Petra. This is not running again. There's called the election this year. So much more on the Central and South American politics of all this tomorrow. Just one more on kind of closing the loop on what is the plan actually for Venezuela and the stupidity of all this. You mentioned one of your old foreign policy buddies that was around in 89's comment about how, in fact, this says, well, Elliot Abrams, who has been out there speaking about this over the weekend, he was Trump's Venezuelan envoy or whatever in the first term. This is Abrams on CNN. The US cannot run Venezuela. The worst thing we could do, and we may be doing it actually, is to make some kind of deal with the regime's remnants and leave the regime in place, except for maybe a change on oil policy. He expanded different outlets saying, were there Venezuelan plutocrats coming to Mar-a-Lago and whispering about how easy life would be if we just made a deal with the regime once Maduro was gone? Were they the source of Trump's lies about Machado's stature? Machado being the winner of the Peace Prize who was the opposition party. There's some reports of Venezuelans at celebration parties in Miami that thought Trump had misspoken when he said his plan appears to be for Venezuela to remain under day-to-day rule of a senior Shavista with its democratically elected leaders excluded and its wealth controlled by American corporations. So reporting the Washington Post over the weekend says that Trump basically cut this deal because Machado, he wanted Machado to reject the Peace Prize, the fact that she accepted the Peace Prize and said, and even in her speech, thanks to Donald Trump, like she praised him. That still wasn't enough. Trump was mad about this. The situation is pretty ludicrous. And then he ends up with Delcy Rodriguez, the vice president, who has deep Russian ties and was in her speech on Saturday, said that the invasion has Zionist undertones. I'm clear how, what the Zionist undertones would be there. But anyway, and that's who we're cutting this deal with. It is under any possible measurement of what could be optimistic for Venezuela. There's nobody out there, even Trump's own very hawkish Venezuela on bullets who don't currently work for him now, who are saying there's a clear, positive plan for the next steps. Now, just to emphasize for one second, the insanity of turning on Machado. I mean, if you're an American president, you do something that's a little dicey, it's problematic. Some of your allies aren't going to like it, including in the region, but also Europeans aren't really big on this kind of going into stashing leaders as much as we are sometimes. Anymore. Anymore. Yeah, well, good point. They were big on it for a while, century, exactly. They're pretty big on it. Yeah. So this is like a dream to have, you're defending the legitimately elected person who was the number two person and then had to replace Machado when she was booted off the ballot. And she's the Nobel Prize winner. I mean, at every American European government and most of the Latin American governments like her, she was wanted to be the candidate. They booted her off the ballot. Now she's going to exile, as has the person who won the election. But it's like a gift if you're an American president to have this set of circumstances in a way, which is why, as I say, I originally thought, I don't know, maybe this could work out okay. And it makes it even more infuriating really that he's just thrown out all the way. And now, as I said on the path that I think really is bad for the region, but really bad for us as a country, it is very bad to have Donald Trump as our president. I want you to think about that, Tim, because I know you've been a little way on that. It does seem pretty bad. There was some like real lefty type on social media who's had some not nice words to say about me who like posted over the weekend. It's like, I think, I think we'd even be better off with Bush right now. And then he replied as like a total Tim, Tim victory. And I was like, thank you. Okay, I'm not giving high flying marks to the Bush presidency either. But yeah, we're in for, we're in for Rocky ride. Just one more thing, I guess, just on without getting into like the internal politics of all these countries of Columbia and Mexico and Greenland to like, on the next level, last year, four New Year's, we did kind of like what your fears are and what your hopes are. And one of my fears that I laid out was that it's just hard to know what is going to be happening in the adult brain of an 82 year old man who like jails probably not anymore in the cards for him on the other side, but other bad stuff could be or for his family or somebody could get something in his brain or he could buy some crazy conspiracy theory and that he could do crazy shit trying to hang on to power. This first week of the year makes me wonder if that fear was a little bit, I need to up the timeline a little bit on that fear, you know, and that this year he might start to think, well, shit, I'm running out of time. Okay. And the midterms don't look good. And like, fuck it, basically, and start doing real, and this is crazy. But like going into a NATO ally, like Greenland or Columbia with a democratically active president, like that is that's a different category of crazy that doesn't seem to be like 0%. I don't think that's like Trump derangement syndrome people at this point to be like, this is a 0% chance. It's like the stuff that he said he might do, he's done pretty much. So I would be pretty seriously concerned if I was the Danes. Now, totally. And I guess I wrote about that a little today, I was like, I didn't meant to, I was going to write more just what we've been talking about about the actual operation and you know, the actual effects. But I actually, I'm also very now freaked out by that. He went out of his way to talk about Columbia and Greenland in the last 48 hours. This isn't like six months ago, he mentioned Greenland and now it's on some say backburners, meaningless. He's got talked about it a lot in the last two, three, four weeks, well, Sal and had a good piece for us, a catalog and some of this. And now he goes out of his way to speak about it, which is really insane. I mean, Greenland, Greenland is not in Latin America. Greenland is part of a NATO ally. And Michael Wood, I think I put this in the newsletter, texted me, when he mentioned Greenland, texted me and said, you know, this is my kind of off the wall prediction for 26, we'll be in a shooting war with some dangerous soldiers somewhere in Greenland, you know, and I, this guy seems insane, but why is it insane given what he's doing with Greenland and what he's saying about Greenland? I agree, you have to take it seriously. The chance is way above 0% that he's going to do one of these things. And it's just on the point about the elections, he cited his own, the stealing of the 2020 election in the context of why Maduro had to go. As Maduro had similarly stolen the election there, that was, it was actually on Saturday, I think at the Mar-a-Lago, at the press conference. That's a little ominous, isn't it? That he thinks we should go into overturn stolen elections. 2020 was stolen, 2028, the same people try to steal it, so he has to do things, right? Either ahead of time or after the vote. I mean, I really think I've been alarmed about that for a while, but I think you're absolutely right to be much more alarmed even than we were three or four weeks ago. Update on how things are going in Venezuela versus the breaking from Reuters. Venezuela was ordering police to find and arrest anyone involved in supporting the US attack decree. So, it doesn't seem like they're playing along initially. We'll see how it all goes. $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. You mentioned election fraud stuff. I do want to play this flashback, because this is my burden as somebody that just marinates in the crazy all the time. I was thinking on Saturday, so I was in New York. I was like, I wonder if part of this is that Trump really still kind of in his weird brain with his mania, blames Venezuela still for the election, the stolen election in 2020? I went back and found this. It's a Sidney Powell, who is his lawyer, folks might remember in 2020. It was one of the few people that was kind of ride or die with him and is in her circle. He's keeping the craziest people around at the very end there. Another thing to be concerned about looking forward. And she was on Fox trying to explain her theory of how the election was stolen. And I want to play this audio Sidney Powell back in 2020. I can hardly wait to put forth all the evidence we have collected on Dominion, starting with the fact it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one. It was funded by money from Venezuela and Cuba, and China has a role in it also. He remembers that. Like Donald Trump doesn't know anything. He doesn't read any books, but little flies flying around up there in his brain. There are sort of grooves somewhere in his cranium that are like, he remembers all the details of all the weird accusations that people made about 2020 as they're trying to justify his attempt to stay in power. I don't think it's crazy to think that that contributed to this. I mean, obviously, like there are all these other elements. Rubio has to gas him up on it. He's mad that Machado didn't give him the peace prize. There's a report that Maduro Danzing was bothering him. But like, which is all this like deep megalomaniac stuff. But I do think that this action does relate directly to his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. No, it's interesting. I didn't really focus on it. But I've forgotten that Venezuela was part of the whole attack on Dominion, which did cost Fox $750 million. We should think clearly that was false. Everything in there was false. Yes. In case, in case, in case, who's us were gone for you, who won that $750 million are watching, which I think someone do watch our stuff. So, yes, it was false. And it's good that they won that lawsuit. But one more point where I was setting a lot of time in this, but it is important. I guess, I mean, not a guess, it is important. The Democrats, one reason they should be very firm in their opposition, South Bolton like is to the degree they show any weakness in opposing Trump on this, it just emboldens Trump to do the other stuff he's talking about, right? What if he gets a tiny little bump? I don't even think he's going to. But what if he feels like this is working out okay politically? That's very bad. That means he does do stuff with Mexico. It means he could do stuff with Colombia. It means the Greenland thing because from being, you know, very low odds to because I'm something we really need to explore. And so I think it's again, if you care about the next three years, which everyone does for some reason, this is no moment to look wavering in opposing this kind of insanity. One more thing to move on to some of the political news. I just have a little section here in my notes called dystopia update. You're a Twittering. So I don't know what your for you. What is your for you page look like on Twitter? Do you ever go over there and see what Elon's feeding you? I think I try to stay on the following one. Before you think it'd be kind of wacky. I do my accidents sometimes show up there. Yeah. The AI like response to this, it's maybe the first time that, you know, all going into 2024, there are these like concerns about deep fake videos that ended up being kind of over overcooked. Everywhere. It was everywhere on social media. There were like pictures of like, Venezuelan grandmas crying with joy, you know, kind of right wing accounts. There were some, there was the inverse or left wing accounts that were showing people like rallying in the streets, supporting Maduro. Like there's just a ton of fake stuff out there with huge massive numbers of views and retweets. You know, there's a lot of more traditional kind of disinformation out there. Like people showing like rallies from soccer matches and saying, this is caracas right now. That combination that you mentioned at the top with Polymarket, like there's somebody that inside or trading on this, they put in 30 grand 24 hours before we went into Venezuela and they won 400,000 betting on Maduro being deposed by the end of January. There's just tons of insider climbing happening right now. And whether that was coordinated in the administration, is that Barron Trump? Is that somebody else that a friend of somebody we don't know? But like obviously, they have corrupt deals that they're planning for Venezuela itself. I don't know. Just the kind of tech dystopia element of this, I just think was an important subplot that we shouldn't just ignore. Interesting. Depressing. I'm just pressing. I'm just saying yes. Yeah. Well, I'll keep on that beat for you, Bill. Let's do some politics. Tim Walls, I guess is the biggest news of these items. He's decided not to run for reelection to governor. I have some thoughts. I'm wondering what yours are. I don't know if he was a good governor, a decent governor or a poor governor. So I don't follow internal Minnesota stuff much. I thought he was a poor pick for vice president. I think said so at the time. I just thought it was a political matter and not a personal judgment on Walls. So also a little bit of a judgment once I saw him a few times and did a miserable job of the debate with JD Vance, which ultimately probably didn't matter. But I don't know. I feel like it kind of helped Trump regain some footing there and whatever that was in late September was. I can't remember. And made Vance less horrifying than he should have been because Walls was being so nice to him. So I'm not a big fan of Walls. It's a national political figure. No, me there. Actually, we do have a statement now out from Walls. I'm just going to read it. He said he can't give a political campaign my all after what he described as an extraordinarily difficult year for our state. Trump and his allies want to make our state a colder, meaner place. They want to poison our people against each other by attacking our neighbors. And ultimately, they want to take away much of what makes Minnesota the best place in America to raise a family. Some discussion about you, maybe Klobuchar, leaving the Senate to jump into the governor's race, in some level, is I think any Klobuchar has been a good politician. But I thought on Walls, it's like there was obviously some really grotesque targeting of him. And I understand why he would not want to stick around for a third term. That makes sense. Going after a family, going after his kids, these people are disgusting. The most Hortman assassination and blaming him for it falsely. Again, all these lies and conspiracies targeting him are horrible. And so I don't begrudge him wanting to step aside. The political point I want to make just because going forward is more productive than going back to your point about Walls is, and I'm not really that hopeful that this will come to pass, but all I can do is put it out into the ether. I think that Democratic media members, leaders, social media influencers, all of you all listening who have strong feelings about where the party should go, national politics is different in state politics. And it's smart to let people get out there and kick the tires for a while on them and see how things shake out. Part of it was Joe Biden's fault with Kamala. I had such a short time to kind of decide on a VP, but there's this like sprint to choose a VP. And Tim Walls kind of emerges out of nowhere, because he has a couple of good media hits, you know, where he's calling Trump weird and he's fixing the carburetor. And people got really caught up in it. And we're like, oh, hey, what about this guy? And then he meets the vice president, they had a good rapport, which is, you know, important. But like, they didn't know each other. I just reported, like, they didn't know each other before that at all. And so then he gets picked. In our like social media era, especially, there's this tendency to like, glom on to something that's on your team or on your side and be like, this is great. Now I'm going to defend it to the death. And now I'm going to chain myself to it. And I'm going to wear this anchor on my ankle and defend no matter what, you know, additional information arises. And I just think like became pretty obvious, like afterwards, that Walls just wasn't that good at the national political stuff. Like regardless of what you think about it, is the ideological element of it. It did not do well in the advanced debate. And I do worry about this as you get into 28, the like people, people are going to be so desperate for counter to Trump, that, you know, there's kind of a, you know, bandwagon effect. And I just, I think the right thing to do now is kick the, you know, people emerge, kick the tires, see who's got it, you know, don't tie yourself down. You don't need to tattoo yourself to somebody already. And I think the Democrats, and I think the sort of media vortex on the left did that with Walls a little too quickly. So anyway, that's my thought on Tim Walls. At AJ Bell, we believe investing is for everyone. And when we say everyone, we mean your dad. Dan, Danielle, Dean, Dave, Dell, Dell's delivery driver, Denise, Denise's dentist, Dinesh, and Devon's strongest man, Donathan. Donathan? Donathan, that can't be right. Donathan? Well, whatever your name is, if you're a real person, investing is for you too. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. At AJ Bell, we believe every customer deserves brilliant service, which is just one reason we're rated excellent on TrustPilot. And we all trust pilots with their smooth, captainly voices that make you feel like you'd let them land anywhere they like. Sorry, where was I? Right, AJ Bell, rated excellent by sexy pilots. I mean, trust pilot. I'm a flight risk. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. Another one of the VP candidates that was in there was Mark Kelly, who is wearing, well, I think, overtime in the public eye. There's an announcement this morning from our secretary of war. Who would get mad when I said that? But I think it's funnier to just make fun of him. He's a pretty tough guy. He's got General Kane is doing the actual work. Well, Pete Hanks has, you know, those push-ups. Anyway, he put out a statement this morning saying that Mark Kelly's seditious statements have led the department to take administrative action against him. They've reduced his grade and his retirement pay. They've censured him. They're going to say he's not a captain anymore after this. These guys really care a lot about this sort of stuff, titles, and the nomenclature. That's like the woke right. We've got to use patriotic correctness. Anyway, it kind of goes on and on with more eye-rolly stuff. I'm looking at it right now, and Adam Kinsey going to reply, as you are such a dork. That's just kind of my reply to that as well, to Hanks Seth. But Kelly has really been vindicated in taking on this fight against the secretary of defense. And so I think that's worth noting on a few of the other thoughts on this. Well, just how disgusting it is what they're doing. I mean, there are times, I guess, I don't know much about the military justice system, works for the people who are no longer in active duty. But there are occasions when people get bumped down and rang for really gross misconduct, either that's discovered later about what they might have done while being on active duty, or I guess even after. But Mark Kelly is a United States Senator serving with distinction, and he happened to make a correct argument that you don't have to obey unlawful orders and you should be maybe wary of some of the orders coming from this administration. I don't want you to know what legal, are we going to know? I just heard this from you now. Yeah. It's interesting to see what, with their actual legal procedures, was there like a midi court martial where he gets to defend himself? It doesn't sound that way. They just decide administratively. I do think it's dorky, and it's stupid, and Mark Kelly doesn't care. There are a lot of retired military. And some of them are going to think, not all of them are famous like Mark Kelly, and some of them are living off their retirement and whatever, don't want to be publicly humiliated and knocked down or rank. And certainly if you're a level guy and you maybe have a consulting contract or you're working on for some corporation that does work with the military, maybe they don't want to hire someone who gets bumped down, I worry always about the intimidation effects of these things, even when they're done in the dorkiest bullying way. But they're all such bullies, right? And they're really such pathetic human beings, I've got to say. Tech Seth Trump. They're pathetic. It's embarrassing. It's just also worth noting how pathetic and embarrassing it is. You're doing this today. You're writing this very long statement on X. After you just cooed a leader of Venezuela and allegedly were running Venezuela and there's internal dissent, I don't... Is this really what was at the top of the secretary's desk this morning? I think it's another thing that's worth noting. Well, it's not only... I hadn't heard either of you, so you read at the statement about the report that maybe they're now going to go after the people who helped us at Venezuela. I kind of assumed the regime would do that. Maybe we should be doing a little more to make sure that people who did help us are being extracted. This is again why these things are never one and done, right? Are we going to go in and help them? Are we just going to let our friends be arrested and maybe killed? I assume all the Americans are out now, but there are people who did help us. We owe them something. The idea that he's focused on Markel and not on that is ridiculous. Yeah. I don't know about all the Americans. Shit. I had forgotten. I don't want to... This pot's going to go long, folks. I'm sorry. You just got to ride with us today. It's a good show, long show. I wanted to be fun to a couple of the things, but we just mentioned the Veepstakes and mentioning that Wall Street with JD. I realized I'd forgotten that I do want to make fun of JD Vance a little bit as part of this as well. The vice president was cut out of this deliberation over Venezuela clearly. It's not part of the press conference. There's not a lot of reports about what his role was. There is pushback to that once that accusation came out of the weekend. I can report was leaked to somebody that he was on Zoom, I guess. He wasn't in any of the pictures in the war room. He was somewhere else on Zoom. I thought it was funny because there literally is a scene from Veep where that happens, where there's a news-back hostage crisis. They bring in Selina Meyer on the television screen while all the real men are around the desk. Making the decisions dealing with the hostage crisis. That was apparently JD Vance. Then he posts the longest, most defensive post of all time about why he supports this action of Venezuela. He starts off saying that fentanyl isn't the only drug in the world and there's still fentanyl coming from Venezuela. I don't think that second part is true, but it's weird. Then he goes, the cocaine is the real problem. If you cut out the money from the cocaine, you weaken the cartels. Venezuela is like 10% of the cocaine market at most. If you look at experts, it's a blip on doing anything as far as cartel financing is concerned. Then he says, yes, fentanyl is coming out of Mexico. He also can adapt his toe into the, maybe we'll need to do something in Mexico. Then he tries to do tough guys stuff about the oil and about how we can't let commies steal our stuff. That's in the ground in Venezuela. That's what it's saying, the oil. I don't know how that's our stuff really. It's a very defensive poster kind of behavior from somebody who I think made a big bet on the nationalist side, the real, the America first side of this, but also now has made a bigger bet on Trump. He's got to come up with some Ivy League post-talk rationalizations for every dumbass thing Donald Trump does now. It's sad for the country, but it's kind of funny for me to watch. I just wanted to mention that. I don't know if you have any additional JD thoughts? No, just that he, don't you think even that's the fact that Rubio is basically the guy Trump's turned to Rubio to run, you know, is getting featured and he's not. Assuming they are rivals for 2028, I guess they are, not the only ones, but yeah, he's doing his best. He's also so, you just shut up, right? I mean, no one would care if everyone's going to, no one's going to remember what JD Vance was doing last, the last two weeks, three months for now, let alone two years for now. So none of them has the discipline to just let life go on and not weigh in on everything on social media. Shut up JD Vance. I also saw you posting as well. You're just like JD, you posted sometimes. They're moving forward on the triumphal arch. I'm sorry to downgrade. It's something so stupid, but we have a stupid country and a stupid president and so we're doing stupid stuff, so we have to talk about it. We're building a triumphal arch in DC. I was impressed with your take on that. You pointed out that the Arc de Triomphe in France was designed in 1806 and then France was defeated less than a decade later and then again, 60 years later and then again 130 years later. And you also mentioned the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum and that that's not looking so great. So anyway, I don't know, if you have anyone expand your remarks on the triumphal arch at all. I mean, it's such a piece of the van, Trump's vanity and grand eloquence or whatever the right word is for that. And that often does correlate with hubris and then it turns out Napoleon won a nice battle in 1806. Let's have the Arc de Triomphe and then nine years later, Waterloo happens. So I mean, it's so distasteful, the whole thing. But so far, as I can tell, the biggest invitation, the most notable invitation of the Arc de Triomphe outside France in the last, I guess maybe ever, but certainly in the last 50 years, was in North Korea. They built one in 1982, which is a very good model. It's up there. It's up there and they have a little base and they parade through it. So that's really great that we in North Korea are adopting this sort of stupidest, most, I don't know, grandiose, imperial symbolism to put in our nation's capital. I don't like giving Trump grand eloquent. And so while you're giving us that history lesson, I just Googled grand eloquence, the sores to see if there's something better. A magne eloquence means the same thing, but it doesn't seem as good. But I like turgidity because it kind of sounds like turd. So I think Trump's turgidity is what we'll go with instead of grand eloquence. Okay, I accept that. I have to talk about Zoran before I let you go. I was in New York. It was great to be there under the new regime. No, when they're everyone's leaving town, the billionaires are lined up on the way to Teter borough for their private planes to fly. No, it's saying great economically in New York, I will say. Lines were long. It was hard to get into the shows. There was a new spirit, the common man, all joining together, joining the plurb. There are two things that I'm weighing on. He signed his first two executive orders, and I want to give him a toot for that, because they were both EMB. One was to create a land inventory fast track task force, and one's to create a speed task force to identify bureaucratic and permitting barriers that slow the construction of housing. If the lefties want to take on EMB, that's great. I'm going to hold hands with them on that. And I think that's awesome and important, and I hope that he's successful doing that. So the executive order is good. Some of the rhetoric of his inauguration speech, well, I just want to play one clip. We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Still pretty frigid to New York this week in L.A., so it hasn't happened yet. The warmth of collectivism did not reach there. I say this about AOC a lot, and it's just like AOC kind of has a bartender side and a, I forget what liberal arts college she went to, but a liberal arts college side. And like Zoran also has like a, well, it has been like a Halal truck side and like a Bowdoin class president side. And it's like the Halal truck guy that is like worried about working people and wanting to make sure the taxi drivers, you know, are getting paid enough. That's good. Sewer socialism stuff is fine. I can stomach it. It's like the liberal artsy, like the warmth of collectivism. Whoever put that, he needs like a, just a rate. He needs to get a taxi driver actually maybe to review the speeches that the other people are riding for him and just be like, let's, let's, I'm just going to strike a couple of these lines. I don't know what you're talking about, bro. So I don't know. Do you want to give us any defense on the warmth of collectivism returning to New York? The only defense I would give is the right wing went totally nuts. And you know, collectivism is Stalinism, as if the words never been used in any other context. I mean, I don't, it's ludicrous to microanalyze this rhetorical things of speechwriter, you know, that they wrote once ends, but, you know, collective action, collective bargaining, there are many ways in which this is a perfectly normal progressive, mostly labor type thing. And yeah, for me, it's funny, you put much better than I had articulated to myself why I found the term kind of annoying and off-footing. And it's the warmth side of it more than the collectivism side. If he just said, no, but if he said, we have to have collective action in many cases, individuals can't just do this, things by themselves. Government has a role. He would have been like FDR. FDR, I think used the term collective action. Yeah, Bill Clinton had some good lines to that effect. This was more the Hillary Clinton that actually reminded me of this, the what was her thing? Well, it takes a village. We already killed that back in 1993. Again, it's a little unfair. It does take a village. I, you know, it's a legitimate point, but the whole way it was done was sort of swarming, as you say, kind of a little bit of, yeah, so the warmth of collectivism. I'm the frigidity of rugged individualism. Frigidity, I grew up in New York. I'd say the spirit of New York is a little more hostile frigidity than loving warmth. You know, much as I loved many people in New York, you know. Trying to get into FAA of Schwartz with my daughter, let me tell you, frigidity of rugged individualism. It was frigid. She kept going through, going to get through the line and like, excuse me, excuse me. And that like all like grownups were bumping her and biting her. And like we, we got inside and she went to me and she's like, it is people aren't quite as, as nice and people are a little more rude in New York than New Orleans or something. Yeah. No. Okay. Well, I just, one more thing, just so I can get it off my chest is like, I also don't even think the leftist really want the warmth of collectivism. If like the response to like what you see online about Eric and Kirk and all this, I'm like, I even lefties like aren't, do they really want to be warm and collective with the people in the evangelical mega churches and the people in the red hats? I don't actually think so. Zoran might actually. Zoran's pretty authentic on this, but a lot of the online folks, not as much. Okay. Well, there we go. All right, Bill. Well, thank you so much for your, for your frigid collectivism. No, I found this a warm village like show. I just, yeah, I feel kind of warm and fuzzy all over it now that we've done this excellent podcast every Monday. Every Monday is my warmest. Thank you so much. We'll see you next Monday. Who the hell knows what we might have a shooting with Dan Markzai then for our regular pod listeners. We'll see you tomorrow. But if you're a Bullwark Plus member, stick around for our mailbag segment. It's 2026. That's a great time to join the Bullwark Plus. You get the secret podcast, you now get this Monday mailbag. So you can join us at thebullwark.com or on YouTube or with YouTube Plus members as well. So for you guys, we appreciate you. Stick around for the mailbag. And for everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. It is going to be a good one. Peace. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with Audio Engineering and Editing by Jason Brown. At AJ Bell, we believe investing is for everyone. And when we say everyone, we mean your dad, Dan, Danielle, Dean, Dave, Del, Del's delivery driver, Denise, Denise's dentist, Dinesh, and Devon's strongest man, Donathan. Donathan? Donathan, that can't be right. Donathan? Well, whatever your name is, if you're a real person, investing is for you too. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. What a scream. 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